Reading List: How Many Have You Read? 72

[porphyry]

I borrowed this meme from stefanie_bean.  Well, I always have been a bookworm...

A few comments:

--The only one that embarrasses me is Gone With the Wind.  Drivel.  Horrid drivel.  Or at the very least, too melodramatic for my tastes.

--I have only read Le Petit Prince in French, never in English.  Loved that little narcissistic, coughing rose.

--I thought I might not make it through One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I did.  Once I start reading a book, I usually finish it, no matter what.

--The one I am most proud of is Ulysses.  I couldn't make it through Finnegan's Wake, though (sorry, Martin).

--Some of them I have actually read two or three times.  Why would I do that when there's so many other books to read?  Even so, this list indicates to me I probably need to get out more. 


Bolded = Have read
(*) asterisked = Partially read
Italics = Want to read someday



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 Atheist J.M. Straczynski (of Babylon 5 fame) supposedly read the Bible five times through. So I figure I could read it through at least once.
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 - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

Comments

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

I'm shocked to see that you haven't read 'The Da Vinci Code'; you clearly have no pretensions to culture.

I find that my list would be much the same as yours, except that I haven't read Tolkien, Dracula or that book by Alice Walker.

May I recommend Wilkie Collins? The Woman in White (and also the Moonstone) make really good reading.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Showing off my ignorance:

Books we both have read:

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Books you have read, but I haven't:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Books you haven't read, but I have:
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I don't recommend it, but it passes time on the subway. In a kind of awkward way.)
6 The Bible (Not exactly everything, but a lot. Much of it again and again. Apart from my having been a very pious child, my dad collected facsimiles of illuminated books.)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Tediously amusing fastfood.)

Books neither of us has read:

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
80 Possession - AS Byatt
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Here´s A Lazy Readers Manual containing a half-full cup of nothing, namely what I haven´t read and quite possibly never will:

- one word of J.K. Rowling and I don´t intend to, (call me a snob, a culprit or an ignorant. No: a childhater is what I am, basically)

- that bible atheist, maybe should, am prepaired to think about it but prefer having the real thing read out loud to me but only in italian or even latin if provided.

- Louisa M. Alcott´s Little Women, there are so many of them around in real life, already and such anuisance too but I loved the film. I think.

- Faulks, Niffenegger, Lee, Tartt et al but feel I must desperately read:

- "The Lovely Bones" because of the title, I wonder what it might be about? Perhaps something similar to that comment a frenchman put into the guestbook of the Paris catacombs: "Quelles jambes, quelles jambes!" (I am certain he spoke only of poetry rhyme.)

- That Eliot, but I read some by another Eliot.

- Grahame, but I love the swedish cookies he does on the side!

- Brown & Irving and I sternly refuse to, too. Stubborn like a child, me.

- Louis de Bernieres,...: oh, must I?

- Golden, Collins, Montgomery...hm; am starting to feel deeply ashamed of myself, I clearly lack any Bildung and am only half way through and therefore digress, bowing my way away, to those who have.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Don't be sorry about not having read all of Finnegans Wake, but please lose that misplaced apostrophe;-)

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

It *is* kind of embarassing for an adult to read Harry Potter, I grant you that, and lovely Linda Smith has said everything about it here (starting at 8:20):



(So I'm in no way defending that ghastly series on the grounds of "depth" [btw, I also read but detest Tolkien, and I don't think CS Lewis is all that good either], but it's mildly entertaining fastfood.)

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

(But Alice in Wonderland is great.)

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

First I suspected you were trying to say I would perhaps be not only a twat and a childish fuckwit but also a psychotic serial killeress or something for refusing to read J.K.Rowlings.

Now, of course, I realise how it is all about not making that last downpayment on the Harry Potter series of books if one wishes the sudden stop to be not as harsh as for that sad and notorious bowtie-wearer in the crashed car, which immediately brings us on to the next and pretty damn incurable by stern will New York psycho Woody Allen who I always suspect might have meant me (though we never met) when saying about someone who insists on being crazy (one should stick to one´s methods rather than other´s theories as it is far more empirical, I deduct for myself this minute, in approach I deduct for myself this minute and which I guess this is all about):

"not only is she alienated, she also can´t stop smiling".

