#8 Read 12 classic books & watch 12 classic movies - Top 10 in 2016
If I lay dying, I’d probably say.. “$#%&...I never read Moby Dick...failure.”
Rules:
Check yours out here:
http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results
The List:
Books:
1) Books:
Moby Dick
By: Herman Melville
Date: 1851
A sailor called Ishmael narrates the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the 20th century
2) Books:
War & Peace
By: Leo Tolstoy
Date:1869
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version of the novel, then known as The Year 1805.
3) Books:
The Grapes of Wrath
By: John Steinbeck
Date: 1939
A poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California.
4) Books:
Brave New World
By: Aldous Huxley
Date: 1958
Brave New World opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future ("After Ford"). Human life has been almost entirely industrialized — controlled by a few people at the top of a World State.
5) Books:
Love in the Time of Cholera
By: Gabriel García Márquez
Date: 1985
The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Both Florentino and Fermina fall in love with each other in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica
6) Books:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By:Mark Twain
Date:1884
The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri (based on the actual town of Hannibal, Missouri), on the shore of the Mississippi River "forty to fifty years ago. Huckleberry "Huck" Finn (the protagonist and first-person narrator) and his friend, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures.
7) Books:
Crime and Punishment
By:Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Date: 1866
Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash.
8) Books:
Catch-22
By:Joseph Heller
Date: 1961
During the second half of World War II, a soldier named Yossarian is stationed with his Air Force squadron on the island of Pianosa.Yossarian and his friends endure a nightmarish, absurd existence defined by bureaucracy and violence.
9) Books:
Slaughterhouse Five
By:Kurt Vonnegut
Date:1969
The story is told in a nonlinear order and events become clear through flashbacks (or time travel experiences) from the unreliable narrator who describes the stories of Billy Pilgrim, who believes himself to have been in an alien zoo and to have experienced time travel.
10) Book:
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
By: Charles Dickens
Date: 1837
Oliver Twist is an orphan, who is soon kicked out of the orphanage and thrown into a terrible home. The bad treatment Oliver receives, forces him to run off to London. Here, he is soon picked up by the Artful Dodger and taken to Fagin.
11) Book:
Lolita
By:Vladimir Nabokov
Date:1955
The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a 37-to-38-year-old literature professor called Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather.
12) Book:
The Old Man & The Sea
By: Ernest Hemingway
Date: 1951
The Story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
MOVIES:
1) Movie:
Casablanca
Director:Michael Curtiz
Date:1942
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), who owns a nightclub in Casablanca, discovers his old flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) is in town with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Laszlo is a famed rebel, and with Germans on his tail, Ilsa knows Rick can help them get out of the country.
2) Movie:
Citizen Kane
Director:Orson Welles
Date:1941
When a reporter is assigned to decipher newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane's (Orson Welles) dying words, his investigation gradually reveals the fascinating portrait of a complex man who rose from obscurity to staggering heights. Though Kane's friend and colleague Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and his mistress, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), shed fragments of light on Kane's life, the reporter fears he may never penetrate the mystery of the elusive man's final word, "Rosebud."
3) Movie:
Gone with the Wind
Director:Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood
Date:1939
Epic Civil War drama focuses on the life of petulant southern belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh). Starting with her idyllic on a sprawling plantation, the film traces her survival through the tragic history of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and her tangled love affairs with Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).
4) Movie:
Lawrence of Arabia
Director:David Lean
Date:1962
Due to his knowledge of the native Bedouin tribes, British Lieutenant T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is sent to Arabia to find Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) and serve as a liaison between the Arabs and the British in their fight against the Turks. With the aid of native Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), Lawrence rebels against the orders of his superior officer and strikes out on a daring camel journey across the harsh desert to attack a well-guarded Turkish port.
5) Movie:
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Director:Blake Edwards
Date:1961
Based on Truman Capote's novel, this is the story of a young woman in New York City who meets a young man when he moves into her apartment building. He is with an older woman who is very wealthy, but he wants to be a writer. She is working as an expensive escort and searching for a rich, older man to marry.
6) Movie:
The Third Man
Director:Carol Reed
Date:1961
Set in postwar Vienna, Austria, "The Third Man" stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, who arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to find him dead. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Maj. Calloway (Trevor Howard) and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.
7) Movie:
Seven Samurai
Director:Akira Kurosawa
Date:1954
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food. A giant battle occurs when 40 bandits attack the village.
