In the Middle at the Beginning - Wuthering Heights and the New Blog

First entry! As the side panel says, this blog is all about the 'great' lists of literature. As a lit-geek grad student, I'm 'forced' to read through lists in classes every semester. However, I've never taken it upon myself to seek out the greatest novels. That's what I intend to do here. I found a few exciting lists through which I plan to read. There are few redundancies in the several lists, so I will catalog them with their rankings from the individual lists.

Once I've exhausted the linked lists, I plan to make a Top 100 list of my own!

Now for an introduction. My name is Sarah and I'm a grad student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. I've been a lit-geek for as long as I can remember. For a long time I stuck to science fiction and humor (Douglas Adams, anyone?), but for the past couple of years I have become rather more partial to Scottish fiction, specifically the 20th century revival movement and the early 19th century fiction (primarily Sir Walter Scott). Two of my favorites are Buddha Da by Anne Donovan and Waverley by Sir Walter Scott.

I live in the Koreatown of the US with my two cats and two roommates.

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Though I've read it before, I am currently re-reading through Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It was assigned for Professor Jann's Victorian Literature course. It is also #38 on Daniel Burt's 100 and #17 on the Observer's 100. So, the book ranks rather highly for a gothic romance.

Brontë's 1847 romance could be considered a work of trashy fiction if it were not for all of the inherent symbolism. In my mind, the whole novel seems to be about the love story of two self-centered, evil psychopaths. There is criticism out there that investigates Cathy's sanity and the possibility of either a split-personality or bipolar disorder. Interesting, right?

The first time I read Wuthering Heights, I was in high school. Back then, my great love was Beowulf. I didn't like the gothic romance genre. I simply didn't care. I was more interested in adventure (my other great love was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). I simply didn't 'get' Wuthering Heights.

Now, I see the book in a vastly different light. I still enjoy the parts that I recall as favorites from the first read-through (namely Heathcliff and Cathy terrorizing the household at large as adolescents). However, there is a lot that I didn't remember at all! For one thing, I didn't retain the confusing family tree as names get added in twos. I see now that the whole world here is Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. There is simply no one else around!

One of the major things that caught my eye on this read-through is Heathcliff as a litmus test for the definition of a 'gentleman'. Brontë allows the character to operate in this way by having him run off for a few years and then 'somehow' return as a middle class gentleman. However, there is the "gipsy" issue. Heathcliff is clearly a different race. So, can a man of a darker race (the indication is that he is half-Black, or perhaps Arab) become a proper gentleman? Cathy seems to think so and Hindley does not seem to mind (although I have only read to Heathcliff and Isabella running off together) as of yet. Well, Hindley tolerates him at any rate.

Leading up to his disappearance, Cathy is attacked by a dog at Thrushcross Grange. This act is symbolic of a young woman's beginning menstruation. According to the timeline, young Cathy was twelve at the time of the incident. She bled, then was carried off to the Grange for five weeks and returns as a dainty lady. She is no longer a dirty child playing with the dogs. It is at this point that it is speculated that she develops a split-personality disorder. She does not formally close the chapter on her childhood, instead being immediately thrust into adulthood without hesitation. Heathcliff incites the childish part of her while Edgar reminds her of the middle class adulthood of which she is now a part.

This leads to the problem of who she would choose to marry. Cathy tells Nelly,

"My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well
aware, as winter changes trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal
rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary." (Brontë
122)

The List Progress

Progress

Victorian Literature:

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.

Eliot, George. Adam Bede.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House.

Trollope, Anthony. The Warden.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Conrad, Joseph and Rudyard Kipling. Heart of Darkness, the Man Who Would Be King, and Other Works on Empire.