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Ooops, the last sentence kind got lost in translation, heh, but I guess you might get its meaning in the deep end or something?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I now have instructions from Mme. Malkhos to get Collins out of the library this weekend.

If the problem with Tolkien is guilt by association, I can assure you its quite unfounded. I can also commend to you Tom Shipepy's reading of Tolkien in Author of the Century

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

How can you setest Tolkien?

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Me, I thought she was small?
But then, she always drank too much, just because the bottle asked her to. Fatal!

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

How on earth did you find that existenstial horror in the clip?

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Because I found it dead boring. I only read it because my friend Holger was so very enthusiastic about it. I kept hoping over 1500 pages for it to turn into interesting at some point, but for me it didn't. Really not very far from Harry Potter shallowness for me, only more strenuous and pretentious. (And people telling me about Jungian archetypes worked into the book didn't help at all.)

Of course I know that I'm not doing the book justice. I just don't like it because I'm not into that kind of fiction, that's all.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

I have no particular prejudice against Tolkien, it is just that that particular genre of literature does not appeal to me; but one day I may test the water.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I have only read Tolkien through once myself although I did enjoy the stories. I found The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, also selected and edited by Tom Shippey, to be a good starting point for the science fiction/fantasy genre. He also wrote a very good introduction to the book. But perhaps it's not your cup of tea.

I almost read The DaVinci Code out of simple curiosity (all the frenzy surrounding it) but couldn't bring myself to do it. Plus, Malkhos might have divorced me over it if he'd seen a copy in the house. :)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Can I help it if Joyce doesn't employ his possessive adjectives correctly? :) English teachers can't just write grammatical mistakes, you know--it's heresy! But I'll try: Finnegans Wake. There. I did it.

You're not showing off any ignorance. I know you've read much; you can't fool me. The same is true of Malkhos--I've read more on this list than he has because his reading tastes differ from mine. I would never, for example, read a book called Demotic Spells in Antiquity or some such name, but he would, and actually enjoy it.

I've always meant to read a Rushdie novel but haven't gotten round to it.

[the-new-lemon.livejournal.com]

I usually finish reading novels, but I regret that even after two tries, I have been unable to make it all the way through Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Well that is what I meant. The genre that grew up in Tolkien's wake badly msiunderstoond Tolkien's intentions and has nothing to do with Tolkien except in the most superficial ways. I would say the English literture that is closest in spirit to Tolkien is Paradise Lost.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The funny thing about the Bible--I'm the Catholic, but have never read it. Malkhos is neither Catholic nor Christian (if you ask him, he says he's a pagan; by today's standards he would be called an atheist)--yet he is intimately familiar with the Bible.

Little Women is more of a juvenalia book--one wouldn't want to read it in one's womanhood, especially when one is surrounded by them. :)

I shall never read Rowlings, either.

The Lovely Bones is a novel about a young girl who is sexually assaulted and murdered. The novel keeps her as narrator, however, after her death, so she can watch her family--her parents, her sister--deal with her death. It was an okay book but has nothing to do with bones, really.

Reading the Bible

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Reading the Bible is the best way to convert from Catholicism. During the Reformation, it was illegal for women to read the Bible.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I feel I must admit I sneaked over to your own site yesterday (as I had secretely done a few times before that, coming there from our mutual friend PetrusPlancius in the first place); as all old cats tend to be curious about what might be inside any closed box and hope you don´t mind too much, if I allow myself to compliment you on your very fine style there, especially that most charming smile to the huge and very becoming bowtie.
I also think you should keep your hair long as it all gives you the look of a 19th century bohemien. I am saying it here, not to intrude unwantedly on your site, and please excuse the impertinence of an old woman, Sir!

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

HAHAHA, thanks a lot.

(And "intrude" however much you like. The occasional sneaking is mutual. ;-) In my case via anicca_anicca.)

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Oh how very nice to hear that from you, was worried about it a tiny little bit. Please feel welcome to my place and to comment freely any time you like! Am just now in a posting mode. There will be ballet today...just saying to lull you into coming over to my weird pirate ship, you know! And of course I already enjoyed your company over at anicca´s too.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

This is easy. Become mutual friends and stop all the sneaking around, ha ha.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Neither did Robert Musil. (It's unfinished after all.) But there are some good bits right at the first few hundred pages, so you might have profited even from an incomplete reading.

I have the same problem with Dante's commedia. I must have read the first two parts five or six times, but always lost interest after one or two cantos of Paradiso. Now by sheer willpower I force myself through it, and find some surprisingly nice bits in the midst of overambitious, strenuous and - for my taste - unappetizing, erm, "metaphysics with psychedelic effects". (But I'll make it!)

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

Who is this 'Da Vinci' anyhow?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Um, I daresay it's supposed to refer in some way to Leonardo the Renaissance painter, but I can't be sure. :)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The Collins books, I am happy to report--both of them--are now checked out. As soon as I finish my current read, I shall begin them both.

Re: Reading the Bible

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Likely it is. :) One of these days, though, probably when I'm really old and contemplating my own demise, I'll get round to it.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Can you please tell me what this book is about? The Musil book, I mean.

I agree the Inferno and Purgaturio are better reads, though I slogged through Paradiso too. I'm sure you'll finish. I wish I could read Italian! Are you reading a translation?

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

To say what The Man Without Qualities is about is well nigh impossible; that is why people fail to read it through, because they cannot work out what it is all about.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

(Yes, in Hans Gmelin's translation. I sometimes take a look at the Italian original, but only to find what good job Gmelin did. Borges writes that Dante was his textbook to learn Italian. He read the Divine Comedy in an English/Italian edition; each pages three times: first Italian for the sound, then English for the meaning, then again Italian, now understanding the meaning. At some point he could just read and understand the Italian.)

Robert Musil started writing "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" in 1921; the first volume was published 1930, the second one 1932. When he died in 1942 he left it unfinished, but there are 12,000 pages for editors and readers to tackle. The novel is set in Vienna in 1913. People are planning the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef's accession to the throne. (Which would have been due in 1918, but of course WWI and FJ's death in 1916 should prove all this fuss futile.) There's not much plot really, Musil just shows us people going on with their everyday lives and ideas while times are changing dramatically. There's Ulrich (the man without qualities), a mathematician, engineer, and political consultant. "Without qualities" means that he's got a lot of qualities that contradict each other and are kept in a kind of equilibrium. He's trying to take a disengaged stance to life and to himself. He has got a father who encourages him to make something of his life (till he dies) and a twin sister, Agathe. There's his friend Walter, an artist, and his very unbalanced wife Clarisse, in love with Ulrich. There's "Bonadea", one of Ulrich's lovers; Count Leinsdorf who's trying to conduct the plans about Franz Josef's anniversary; "Sektionschef" (a very Austrian Gouvernment official) Tuzzi who's sceptical about the whole thing, and his wife Hermine, a.k.a. "Diotima" who is the hostess of a "Salon". Paul Arnheim, a businessman, politician and intellectual, is deeply, but platonically in love with her. So is General Sturn von Bordwehr, a military man. These people and their lives are analyzed and commentated by the author, but also by themselves and by each other, which makes a much more amusing read than might seem. "The Man Without Qualities" is a very Austrian thing and many Austrian politicians to this day claim it to be their favourite book. (Which is not only unlikely, but also kind of awkward. But still: a great book, I think.)

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

- not to forget Moosbrugger, the crazy murderer (such a good name that it's hard to believe that it's a real one). Yes, it's full of good things, but it's also very self-indulgent, as Proust came to be though he certainly wasn't at the beginning. There's no reason, really, why he shouldn't have gone on like that for ever; maybe he would have done if he hadn't died.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

The Woman in White is the best, it all becomes decidedly sinister, and it has a capital villain in Count Fosco. (Doesn't seem to be much read these days for some reason, I hope it draws you in. They made rather a good TV adaptation of it about ten years ago with Simon Callow as the Count.)

