Calling on my literary friends list

[velvetpage]

I have a lot of very literary people on my friends list, so surely we can manage this amongst us.

I want to rewrite that meme I posted this morning.  Not edit it, but completely rewrite it.  I don't want to go with bestsellers, or any other arbitrary appeal to authority when it comes to what books should be on it and what should be left off.  I also don't want to include a certain laundry list of the "best" books by certain authors, while leaving out books by other, equally good authors.  I'd like to, for example, ask people to give themselves one point for each book they've read by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or Mark Twain.  I'd like to develop a sub-list for young adult literature.  In the interests of brevity, I'm limiting this to novels, which means many well-read people will not see themselves in it.  That's a cultural bias I'll acknowledge and address some other time.

So, if you were to make a list like that, what books or authors would you keep from the old list, and what ones would you add?

I'll start.

Under the authors category, I'd let people give themselves points for any book written by the following authors that were left out of the first list:
Madeleine L'Engle
Arthur C. Clarke
Carl Sagan
Mark Twain
Margaret Lawrence
Michael Ontdaatje
Robertson Davies

Your thoughts?

Comments

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

Some books I've either read or plan on reading so I can know what my *students* are likely to be reading, whether their literary value is high or not:

Speak by Laurie Halse Andersen (and her other books; Fever, 1793 is a bit of departure from her other books and more suitable for younger than 7th grade audience) is both a gripping tale of silence after a trauma and the realities of a suburban high school.

Walter Dean Myers is on my to-read list, especially Monster.

I suppose Sandra Cisneros might not make it onto this list, because The House on Mango Street is short stories.

Tell me To Kill a Mockingbird was on that list.

Then there's the books that kids read around The Diary of Anne Frank: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.

I'm sure there are more, but my brain is writing lesson plans. :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

To Kill a Mockingbird was on that list, yes.

I love Number the Stars and have taught it several times. I'm unfamiliar with The Devil's Arithmetic, but it sounds interesting.

*is too lazy to italicize*

[grrl-next-door.livejournal.com]

What about Go Ask Alice? That was a popular one when I was a youth and really impacted me...