Daniel Burt's 100:

1.Don Quixote (1605, 1630) Miguel de Cervantes
2. War and Peace (1869) Leo Tolstoy
3. Ulysses (1922) James Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) Marcel Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Feodor Dostoevsky
6. Moby-Dick (1851) Herman Melville
7. Madame Bovary (1857) Gustave Flaubert
8. Middlemarch (1871-72) George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain (1924) Thomas Mann
10. The Tale of Genji (11th Century) Murasaki Shikibu
11. Emma (1816) Jane Austen
12. Bleak House (1852-53) Charles Dickens
13. Anna Karenina (1877) Leo Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Mark Twain
15. Tom Jones (1749) Henry Fielding
16. Great Expectations (1860-61) Charles Dickens
17. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) William Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors (1903) Henry James
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. To The Lighthouse (1927) Virginia Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment (1866) Feodor Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury (1929) William Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair (1847-48) William Makepeace Thackeray
25. Invisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison
26. Finnegans Wake (1939) James Joyce
27. The Man Without Qualities (1930-43) Robert Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow (1973) Thomas Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James
30. Women in Love (1920) D. H. Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black (1830) Stendhal
32. Tristram Shandy (1760-67) Laurence Sterne
33. Dead Souls (1842) Nikolai Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) Thomas Hardy
35. Buddenbrooks (1901) Thomas Mann
36. Le Pere Goriot (1835) Honore de Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) James Joyce
38. Wuthering Heights (1847) Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum (1959) Gunter Grass
40. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1951-53) Samuel Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter (1850) Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. Fathers and Sons (1862) Ivan Turgenev
44. Nostromo (1904) Joseph Conrad
45. Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison
46. An American Tragedy (1925) Theodore Dreiser
47. Lolita (1955) Vladimir Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook (1962) Doris Lessing
49. Clarissa (1747-48) Samuel Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber (1791) Cao Xueqin
51. The Trial (1925) Franz Kafka
52. Jane Eyre (1847) Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) Stephen Crane
54. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) John Steinbeck
55. Petersburg (1916/1922) Andrey Bely
56. Things Fall Apart (1958) Chinue Achebe
57. The Princess of Cleves (1678) Madame de Lafayette
58. The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus
59. My Antonia (1918) Willa Cather
60. The Counterfeiters (1926) Andre Gide
61. The Age of Innocence (1920) Edith Wharton
62. The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford
63. The Awakening (1899) Kate Chopin
64. A Passage to India (1924) E. M. Forster
65. Herzog (1964) Saul Bellow
66. Germinal (1855) Emile Zola
67. Call It Sleep (1934) Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy (1930-38) John Dos Passos
69. Hunger (1890) Knut Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) Alfred Doblin
71. Cities of Salt (1984-89) 'Abd al-Rahman Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) Carlos Fuentes
73. A Farewell to Arms (1929) Ernest Hemingway
74. Brideshead Revisited (1945) Evelyn Waugh
75. The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866-67) Anthony Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers (1836-67) Charles Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe (1719) Daniel Defoe
78. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79. Candide (1759) Voltaire
80. Native Son (1940) Richard Wright
81. Under the Volcano (1947) Malcolm Lowry
82. Oblomov (1859) Ivan Goncharov
83. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Zora Neale Hurston
84. Waverley (1814) Sir Walter Scott
85. Snow Country (1937, 1948) Kawabata Yasunari
86. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) George Orwell
87. The Betrothed (1827, 1840) Alessandro Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans (1826) James Fenimore Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) Harriet Beecher Stowe
90. Les Miserables (1862) Victor Hugo
91. On the Road (1957) Jack Kerouac
92. Frankenstein (1818) Mary Shelley
93. The Leopard (1958) Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) J.D. Salinger
95. The Woman in White (1860) Wilkie Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk (1921-23) Jaroslav Hasek
97. Dracula (1897) Bram Stoker
98. The Three Musketeers (1844) Alexandre Dumas
99. The Hound of Baskervilles (1902) Arthur Conan Doyle
100. Gone with the Wind (1936) Margaret Mitchell

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The Observer's 100:

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe

4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding

6. Clarissa Samuel

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

9. Emma Jane Austen

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley

11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love

12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac

13. The Charterhouse of Parma

14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas

15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli

16. David Copperfield Charles

17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte

18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte

19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray

20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne

21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville

22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins

24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll

25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott

26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope

27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot

29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky

30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James

31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson

33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar

35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith

36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy

37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine

38. The Call of the Wild Jack

39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad

40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame

41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence

43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan

45. Ulysses James Joyce

46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

47. A Passage to India E. M. Forrester

48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

49. The Trial Franz Kafka

50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway

51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine

52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner

53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh

55. USA John Dos Passos

56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler

57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford

58. The Plague Albert Camus

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell

60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett

61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger

62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor

63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R.