8) Movie:
A Streetcar Named Desire
Director:Elia Kazan
Date:1951
Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, this renowned drama follows troubled former schoolteacher Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) as she leaves small-town Mississippi and moves in with her sister, Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter), and her husband, Stanley (Marlon Brando), in New Orleans. Blanche's flirtatious Southern-belle presence causes problems for Stella and Stanley, who already have a volatile relationship, leading to even greater conflict in the Kowalski household.
9) Movie:
Rebel Without a Cause
Director:Nicholas Ray
Date:1955
After moving to a new town, troublemaking teen Jim Stark (James Dean) is supposed to have a clean slate, although being the new kid in town brings its own problems. While searching for some stability, Stark forms a bond with a disturbed classmate, Plato (Sal Mineo), and falls for local girl Judy (Natalie Wood). However, Judy is the girlfriend of neighborhood tough, Buzz (Corey Allen). When Buzz violently confronts Jim and challenges him to a drag race, the new kid's real troubles begin.
10) Movie:
North by Northwest
Director:Alfred Hitchcock
Date:1959
This classic suspense film finds New York City ad executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) pursued by ruthless spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) after Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent. Hunted relentlessly by Vandamm's associates, the harried Thornhill ends up on a cross-country journey, meeting the beautiful and mysterious Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) along the way. Soon Vandamm's henchmen close in on Thornhill, resulting in a number of iconic action sequences.
11) Movie:
Modern Times
Director:Charlie Chaplin
Date:1936
This comedic masterpiece finds the iconic Little Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) employed at a state-of-the-art factory where the inescapable machinery completely overwhelms him, and where various mishaps keep getting him sent to prison. In between his various jail stints, he meets and befriends an orphan girl (Paulette Goddard). Both together and apart, they try to contend with the difficulties of modern life, with the Tramp working as a waiter and eventually a performer.
12) Movie:
Frankenstein
Director:James Whale
Date:1931
This iconic horror film follows the obsessed scientist Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) as he attempts to create life by assembling a creature from body parts of the deceased. Aided by his loyal misshapen assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), Frankenstein succeeds in animating his monster (Boris Karloff), but, confused and traumatized, it escapes into the countryside and begins to wreak havoc. Frankenstein searches for the elusive being, and eventually must confront his tormented creation.
Rules:
- I cannot have read/seen it before
- I'm ashamed to not have read/seen it
- Will improve my cocktail party game
Check yours out here:
http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results
The List:
Books:
1) Books:
Moby Dick
By: Herman Melville
Date: 1851
A sailor called Ishmael narrates the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the 20th century
2) Books:
War & Peace
By: Leo Tolstoy
Date:1869
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version of the novel, then known as The Year 1805.
3) Books:
The Grapes of Wrath
By: John Steinbeck
Date: 1939
A poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California.
4) Books:
Brave New World
By: Aldous Huxley
Date: 1958
Brave New World opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future ("After Ford"). Human life has been almost entirely industrialized — controlled by a few people at the top of a World State.
5) Books:
Love in the Time of Cholera
By: Gabriel García Márquez
Date: 1985
The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Both Florentino and Fermina fall in love with each other in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica
6) Books:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By:Mark Twain
Date:1884
The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri (based on the actual town of Hannibal, Missouri), on the shore of the Mississippi River "forty to fifty years ago. Huckleberry "Huck" Finn (the protagonist and first-person narrator) and his friend, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures.
7) Books:
Crime and Punishment
By:Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Date: 1866
Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash.
8) Books:
Catch-22
By:Joseph Heller
Date: 1961
During the second half of World War II, a soldier named Yossarian is stationed with his Air Force squadron on the island of Pianosa.Yossarian and his friends endure a nightmarish, absurd existence defined by bureaucracy and violence.
9) Books:
Slaughterhouse Five
By:Kurt Vonnegut
Date:1969
The story is told in a nonlinear order and events become clear through flashbacks (or time travel experiences) from the unreliable narrator who describes the stories of Billy Pilgrim, who believes himself to have been in an alien zoo and to have experienced time travel.
10) Book:
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
By: Charles Dickens
Date: 1837
Oliver Twist is an orphan, who is soon kicked out of the orphanage and thrown into a terrible home. The bad treatment Oliver receives, forces him to run off to London. Here, he is soon picked up by the Artful Dodger and taken to Fagin.
11) Book:
Lolita
By:Vladimir Nabokov
Date:1955
The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a 37-to-38-year-old literature professor called Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather.
12) Book:
The Old Man & The Sea
By: Ernest Hemingway
Date: 1951
The Story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
MOVIES:
1) Movie:
Casablanca
Director:Michael Curtiz
Date:1942
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), who owns a nightclub in Casablanca, discovers his old flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) is in town with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Laszlo is a famed rebel, and with Germans on his tail, Ilsa knows Rick can help them get out of the country.
2) Movie:
Citizen Kane
Director:Orson Welles
Date:1941
When a reporter is assigned to decipher newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane's (Orson Welles) dying words, his investigation gradually reveals the fascinating portrait of a complex man who rose from obscurity to staggering heights. Though Kane's friend and colleague Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and his mistress, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), shed fragments of light on Kane's life, the reporter fears he may never penetrate the mystery of the elusive man's final word, "Rosebud."
3) Movie:
Gone with the Wind
Director:Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood
Date:1939
Epic Civil War drama focuses on the life of petulant southern belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh). Starting with her idyllic on a sprawling plantation, the film traces her survival through the tragic history of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and her tangled love affairs with Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).
4) Movie:
Lawrence of Arabia
Director:David Lean
Date:1962
Due to his knowledge of the native Bedouin tribes, British Lieutenant T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is sent to Arabia to find Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) and serve as a liaison between the Arabs and the British in their fight against the Turks. With the aid of native Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), Lawrence rebels against the orders of his superior officer and strikes out on a daring camel journey across the harsh desert to attack a well-guarded Turkish port.
5) Movie:
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Director:Blake Edwards
Date:1961
Based on Truman Capote's novel, this is the story of a young woman in New York City who meets a young man when he moves into her apartment building. He is with an older woman who is very wealthy, but he wants to be a writer. She is working as an expensive escort and searching for a rich, older man to marry.
6) Movie:
The Third Man
Director:Carol Reed
Date:1961
Set in postwar Vienna, Austria, "The Third Man" stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, who arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to find him dead. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Maj. Calloway (Trevor Howard) and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.
7) Movie:
Seven Samurai
Director:Akira Kurosawa
Date:1954
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food. A giant battle occurs when 40 bandits attack the village.
8) Movie:
A Streetcar Named Desire
Director:Elia Kazan
Date:1951
Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, this renowned drama follows troubled former schoolteacher Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) as she leaves small-town Mississippi and moves in with her sister, Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter), and her husband, Stanley (Marlon Brando), in New Orleans. Blanche's flirtatious Southern-belle presence causes problems for Stella and Stanley, who already have a volatile relationship, leading to even greater conflict in the Kowalski household.
9) Movie:
Rebel Without a Cause
Director:Nicholas Ray
Date:1955
After moving to a new town, troublemaking teen Jim Stark (James Dean) is supposed to have a clean slate, although being the new kid in town brings its own problems. While searching for some stability, Stark forms a bond with a disturbed classmate, Plato (Sal Mineo), and falls for local girl Judy (Natalie Wood). However, Judy is the girlfriend of neighborhood tough, Buzz (Corey Allen). When Buzz violently confronts Jim and challenges him to a drag race, the new kid's real troubles begin.
10) Movie:
North by Northwest
Director:Alfred Hitchcock
Date:1959
This classic suspense film finds New York City ad executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) pursued by ruthless spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) after Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent. Hunted relentlessly by Vandamm's associates, the harried Thornhill ends up on a cross-country journey, meeting the beautiful and mysterious Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) along the way. Soon Vandamm's henchmen close in on Thornhill, resulting in a number of iconic action sequences.
11) Movie:
Modern Times
Director:Charlie Chaplin
Date:1936
This comedic masterpiece finds the iconic Little Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) employed at a state-of-the-art factory where the inescapable machinery completely overwhelms him, and where various mishaps keep getting him sent to prison. In between his various jail stints, he meets and befriends an orphan girl (Paulette Goddard). Both together and apart, they try to contend with the difficulties of modern life, with the Tramp working as a waiter and eventually a performer.
12) Movie:
Frankenstein
Director:James Whale
Date:1931
This iconic horror film follows the obsessed scientist Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) as he attempts to create life by assembling a creature from body parts of the deceased. Aided by his loyal misshapen assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), Frankenstein succeeds in animating his monster (Boris Karloff), but, confused and traumatized, it escapes into the countryside and begins to wreak havoc. Frankenstein searches for the elusive being, and eventually must confront his tormented creation.
