Books. More Books. Some Pie. More Books.

Today, I stumbled upon two extremely wonderful articles from buzzfeed.com regarding, wait for it.... Books! Imagine that. I cannot help but get distracted by the impending vortex of related articles that occur from just one, tiny, little book article. I also baked a pie, today. Because... Well, because I could.

The first article, titled The 25 Most Challenging Books You'll Ever Read, comes complete with 25 daunting titles, reasons why they are challenging, and finishes with an excerpt from each novel. Below is a list of the 25 pains that I now feel compelled to read. Sadly I have read only one, in full: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. There are others of which I have read excerpts for school (Jean Baudrillard & William Faulkner).

1. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)
2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
3. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century)
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
5. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
6. The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975)
7. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1927)
8. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943)
9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
10. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
11. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (1977)
12. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
13. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
14. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
15. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)
16. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
17. Underworld by Don DeLillo
18. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)
19. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (1981)
20. The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
21. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)
22. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)
23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
24. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
25. The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Now, the second article is the piece-de-resistance: 65 Books You Need to Read in Your Twenties. Holy mother of awesome, this list has so much to offer. Everything assumes intelligence. There are 37 novels, 13 memoires, 5 collections of poetry, 5 essay collections, and 5 "life how-to's" (it's not what is assumed when you see "how-to" and "life" next to each other). This list reminds me of how few books I have read, even though I have been an avid reader since a small age. It makes me long for a past when I had been inspired to read more novels such as these, and not the silly, traditional ones we are all forced to read in high school. I'm not saying they aren't good, obviously there are great ones included in those requirements, but students should be inspired to look beyond those. Find something out of the ordinary to give us tortured, suffering students.

I hope that these lists inspire you to keep reading and keep enjoying everything that comes with being a lover of literature.

(originally published 26 June, 2013)