Picking up from yesterday:

The Time Traveler’s Wife* (73)
Yep, in the stack.

The Iliad (73)
And a good thing, too: otherwise I would have been helpless in the face of my former neighbor’s complaints.

Emma (73)
Allow me to also express my admiration for Clueless. Said admiration does not extend to Clueless: the Musical.

The Blind Assassin (73)
Yipes — I must admit I had not processed the existence of this (*off to read list of Booker Prize winners and Margaret Atwood’s recent output, not including Oryx and Crake and the LongPen, which I already knew about*).

The Kite Runner (71)
Seen at many airport bookstores.

Mrs. Dalloway (70)
I should probably re-read this without the Reading It for a Modernism Class baggage.

Great Expectations (70)
I love Miss Havisham’s robot monkeys.

American Gods (68)
I read this with trepidation while I was still drafting my Norse god novel. Big woosh of relief when I discovered that the shared ground is shared by others, notably Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. But Mr. Gaiman is still my dream blurber.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
I loved the non-self-referential bits. The SRBs led to book-throwing. Literally.

Atlas Shrugged (67)
I only recently resolved my decades-old weird interpretation of this title, now acknowledging Atlas as the subject of the intransitive verb Shrugged (i.e. “It is Atlas Who Has Shrugged”) versus the not really justifiable placement of Atlas as the direct object of a transitive Shrugged (“An Unidentified Subject Has Shrugged Atlas”). I probably would have figured this out sooner if I’d read the book. Or thought for two seconds about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, since — awkward naming aside — an Objectivist would probably rather be in the subjective case than the accusative (genitive being an acceptable second choice).

*puts head between knees to recover from grammar geek swoon*

Moving on…

Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books (66)
On my list, but not yet in the stack.

Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Eh.

Middlesex (66)
Recommended. Oh, and I have a borrowed copy, but I don’t recall the generous soul. Let me know if it’s yours…

Quicksilver (66)
On the list.

Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
I really liked this — easily my favorite of the Maguire books I’ve read (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, and Mirror, Mirror). None of the later books mined the same vein as successfully as Wicked.

The Canterbury Tales (64)
Love the naughty bits and the creepy bits, which covers most of the bits. I will admit I have more fun with a contemporary translation — what I remember most about reading it in Introduction to Middle English (a language course as much as a lit course) was that the instructor had this habit of tugging on his beard during the aforementioned naughty bits, turning them into creepy bits.

The Historian: a Novel (63)
Hadn’t heard of this one…

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down [along] the road and this moocow that was coming down [along] the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…”

Years of whiskey drinking and the only thing I forget are a couple of “along”s.

Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of [the fate of] unrequited love.”

Years of cyanide ingestion and the only thing I forget is “the fate of”.

Brave New World (61)
See 1984, tomorrow.

The Fountainhead (61)
I am Howard, hear me Roark. And yes, I did read it as “Ellsworth Ptooey”.

Up next: Dracula, A Clockwork Orange, Angels & Demons, The Inferno, The Satanic Verses, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and — scariest of all — Tess of the D’Urbervilles.