451 Challenge – 451 Fridays

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 I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 at school and we just finished watching the movie today and the last scene of the movie got me thinking. What happened was the “Book People” are walking around reciting the books which they had committed to memorize. If you have read the book then you will understand what I am talking about and if you have not then it is tough luck for you. You will have to read the book to find out.

This last scene then reminded me of a blog which I had come across. 451 Challenge. This blog is no longer in use as far as I can tell because there has not been a post since April of 2010 but I think that I would like to try and continue on this little idea. What you have to do is choose a novel and commit to memorizing it. I think that I am going to try and memorize Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Night by Elie Wiesel or the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.  I know that this is a lot to commit to doing but even if you just memorized a part of a book. Like if a book is put into parts try to memorize the first part of the book. I think that this is a great idea. So leave your name and your blog in the Mister Linkey thing or if you do not have a blog leave your name in the comment section. I would really like to get a lot of people to do this because it would really be fun.

The list is really long but the books are all really good choices. If there is a really good novel that is not on this list tell me what it is and I will add it to the list. Also poems are a good thing to start to memorize to practice because they are smaller (usually) and you can memorize a bunch of them so if you do not want to commit to an entire book, try to commit to a few poems. But try to do classic poems.

Also if you do join in, please share a link on your blog to my post. Thanks.

• 1984 – George Orwell
• A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• A Confederacy of Dunces – John O’Toole
• A Solitary Blue – Cynthia Voigt
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
• Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
• Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
• Ashes in the Wind – Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
• Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
• Atonement – Ian McEwan
• Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
• Blake’s Poetry & Designs – William Blake
• Blindness – Jose Saramago
• Call It Sleep – Henry Roth
• Calvin and Hobbes – Bill Watterson
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• Centennial – James Michener
• Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
• Collected Poems – Robert Frost
• Collected Poems – William Butler Yeats
• Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Cry, The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
• Demonology – Rick Moody
• Devil in the White City – Erik Larsen
• Diaries of Anais Nin – Anais Nin
• Different Seasons – Stephen King
• Dr. Seuss’s ABC – Dr. Seuss
• Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
• Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
• Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise – Ruth Reichel
• Geek Love – Katherine Dunne
• Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
• Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• Greengage Summer – Rumer Godden
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
• I Am America and So Can You! – Stephen Colbert
• I Am David – Ann Holm
• In This House of Brede – Rumer Godden
• Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
• Islandia – Austin Tappan Wright
• Izzy Willy Nilly – Cynthia Voigt
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
• Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
• Julius Ceasar – William Shakespeare
• Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
• Legends of Pensam – Mamang Dai
• Les Miserable – Victor Hugo
• Little Boy Lost – Marghanita Laski
• Little Women – Louise May Alcott
• Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night – Eugene O’Neill
• Love You Forever – Robert Munsch
• Macbeth – William Shakespeare
• Mary Poppins – P.L. Travers
• Maus – Art Spiegelman
• Maus II – Art Spiegelman
• Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
• My Invented Country – Isabel Allende
• Night – Elie Wiesel
• Night at the Circus – Angela Carter
• Nursery Rhymes – Mother Goose
• Out of the Silent Planet – C.S. Lewis
• Paco’s Story – Larry Heinemann
• Paradise Lost – John Milton
• Parthian Stations – John Ash
• Peace Like a River – Leif Enger
• Perfume – Patrick Suskind
• Persuasion – Jane Austen
• Piercing the Darkness – Frank Peretti
• Pitch Dark – Renata Adler
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• Quarantine – Jim Crace
• Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
• Rasero – Francisco Rebolledo
• River’s End – Nora Roberts
• Roots – Alex Haley
• Sam Bangs and Moonshine – Evaline Ness
• Sea Glass – Anita Shreve
• Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 – Nathaniel Philbrick
• Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
• Silence – Shusaku Endo
• Small Gods – Terry Pratchett
• South Riding – Winifred Holtby
• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves – Karen Russell
• Summer of my German Soldier – Bette Green
• Ten Tales Tall and True – Alasdair Gray
• Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights
• The Autograph Man – Zadie Smith
• The Awakening – Kate Chopin
• The Bean Trees – Barbara Kingsolver
• The Beginning and the End – Naguib Mahfouz
• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever – Barbara Robinson
• The Blindfold – Siri Hustvedt
• The Blue Castle – L.M. Montgomery
• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
• The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
• The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare
• The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
• The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court – Peter Irons
• The Double Helix – James D. Watson
• The Dragonridgers of Pern – Anne McCaffrey
• The Family from One End Street – Eve Garnett
• The Far Pavilions – M.M. Kaye
• The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
• The Giver – Lois Lowry
• The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein
• The Golems of Gotham – Thane Rosenbaum
• The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• The Harry Potter Series – J.K. Rowling
• The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
• The Hiding Place – Corrie ten Boom
• The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkein
• The Hours – Michael Cunningham
• The Iliad – Homer
• The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
• The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
• The Joy of Cooking – Rombauer, Becker, and Becker
• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
• The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay
• The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein
• The Love of a Good Woman – Alice Munro
• The Magic of Ordinary Days – Ann Howard Creel
• The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
• The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
• The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster
• The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
• The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
• The Ring and the Book – Robert Browning
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 – Sue Townsend
• The Shadow of the WInd – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
• The Sleep Book – Dr. Seuss
• The Stand – Stephen King
• The Story Girl – L.M. Montgomery
• The Story of a Mariage – Andrew Sean Greer
• The Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
• The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffinegger
• The Way of Herbs – Michael Tierra
• The Worst Hard Time – Timothy Egan
• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon
• This Present Darkness – Frank Peretti
• Time and Again – Jack Finney
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
• Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
• Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
• We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
• We the Living – Ayn Rand
• We Were the Mulvaneys – Joyce Carol Oates
• Where the Sidewalk Ends – Shel Silverstein
• Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
• Women in the Wall – Julia O’Faolian
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig