Hooked on Classics

Sarah at Sarah Reads Too Much is hosting a “Back to the Classics”  reading challenge for 2011.  This challenge is open to anyone who would like to participate.  I’ve decided to take a stab at it.  This will be my first go at a reading challenge, but I think I can do it.  The Challenge is open from January - June 2011.  If I can write a book in one month (jury’s still out on that one), I think I can read eight in six months.  I actually have my selections for each category save one.  These are all books I’ve been wanting to read for years, but haven’t for one reason or another.  They all have the added virtue of being books I already own.
Click the link above or the picture in the sidebar to sign up yourself.
The goals to complete:

1. A Banned Book – Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut  
2. A Book with a Wartime Setting (can be any war) – Schindler’s List (originally published as Schindler’s Ark, but my copy’s called Schindler’s List, so I’m going with that) by Thomas Keneally
3. A Pulitzer Prize (Fiction) Winner or Runner Up:  a list can be found here – The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
4. A Children's/Young Adult Classic – Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
5. 19th Century Classic – Moby Dick by Hermann Melville
6. 20th Century Classic – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
7. A Book you think should be considered a 21st Century Classic – Open, see below
8. Re-Read a book from your High School/College Classes – The Scarlett Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne

There are too many good options for number seven for me to decide.  Besides, I won’t know if it’s a classic until I read it, right?  Because of that, I’ve decided to let you, fearless readers, decide for me.  If I get enough feedback in the comments, I’ll pick the one that gets suggested the most. 

If you all gang up on me and pick Going Rogue, I’m going to be very upset.

How Many Have You Read?

Thank You Rachel @ Rachel Morgan Writes for posting this.
The BBC apparently thinks the majority of people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here...
Instructions:
• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
I have read:

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 – Daphe Du Maurier
16.  The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18.  Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22.  The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23.  War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
24.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
25. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
26.  Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
27.  Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
28.  Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carrol
29. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
30. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
31. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
32.  Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
33. Emma -Jane Austen
34. Persuasion – Jane Austen
35.  The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
36. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
39.  Winne the Pooh - A. A. Milne
40.  Animal Farm – George Orwell
41.  The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
44. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
47.  The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
49. Atonement – Ian McEwan
50.  Life of Pi – Yann Martel
51.  Dune – Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56.  A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
57.  Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
58.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
61. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
64.  Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
69.  Moby Dick – Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
71.  Dracula – Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
74.  Ulysses – James Joyce
75.  The Inferno – Dante
76. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal – Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession – AS Byatt
80.  Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
86.  Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
88.  Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
93.  Watership Down – Richard Adams
94.  A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
97.  Hamlet – William Shakespeare
98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
99. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
100. ??? (For you observant types, yes the list does appear to be missing book no. 100, and a couple of titles are double listed, as well)

I’m not sure what the significance of the list is – I couldn’t track it to the original source, but it’s got some great titles, a good mix of the old and the new.  There are books here I haven’t even thought about since childhood.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I‘ve got a lot of reading to do.

Revenant Evil

NaNo, you soul sucking bastard, oh how I love you so…

Word Count – 13,406.  “Suggested” Word Count – 18,334

I feel like Rocky Balboa at the end of the first Rocky movie.  He wasn’t trying to beat Apollo Creed; he just wanted to go fifteen rounds (or however many it was; it’s been a while) with the champ. He just wanted to prove that he belonged there, to himself more than anyone (and Adrienne). He knew wasn’t the best, but he knew he could compete with the best. 

It’s NaNo day twelve as I stagger to my corner.  I’ve got the cauliflower ear, someone needs to slice open the puffy sack under my eye with a razor blade, and I’m spitting blood into a bucket.  But I’m in it.  Whatever happens, no matter how many times the blank page shouts up at me “It’s over!” or “Yer a bum!” in its best Burgess Meredith, I’m keeping on keeping on. 

I started slowly, barely crawled, in fact. Life got in the way in the wee hours of Monday morning, and I didn’t actually write a word that wasn’t part of the title until Day 2. But I’m kicking along pretty good. I actually like the story, and when the draft’s finished and I go back to revise, I think I might have something pretty good. Personally, I like the characters, and I’m eager to find out what happens next (even though I already know, mostly). If you can get engaging characters and an interesting plot, you about 90% there.

I had originally conceived of a zombie-takes-revenge-on-a-town tale, and became concerned when my undead refused to behave like traditional zombies. It’s one thing to have a fresh take on the genre, it’s another thing to throw beloved conventions and expectations out the window. Anyone who would go near a zombie book wants to read about zombies, and zombies are specific creatures with specific attributes. I was worried my “zombies” would be so far off the map that I’d annoy or bore the very audience I’d be seeking. Until I realized I wasn’t writing about zombies at all.

It turns my undead weren’t zombies but revenants, a term I’d heard before here and there but hadn’t given much thought to. A revenant (as most horror and comics fans know) is an undead (corporeal or ghost) with an individual personality and a specific motivation, usually revenge. Revenants are often brought back via magic or with the aid of some sort of necromancer. In some cases, there can be “good-guy” revenants like Spawn. There’s no zombie apocalypse or zombie virus. This description fits my undead perfectly. It was exactly what I needed to help shape my story and keep the plot from spewing out all over the place.

I just think it’s interesting how I tapped unconsciously into something that’s been a part of folklore and pop culture for centuries without even realizing. Somewhere down the road (when I’m not writing a novel in a month) there’s a blog about the collective subconscious.

Maybe that’s why people keep stealing my ideas two years before I have them.