Six Books that Made Me Happy

Ooops, as I realize Anne tagged me about this one. Oh, right. And I can't get blogspot to line up the links for the books, so you'll just have to muddle through. If anyone who's reading this knows how, let me know. Maybe I should switch my blog to wordpress.

The premise is, six books that made me happy. Here they are in no particular order.

--The Dragon Series: Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons and Talking with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. Am counting these as a unit, even though they are more than one book. I was teaching the mystery class in 2004, I think, and tres distracted. Zach O, one of my students from class and from my old 105 class, lent me his copies. I read them fairly quickly, and really, really liked them. They would've been awesome to read when I was in my teens, but as they came out in the '90s, it wouldn't have occurred me to read them. I ended up getting multiple people hooked on them, and so forth. I loved Morwen's sign, "No nonsense, please" and was very tempted to put it in my office.
--The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. I had listened to the second one, Pigs in Heaven, on audiobook, and I bought this one on an semi-impulse buy. I know that I really, really liked it. I liked its descriptions of people, it resolved well, and I liked the Tucson descriptions since I was here by that time. Apparently, it's become one of those assigned in high school and I can live with that.
--Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I know, kind of a given considering me. And I don't mean when I read it the first time, in 1992-3, but when I re-read it in 2001. I had moved out here, and all I had was an inflata-bed and some books. I can't remember why I had P. and P.; I probably figured a re-read was as deep as I could handle at the time. It was the perfect book for that time; I could enjoy the humor and remember why I liked it so much. And, Darcy!
--Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. Melanie had leant me her copy and I think it had gotten slightly spilled on, so I replaced it. This of course meant that her copy became mine. It was a particularly good book to read 2 chapters of before bed. It was a very good fairy-tale like book that had some fun linguistic and political and magical things. I am not doing it justice, but it's cool.
--I Love Everybody and Other Atrocious Lies by Laurie Notaro. I have to include at least one humorous essay book in here and I choose Laurie's third book. I've been reading her stuff since I moved here and she was writing for the AZ Republic. While her first two books are good, in the third, it just gels together. She has phrases like "angry jazz hands" and she has a whole chapter of dealing with the idiocy of people. Also, she was local at the time, so I could read it and share the feeling of being stuck behind a Valley Metro bus in traffic since I always seemed to have that problem.

Okay, I'm cheating. I can't think of another book and I'm not going to force it to make the 6 books. Because, that's apparently how I do things. I'd rather have 5 good books than 5 books and 1 book that's merely ennnhh. Call me whatever you want, but if I can't think of one, I'm not going to phone it in.

Books read.

Got from Anali who got if from Musical Perceptions, I found this meme of LibraryThing books that were tagged unread. The job is to bold those books I have read, underline the titles I read for school , and italicize those I started but didn't finish. I am also noting what I had to read for high school because my high school English in retrospect exposed me to a good mix of lits.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (hs)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (hs)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel
The Name of the Rose (and yes, I read it before I had really taken medieval classes. Still haven't re-read it.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (am pretty impressed that considering my career, have managed to side-step that one)
Ulysses (though finished it on my own shortly after the class was over)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (hs)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov (haven't really read the Russians either. The only thing I think I read was Solzenitschen (sp. who knows) and have seen Dr. Zhivago)
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace 
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (hs)
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver (sadly, not yet)
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (As a medievalist, yes. But do they mean the whole ones? 'Cause I think I have, but there are a lot of random ones that are hard to get through. )
The Historian : a novel (it's on the deck.)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (first in hs and then in college)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum (Read, yes. Understood all of, no. But liked parts)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 (hs)
Angels & Demons
Inferno (though I've only read the Hell section and that's all that was assigned. )
The Satanic Verses (though have read Haroun and the Sea of Stories which I highly recommend. Very good.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray 
Mansfield Park (this would be one of those where I got almost to the end like the last chapter, so I'm counting it as read.)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse (hs. on my own for an oral report)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir (During the summer, no less)
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere  (keep meaning to read Gaiman; hasn't yet happened.)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (I tried; I really did. I eventually gave up)
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey (these last two are the Austen I mean to get to.)
The Catcher in the Rye (hs)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

(I have issue with some of the things that they have left out, like Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and Robber Bride. Or like some of the Faulkners. Like Absalom, Absalom, or As I Lay Dying. (the first I've read; the second I haven't, so Sound wasn't the first Faulkner I read. And yes, I did read jane Eyre on my own, but that was after I had read WH. And hi, I _do_ have a master's in English. And regarding all the Joyce, I took a seminar in him in college. )