Between high school, college and my personal effort I have read: Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Julius Caesar Macbeth Hamlet The Taming of the Shrew Othello The Tempest A Comedy of Errors Branaugh’s productions: A Comedy of Errors Henry V Herman Wouk: Aurora Dawn City Boy Don’t Stop The Carnival Youngeblood Hawke Inside Outside Slaterry’s Hurricane Nature’s Way The Caine Mutiny The Caine Mutiny Court Martial The Winds of War War and Remembrance The Hope The Glory A Hole in Texas The Law Giver Marjorie Morningstar The Lomokome Papers This is My God (non-fiction) The Language God Talks on Science and Religion (non-fiction) Dickens: A Christmas Carol Great Expectations David Copperfield Oliver Twist A Tale of Two Cities Hard Times Martin Chuzzlewit (in progress) Stephen Crane: Red Badge of Courage Ernest Hemmingway: Old Man and the Sea Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre/Cliff’s Notes Most of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels Sophocles: Oedipus Rex Antigone Ibsen: A Doll’s House Enemy of the People Richard Rodgers libretti: Pal Joey Oklahoma! South Pacific Flower Drum Song The Sound of Music Me and Juliet No Strings A good bit (as in way too much) of British poetry
...Why are you disturbed? I've read a few of the works you've listed, mostly Shakespeare stuff for school, and it's not particularly demented in my opinion. If you're suggesting you're somehow weird for reading stories with disturbing subject matter... I'm afraid you're not too unique there Many stories have events or subjects that might make us squirm were they to happen to us. That's part of why we read them.
The Bronte Sisters were for a summer reading assignment between 9th and 10th grade, but the 10th grade teacher never gave us the test he was supposed to. I don't think I would have ever read either Bronte on my own. I thought The Red Badge of Courage (7th grade) and Old Man and the Sea (8th grade) were both extremely boring. I read all of the Wouk on my own, although I used The Winds of War and War and Remembrance for a 12th grade AP English term paper since I had just read The Winds of War when I learned of the assignment. I never would have read any of the poetry on my own, and spending so much time on poetry in English class ended up hampering me on the AP exam because the essay had to be about a novel and none of what I had read up to 12th grade really fit the question.
More disturbing to me are the number of books I've read that I no longer remember. I know I read them because there are little remnant pieces of code on my internal hard drive. A flash of a scene or snippet of dialogue. The rest of the book, the title, the author, all gone. Like on a Windows machine when you remove an application but it always leaves some little file or directory behind as evidence of its one-time presence, little by little these files accumulating and eating your hard drive space with useless remnants that serve no purpose. With age comes the growing fear that The Blue Screen of Death is an eventuality, even though the machine still powers up.
Its better that remembering virtually everything you've read.... I have a virtually photographic memory for things I've read (not however for anything else) with the end result that I've read well over 2ooo books and could give you a basic plot synopsis of most of them. I fear that I am about to experience a stack overflow error and put my database into permanent shutdown
I have read 1.2 million books. In the last 12 months, from memory: Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix Charlotte's Web The Handmaid's Tale Jaws/Buck Rogers - I read these two at the same time, as an exercise in mental expansion. Whizzer & Chips Emmanelle (complete scripts, unabridged) The Gestapo The Yorkshire Ripper True Murders Crime London Gangsters of London Britain's Hardest Villages Evil In My Cupboard I Spit On Your Shoes I Survived The Electric Chair Hair Pride & Prejudice I/Pride & Prejudice 2 Alopecia Hairdresser The Omen The Exorcist The Babysitter The Handmaid's Tale Handbook Dysfunction Is Not Your Destiny Pubs of Lundy Sealions & The Modern Aquarium Sealions Of The Serengeti Nudes Of The Pirelli Calender 1887-2012 (Abridged) The Complete American Poetry Pamphlet
I'm quite similar. And sometimes, I'll pick something up and think 'Oh, I don't think I read this one', and by the end of chapter 1 I remember everything that is coming.
And dudettes. With a lot of great things to say. May we all aspire to be on such a list someday, whatever our color, etc.
I went to a school where literature wasn't offered, I read Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar for class once. I read all others like Dickens,bronte sisters Fitzgerald and other classics just for the fun of it. It's not as disturbing as you think.
Is this a poem? The only thing more pretentious than listing the book you have read, is listing the books you forgot you read. But no-one would do that.
If you don't think Shakespeare is disturbed then its probably about time we introduced you to Titus Andronicus.
