Top Ten Tuesday

It's Top Ten Tuesday again from The Broke and the Bookish. Today's list: Top Ten Most Intimidating Books. Here we go....

1. Moby Dick (Herman Melville). It's huge. It's American (I'm a Brit Lit girl). I was dragged kicking and screaming through it in high school. Did I mention it was long? It didn't even help when we watched the film version with Gregory Peck as the doom & gloom minister.
2. The Night Is Large (essays by Martin Gardner). I love this book of essays....but talk about your difficult reads. Gardner thinks more thoughts more intensely about intricate ideas before breakfast than I believe I've thought in my entire 41 years.....
3. Ulysses (James Joyce). One of those books that as an English major you want to be able to say you've read. I have....but I certainly didn't get it.
4. Letters from a Lost Generation: The First World War Letters of Vera Brittain & Four Friends (ed by Alan Bishop & Mark Bostridge). Another intimidating book that I loved. This one is intimidating in subject matter. To hear the voices of the Lost Generation, the men & women who lost so much during WWI was overwhelming at times. But I'd read it again...I learned so much about this time period from this book.
5. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (Jorge Luis Borges). Recommended by a friend. Borges scares me. He just does--even in the stories I liked in this collection. It's not horror. It's not even creepy...but he manages to scare me none-the-less.
6. Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne). The ultimate of my want-to-read, but just can't do it books. I like Sterne but this one seems to have a "Keep Off" sign posted. Every time I start it, I get about 1/3 of the way in and just can't get any further.
7. Drood (Dan Simmons). Another big ol' book. Simmons took way too many words to say what he had to say. And then I didn't find that it had been worth it.
8. Tom Jones (Henry Fielding). Another one of those "I'm an English major" I should read this kind of books. It sits on my shelf and taunts me.
9. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens). The earliest of the taunting books. I tried this when I was a pre-teen and I figure I was too young for it at the time. I should gird my loins and wade in for another round.
10. Middlemarch (George Eliot). I keep telling myself that I'm going to read something by Eliot. I haven't gotten over the hurdle of intimidation yet.