65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis

66. Lord of the Flies William Golding

67. The Quiet American Graham Greene

68 On the Road Jack Kerouac

69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov Humbert

70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass

71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark

73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper

74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller

75. Herzog Saul Bellow

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre

79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison

80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge

81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer

82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo

83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul

84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee

85. Housekeeping Marilynne

86. Lanark Alasdair Gray

87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster

88. The BFG Roald Dahl

89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi

90. Money Martin Amis

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro

92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera

94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie

95. La Confidential James Ellroy

96. Wise Children Angela Carter

97. Atonement Ian McEwan

98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth

100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald

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Harvard Bookstore's 100:

1. A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn
2. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles Haruki Murakami
3. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
4. The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon
5. Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
7. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
10. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
11. Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky
12. On the Road Kerouac
13. Alice in Wonderland Carrol
14. Brothers Karamozov Dostoevsky
15. The Age of Innocence Wharton
16. Don Quixote Cervantes
17. Perfume Suskind
18. Ulysses Joyce
19. Anna Karenina Tolstoy
20. Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
21. Cry the Beloved Country Paton
22. Dracula Stoker
23. The Eagles Die Marek
24. Emotionally Weird Atkinson
25. The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood
26. Infinite Jest Wallace
27. Kitchen Yoshimoto
28. London Fields Amis
29. Moise and the World of Reason Williams
30. Movie Wars Rosenbaum
31. Paradise Lost Milton
32. Persuasion Austen
33. Tortilla Curtain Boyle
34. Visions of Excess Bataille
35. Where the Wild Things Are Sendak
36. Wild Sheep Chase Murakami
37. Beloved Morrison
38. Counterfeiters Gide
39. The Bell Jar Plath
40. Blind Owl Hedayat
41. Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe
42. The Count of Monte Cristo Dumas
43. Dealing With Dragons Wrede
44. The Earthsea Trilogy Le Guin
45. The Ecology of Fear Davis
46. Franny and Zooey Salinger
47. History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides
48. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Alvarez
49. Kabuki: Circle of Blood Mack & Jiang
50. Of Human Bondage Maugham
51. The Satanic Verses Rushdie
52. The Sheltering Sky Bowles
53. Tristam Shandy Sterne
54. Well of Loneliness Hall
55. Wicked Pavilion Powell
56. Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett
57. War and Peace Tolstoy
58. Babel 17 Delany
59. Dora Freud
60. Empire Falls Russo
61. For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway
62. Girl in Landscape Letham
63. Goodbye to All That Graves
64. Ham on Rye Bukowski
65. Life Like
66. Mao II Delillo
67. Random Family Leblanc
68. Revolutionary Road Yates
69. The Stranger Camus
70. Humboldt’s Gift Bellow
71. White Noise Delillo
72. Atlas Shrugged Rand
73. Bastard Out of Carolina Allison
74. Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills Bukowski
75. Delta of Venus Nin
76. Fast Food Nation Schlosser
77. Ficciones Borges
78. Go Ask Alice Anonymous
79. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Adams
80. Iliad Homer
81. On Photography Sontag
82. Republic Plato
83. Shockproof Sydney Skate Meaker
84. Society of the Spectacle Debord
85. Strangers in Paradise Moore
86. The Sun Also Rises Hemingway
87. A Wrinkle In Time L’Engle
88. Dubliners Joyce
89. The Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut
90. No Logo Klein
91. Aeneid Virgil
92. Ariel Plath
93. Charlotte’s Web White
94. Curious George Learns the Alphabet Rey
95. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute Paley
96. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter McCullers
97. Henry VIII Shakespeare
98. I, Claudius Graves
99. The Lost Continent Bryson
100. Master and Margarita Bulgakov

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The Modern Library's 100:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E.M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

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NOT on the Lists:

- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

- Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters