Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

This semester I’m taking English 354: British Modernist Novel at Cornell University. Here’s the course description:

Virginia Woolf observed, “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” In her (tongue-in-cheek) statement, the early twentieth century inaugurated a very different understanding of character, and a consequent shift in the emphasis of the novel. The class reads novels by Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, and Rebecca West, along with critical and theoretical writings by these novelists. Writing requirements include a weekly post to the class e-list and two ten to twelve page papers.

For the class, we’ll be reading the following books:

Wired News has a story on the delightful assortment of geeky books available this holiday season. Among the highlights are Spam Kings, and in-depth look at the lives of notorious spammers “Dr. Fatburn, Terri Tickle, Mad Pierre and the Spam King himself — Davis Hawke.” Also up on the plate is Tangent, a hacker thriller about a freelance network security expert named Ash.

Of course, if this isn’t your kind of thing, you can always go with Amazon’s popular gifts in books, and buy your family another Davinci Code

OCLC has posted a list of what they claim are the top 1000 books held by their network of libraries. The top ten:

1. Census
2. Bible
3. Mother Goose
4. Divine Comedy
5. Odyssey
6. Iliad
7. Huckleberry Finn
8. Hamlet
9. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
10. Lord of the Rings

I have to say that they’re all excellent resources–and that I’ve read all of them. The first modern work is “Garfield” at #18, followed by “Carmen” at #66, “Peanuts” at #70, and “Doonesbury” at #80. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sadly lies at #256.

They also have a list of top banned books, of which I will reproduce the top ten modern literary scandals:

1. Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn
3. Don Quixote
4. Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer
7. Gulliver’s Travels
8. Canterbury Tales
9. Scarlet Letter
10. Leaves of Grass

Of course, these are now classics–and Mark Twain gets his name in twice.