Wow, i hadn't seen that first interview before, Jess.

Obviously many of us get different things out of reading the same books :) Love the beauty and variety of interpretation.

I need more themes for my monthly classic book salon. So far, we've done quests, eponymous heroines, russian authors, and classic horror. Next up is "Water, Water, Everywhere" for which I am reading Two Years Before the Mast.

I've gone through various Top 100 lists and 1001 Books to Read Before You Die and have produced the following themes: "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew," "Books and the Bookish," "Religious Characters and Settings," "Colonialism and Independence," California Dreaming," and "War, What Is It Good For?". Lists to follow.

I'm looking to add any classics (or contemporary books on the literary side) that fit these themes. The book lists are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give people ideas for what they might read, so that they can vote on topics.

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (daily life in 19th-century England)
Jane Austen: Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre, Shirley
Charles Dickens: Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities
Maria Edgeworth: The Absentee, Castle Rackrent
George Eliot: Middlemarch, Silas Marner
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford, Mary Barton, North and South
William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Anthony Trollope: The Barchester Chronicles (especially Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset), Phineas Finn, The Way We Live Now

Books and the Bookish
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie)
Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand)
The Glass Bead Game (Herman Hesse)
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino)
London Fields (Martin Amis)
Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)
Mister Pip (Lloyd Jones)
On Beauty (Zadie Smith)
Possession (A.S. Byatt)
Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)
Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)
Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)

War, What Is It Good For?
All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal)
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The Iliad (Homer)
The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
Regeneration trilogy (Pat Barker)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
Suite Française (Irène Némirovsky)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

Religious Characters and Settings
Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
The Divine Comedy (Dante)
Excellent Women (Barbara Pym)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)
Morality Play (Barry Unsworth)
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Jeanette Winterson)
Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)

Colonialism and Independence
A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)
Burmese Days (George Orwell)
A Good Man in Africa (William Boyd)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)
Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)
Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)
A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
White Teeth (Zadie Smith)

California Dreamin’
Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
The Confession of Max Tivoli (Andrew Sean Greer)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
Daughter of Fortune (Isabel Allende)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Walter Mosley)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers)
House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III)
The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
L.A. Confidential (James Ellroy)
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
The Mark of Zorro (Johnston McCulley)
Mildred Pierce (James M. Cain)
Oil (Upton Sinclair)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin)
Two Years Before the Mast (Richard Henry Dana)
White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

For Religious Characters, I'd add Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen. Beautifully written.

Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz for Religious Characters and Settings

Ooh, also, Lamb by whatshisname. Christopher Moore

I want to put Ken Kesey's The Last Roundup in California Dreamin',but I'm not positive that's right.

Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Tortilla Flats, just about any Steinbeck but those are my favorites.