Booked by Three

Shelly has started a new meme on her site called Booked by Three. Her questions:

1. Name 3 books you haven't read but have always wanted to.
2. Name 3 books you've read that you wish you hadn't.
3. Name 3 books you read that were better than you expected.

Three books I've always wanted to read: Don Quixote, which I'm taking a stab at reading this year; Ulysses, which I get to put off until I've read The Odyssey and Dubliners and reread Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and, um, Paradise Lost. I've owned a copy of that for twenty years or more.

I really wish I hadn't bothered reading Ira Levin's sequel to Rosemary's Baby, Walter Miller's sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Billie Letts' Where the Heart Is.

Three books that were better than I expected: The Grapes of Wrath (for a reason that I can't fathom, because I read and loved lots of Steinbeck in high school, I had a bad attitude about this one and read the Cliff's Notes in 12th grade instead. Absolutely knocked me out when I actually got around to reading it in the early '90s); Middlemarch (because Silas Marner was one of two classics in my house while I was growing up, I knew George Eliot had to be terrible--why else would we own anything by her?; I still haven't read Silas Marner); and Pride and Prejudice (this was the other classic my family owned and I denounced without bothering to read it. Lizzie Bennet, c'est moi).