Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

If Flicka, Ricka, and Dick are not about to be lured with candy into an abandoned warehouse by their New Friend, who will then ritually murder them, then I just don’t know what.

last page: “…and all they ever found was one red shoe!”

FACEBOOK POST:
“Why is it that female fantasies are such a source of derision and fear? The male species is allowed all manner of violent, creepy, ludicrous and degrading movie tropes, and while we may not embrace them as high art, no one questions them seriously as entertainment…”

comments:
Jenn Bealer
hmmm….she has some points, but she doesn’t get to why i find the books/movies troubling. it’s actually not Bella’s pregnancy that bugged me, and i am all about women having dark/violent fantasies….i really liked the one you posted about why the only acceptable option for our young women is the “buffy” one – that gave me more to contemplate with than this one, actually…but i think that since i have actually heard girls/teens saying they want a boyfriend who sneaks into their room to watch them sleep or won’t let them talk to other boys – that’s what bothers me. because it’s not just “fantasy” they are saying this is how to know a boy loves you in real life. and my 12 years of teaching self-defense sounds an alarm and screams NO! this is a sign of an abusive relationship….still not sure how to reconcile that.

Jenn Bealer p.s. i also don’t think that male violent fantasies are high art or give them a free pass and i do question them as entertainment. so, there’s that. i am an equal opportunity buzzkiller

Traci Olsen Yeah, Jenn, I liked that one, too. But I find it hard to believe (having been a delusional teenager myself) that most girls grow up wanting a stalker boyfriend because of Twilight. It’s not like girls have grown up with a healthy self esteem and Twilight ruins it all. I am not saying that it’s not problematic, it’s just that the scorn that is heaped upon it is disproportionate.

Jenn Bealer
i agree with you on that – the scorn is disproportionate. most of what i hear falls into that “girly stuff is vapid” category – and that pisses me off. the funny thing is that the storyline i find MOST problematic, in the books at least (not sure if they bring it into the movie) is Leah’s. the whole you can’t have kids so no one is going to imprint on you thing. i guess why i have such a knee-jerk reaction is BECAUSE girls get bombarded with this stuff from every other corner, it’s like, really? the insidious messaging isn’t enough, now we have to romanticize it too? For me Twilight is just a very sparkly part of a bigger than one movie/book whole. On the other hand – using pop-culture references that are relevant to them is an AWESOME way to start discussions with pre-teens/teens about stuff they otherwise might not want to talk about, so in that sense, Twilight is a god-send for me

Traci Olsen
Yes, I think Twilight is a great way to start discussions. I mean, if Robert Pattinson wants to develop an unhealthy obsessive crush on me, well he is more than welcome to. But him, only. Seriously. Anyone else who breaks into my house getshis knees broken, no questions asked. I don’t know about you, but I vividly remember parents and teachers having fits over whatever pop culture phenom was going on, sure that it would ruin me forever. Talking about messages is incredibly important for everyone, not just silly little girls who can’t tell fiction from reality.

Traci Olsen Also, to geek out a bit: the no imprint for Leah thing is just her hypothesis, and the thing she is worried about. In the movie they focus more on her wanting to imprint on anyone else to stop being in love with Sam, who has imprinted on Emily. They juxtapose it with Jacob’s being in love with Bella, but not imprinted.

Jenn Bealer yeah – considering that I was totally obsessed with Anne Rice’s vampires, who would sooner rip your throat out and drain you dry than make googly eyes at you…and i turned out mostly ok

and yes – the issues i like to pick apart in Twilight, or Dancing with the Stars, or whatever are ones that EVERYONE of all ages and genders, need to think about

Traci Olsen Ha! DWTS. *shakes head* Media has some fucked up messages, for sure. Have you been reading the Bitch articles “Isn’t He Lovely”? Those are good, too, about how media makes men feel like shit about themselves, too! Fear and loathing sells stuff SO GOOD.

Jenn Bealer
oh that’s interesting – i guess when i read the book i got the impression the infertility was the reason no one would imprint on her, and that’s why she takes the “male role” of wolfing out, because she can’t be a “proper” female. which could be my women’s studies in overdrive. i like the way it sounds like they frame it in the movie.