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

I agree. The same thing is true even for Kafka's novels that in my opinion are left unfinished not just because of the author's death, but because of their "pointlessness". (The Trial has a beginning and an ending, but the midlle part can be expanded at will. The other two novels haven't got an ending or even a direction.)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

That is the novel for me, then, though who knows when i will ever be able to read a novel again.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

An old girlfriend of mine had, no doubt as an effect of Aspbergers syndrome, an uncanny facility with language. In high school she had read all of Homer, Vergil, and Dante in the Original. I would guess by know she's added the Hebrew Bible. When we undertook to read the Symposium together, she reviewed Greek, which she had not touched in about five years, by reading Smythe's Greek Grammar from cover to cover like a novel (I loaned her a spare copy, and I know she read all of it becuase she ripped out each page as she finsihed it). Her sight-translation was faulty in presentation because it would end in stuttering and other speech diruptions, so the night before we were to start she typed out a translation of the whole thing and a highly accurate one, despite never having seen it before and not riding a pony. On the other hand, she could never have written a term paper to save her life; she just could not think in that linnear fashion, though she hd no trouble about discussing which book or film she like and why in an informal manner. She only got through university by majoring in Mathematics which gave her no problems at all. She was a fully trained actuary and had no trouble getting job-interviews based on her credentials, but her wandering thoughts and head, the occasional collapse of her speech into profound silence, all ensured she was never hired. She also could not drive.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's a woman I'd like to meet! Apart from the ripping up of books. (Well, actually that's the kind of woman I do meet and immediately befriend every once in a while - my best friend Kornelia being a shining example of that kind; and I'm always happy if we manage to stay in contact without too much irritation on either side.)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I actually liked Leah very much myself, partly because she was so interesting and brilliant but very quirky. Malkhos was seeing her when he met me (though they weren't committed in any way), so I was okay with it. At some point, she grew very attached to him while he was growing more attached to me, and I wound up feeling sorry for her because he didn't have the guts to tell her. I asked her straight out if she loved him, and she said she did--the poor thing!--and I told him he needed to quit leading her on and make a choice; this was mostly out of my sense of fairness to her, oddly enough, rather than my wishing to establish a competition. She did go on to marry well, though.

Sometimes I think they would have made a better pair--sitting around reading Greek (which I cannot do) and talking about obscure intellectual ideas together (which I can do but don't want to all day long); I have too much laundry to do. :)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I am sure you would like her, perhaps even be a good match for her (except for your living in Austria). In fact she married and almost the last time we saw her was at her wedding. We were supposed to have dinner with them after that, but somehow it never came about--although it seems strange for me, being so unworthy, to say it, it just became too painful too see how much she still was in love with me.

All of her life she had been an extremely Liberal Jew (their congregation shared a space with a Swedenborgian church and the Rabbi spent most of the service singing Israeli folk songs accompanying himself on the guitar), but he was Conservative (not quite Orthodox) and insisted on her adopting his ways. He also promised her before the marriage that they would have children (which she desperately wanted--it was heartbreaking when she said she wanted them to grow up with ours), and while it is true she would not have been able to watch toddlers by herself, she was under the impression that she would receive tremendous help from his mother who lived next door, but after the wedding it developed that he would allow them to have no children, offering the reason that she couldn't care for them, and his mother's health would not allow her to assist. I doubt we would have liked him very much. But she is completely unemployable and both her parents were aged and in poor health, so what else could she do? He worked as an aircraft engineer.

We could never have run a household together, even if it had not been for my marked preference for Mme Malkhos. Mme. Malkhos exaggerates somewhat when she says I was seeing Leah when I met her. I saw Leah for the first time on a Friday and Mme. Malkhos-to-be next day. It was less than a month before the pattern for the future was set, but we continued to befriend Leah (taking her to the movies and to the Opera often) for about two more years, until her wedding.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Poor Leah, I guess you'll have to live with the burden of being a heartbreaker;-)

(Btw, lovely as she sounds, I don't want to matched with anyone. When I said "a woman I'd like to meet" I thought about someone with whom to discuss books and rant about the state of the world.)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. The chances of your becoming entangled with a married woman living 5000 miles away are quite slim.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Heartbreaker--hmph! Chicken is more like it. Fed his vanity. I took care of it right quick. ;)

Oh, I'm not one who typically makes matches anyway--all in theory, you see. :)

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

HAHAHA! I promise I didn't worry. But I was startled by your use of the word "match".

Re: Reading the Bible

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

It's a good idea to put it off as long as possible, although you might find it so hilarious that you regretted not getting to it sooner. I especially enjoy all the laws concerning menstruation. Once you get past the begats, there are some remarkable stories.