Okay... so, I can't really put these in any sort of order...
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Thanatopsis - William Cullen Bryant
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore
In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Memnoch the Devil or Tale of the Body Theif - Anne Rice
Alanna - Tamora Pierce (or any other book by her...)
I'm really glad the my own personal canon can be as big as I want it to be in real life, because I could never live with just these ten works.
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Hey, Abby! Question: "East of Eden" is also on my canon, and I was wondering why you have selected it for yours. Many people have asked me why I find the book so intriguing and invaluable, and I have come up with few truly "literary" answers. I always seem to say, "There's just something about it that keeps me hooked." I think that Steinbeck's characters are so brilliantly developed in this piece, and I believe the transformations that take place. I also respect Steinbeck's keen attention to the setting of his novels.
ReplyDeleteMemnoch, huh? I think I would have chosen a different Ann Rice book. "Interview with Vampire" is fantastic, and so is "The Vampire Lestat." I was just wondering what drew you to "Memnoch" the most.
Hmm, I have trouble coming up with good defenses for East of Eden... I suppose a lot of it is based on the fact that East of Eden was the first text I really ever analyzed in an English class and it was what first got me really considering literature as something more than entertainment... which may not be a very literary answer, but that's my explanation.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Anne Rice goes... I had a really hard time choosing one work (which is why I have two, haha). I guess I picked those because I feel that Memnoch is a really interesting commentary on religion/Christianity and I think that it is valuable in that way... but I also included Tale of the Body Theif, I guess because I felt that it was really revealing about humans and human nature... I have trouble really defending either of them, to be honest. I guess maybe as far as good plot and back-story go, I might even choose Queen of the Damned, except that the movie ruined it for me. Haha. I guess I can't really defend them well. :P