Coffee Mug Great Books List

A few weeks ago I got a special coffee mug at a local used bookstore.  It depicts several famous books, most of which I have already read...and reviewed on this blog.  There are a few that I've yet to read.  I thought it might be cool to list them all below in the order, from right to left, that they appear on my mug, then place a link on each title to my past blog article about it.  So, here goes...

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger...read in 1972

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka...read only the short story Metamorphosis

Brave New World by Aldeus Huxley

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer...not yet

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath...currently reading

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett...not yet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

On the Road Jack Kerouac

Ulysses by James Joyce

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Little Women by Louise May Alcott

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll...from childhood

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez...not yet

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Lord of the Flies by William Golding 

Quote of the Week...from Cees Nooteboom

Life is a never-ending cross reference.                    ---Cees Nooteboom

Cees Nooteboom is a famous Dutch novelist, essayist, travel book writer and journalist, born in 1933.  I was searching online for quotes about cross referencing and, lo and behold, this dude's name came up...I had never heard of him before.  He writes in his native Dutch and has put out a lot of material.  Unfortunately, I found nothing available of his...in any language...on Libby, the online library resource app.  And my local Alachua County Library only had his 2022 essay book 533 Days, which I checked out (fortunately translated into English).  He achieved renown in Europe but it never did seem to translate into popularity in the U.S., but I liked this and other quotes.  He's also written stuff like "I am a hindrance to the world, and the world is a hindrance to me", "I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist", and the topper, "I have never cared much for people.  Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other".  As for my selected quote, I have been considering going back in my blog articles and doing something similar to Wikipedia, the ultimate Internet site for cross-referencing.  It's just that I have subject matters, like running, reading, constellations, music, etc., that contain interrelated articles spread over years and with my blog going back to 2007 it can be more convenient and interesting to "connect the dots", so to speak.  On my cumulative running race list that I revised on December 10, 2023 I cross-referenced past articles about each race experience, and I continue to update that article even with races after that date.  I found myself wanting to do the same with the books I read...I think that's probably going to be my next cross-referencing project on this blog...I already have the basic reading list from February 22, 2021 and I just need to add the later books and the cross-referencing links.  As for Cees Nooteboom, I haven't yet read much of his one book to grace my library's shelves, but he does seem to have a pretty sharp sense of humor and insight...