Wow, so you like, read things? And talk to people? Socially? People who don't exist on the internet? Oh, brave new world.

force me to get through The Count of Monte Cristo

t weep it shouldn't take force to get through The Count. Ah, Msr. de Nortier, how cunning you are even though you can't talk.

it shouldn't take force to get through The Count

I am reading the unabridged novel in the original French. At 1400 pages, it's by far the longest thing on my should-reads list.

in the original French

OK, that wins at literary badassery, I adore my unabridged Count, but I can't attempt the original French. Though it's always fun to find where someone very formal suddenly trots out casual English where the French was translated oddly.

If you are looking for book salon theme ideas, here are the other book lists I proposed:

Classic "Boys" Adventures

Around the World in 80 Days (Jules Verne)
Captain Blood (Gabriel Sabatini)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas père)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (Jules Verne)
Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson)
King Solomon’s Mines (H. Rider Haggard)
The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Orczy)
She (H. Rider Haggard)
Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas père)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)

Dystopian Novels

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
The Children of Men (P.D. James)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Hunger Games trilogy (Suzanne Collins)
Iron Heel (Jack London)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Neuromancer (William Gibson)
1984 (George Orwell)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
The Stand (Stephen King)
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
V for Vendetta (Alan Moore & David Lloyd)

Water, Water, Everywhere

Billy Budd (Herman Melville)
The Falls (Joyce Carol Oates)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Kon-Tiki (Thor Hyerdahl)
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
Sail Away: Stories of Escaping to Sea (Jules Verne, Virginia Woolf et al)
Sea Tales (James Fenimore Cooper)
The Sea, the Sea (Iris Murdoch)
Ship of Fools (Katherine Anne Porter)
Silent Spring (Rachel Carson)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
Two Years Before the Mast (Richard Henry Dana)
Zeitoun (Dave Eggers)

Oooh, I love the eponymous heroine theme! (Although Anne of Green Gables totes needs to be on there!)

Hmm, I think perhaps tomorrow needs to be a library day.

Classic horror needs to include The Haunting of Hill House. One of my all time favorite creepies.

The last thing I read in the original language was The Satyricon, and I haven't read Latin much since. Dirty idioms are really a pain to translate.

I have We Have Always Lived in the Castle out from the library, but I'm too scared to try and read it at bedtime. I'm not sure quite how I'm going to handle it.

Oooh, I love the eponymous heroine theme! (Although Anne of Green Gables totes needs to be on there!)

Good idea, but if you want to see the problem with this category, go to Wikipedia, where there were only 6 screen pages of eponymous heroes, but 18(!) of eponymous heroines.

Hee, I believe it, Megan.

Dana, Castle is ok bedtime reading, but Hill House is NOT.

Dana, Castle is ok bedtime reading, but Hill House is NOT.

Very much this.

Anything else that has to be on this classic horror list? Does The Thirteenth Tale belong?

Dracula (Bram Stoker)
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving)
The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)
Uncle Silas (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu)

Short Stories

“The Body-Snatcher” (Robert Louis Stevenson)
“The Mark of the Beast” (Rudyard Kipling)
The Stories of Ambrose Bierce (esp. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”)
The Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (esp. “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”)
The Stories of Théophile Gautier (“The Mummy's Foot,” “La Morte Amoureuse”)
“The Withered Arm” (Thomas Hardy)

Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson)
The Return (Walter De la Mare)
Salem's Lot (Stephen King)
The Shining (Stephen King)
The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)