P.S. i should totally come to Knitting Liberally some Tuesday and we should just talk about this over booze for hours.

So That Happened, and like most conversations with me, ended in booze soaked camraderie. And then someone shared the article in a long and squee-ing Breaking Dawn Break Down email thread, which prompted this from Amanda:

I personally like to avoid using gender arguments for things because it’s such a complex, complicated, controversial area to even think about much less talk about. But – quite simply – I still think it has something to do with the fact that this is the first incredibly popular, mainly female-oriented, action/fantasy story to come along in a very long time (and perhaps the only that has ever reached this level of success).

And that makes people nervous.

In the past, female-oriented, romance-driven movies – even those that were moderate box office successes – have been watered down love stories (as the Time article pointed out, what movie has ever talked about the less savoury aspects of the female experience like wedding or wedding night jitters, menstruation, etc…?) And most “girl power” or “female” type films are never box office successes at all. (as the author mentioned, Runaways.)

So, when Twilight came around in 2008, I remember hearing a lot of shocked reactions when the first film did surprisingly well on its opening weekend. Who knew a “cheesy” love story about a girl falling in love with a vampire would do well?

Then the initial surprised reaction morphed into derision…
And the rest of history.

Anyways, I’m rambling about things that we’ve all heard or talked about before. But BD has once again brought up these questions, and perhaps more strongly than ever we wonder: why is Twilight (and why are Twilight fans) the subject of such mockery? Why can’t we have a silly love story and enjoy it without feeling guilty or embarrassed?

I think of action or fantasy movies like Transformers or the Pirates of Caribbean or even Shrek which are considered “cool” but really have no better writing or acting than Twilight. (Except Johnny Depp. He’s great. But he also plays a silly character in Pirates…so it’s not really his greatest performance ever, I don’t think.) those movies are all “cool” to watch and generally accepted. All things considered, I don’t see how Twilight is seen as so subordinate to similarly successful Hollywood franchises. So, the only way to explain it, I think, is because people – men and women – are unwilling to accept a successful female-driven phenomenon.

(BD itself, perhaps recognizing this, even tried to water down some of the other female aspects of the story by adding in more grotesque blood and more wolf action.)

Now I could really go off onto a Twissertation on this topic, so just for fun I will throw in one more thing.

As most of you know I’m temporarily living in Latin America and I am shocked about attitudes towards women down here. It’s really interesting and SO different from the U.S./Canada/Western Europe. On the one hand, many men are kind of macho. They take their masculine roles seriously. (Though, luckily for me, men in Chile aren’t as macho as they are in, say, Brasil, Argentina, or Mexico, from my experience.) Anyways, so the traditional male provider role is taken seriously, and there are no metrosexual men, and men do labour jobs and are the police men and so on and so fourth. Meanwhile, women are valued as child care providers and home makers and… presidents. Yes, presidents. Many of these Latin American countries have or have had female presidents and vice presidents. The current president of Argentina (and in my mind, an awesome lady) is an educated, strong woman and just won a (fair) re-election by a very high majority. I am also struck by how much she (unlike our American or Canadian or European female politicians) can successfully and strongly rule a country WHILE remaining very in touch with her feminine side (she often talks about her family and children, her love for her late husband, she alludes to past prominent female Argentinean figures like Evita, and during her recent victory/acceptance speech, she wore a very feminine, pretty, black lacy outfit and her long hair down and somewhat sexy makeup – a far cry from one of Hilary’s or Pelosi’s or Bachmann’s stiff hairdos, minimal makeup and infamous power pant suits).

Anyways, I say all of this because – yes, I can wrap this back around to Twilight – it has made me realize how terribly afraid Americans (and Canadians, and Europeans,) are of anything too feminine becoming too popular. Would we (as a whole society) elect a female president who wore sexy black lace dresses and talked about her love for her deceased husband and compares herself to powerful female figures from the past? Can we (as a whole society) respect women (and men) who want to go to a popular fantasy movie about a girl marrying the love of her life?

apparently not.

I think I was seven when I got a hold of a Big Little Book of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart and subsequently did not sleep for an entire week, so she is right on track to follow in my hyper-emotional attachment to books.

Sorry/You’re Welcome, kid.

But, for reals. Katy is making whoopie pies.