Well read Book list...

There is a new "meme" running through the lit blog community (see here and here) that involves revealing how many literary "classics" you have read. I did this awhile back with the Modern Library's top 100 English language novels. To further reveal my lack of culture I will use the list provided this time. The ones in bold are the ones I have read:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua — Things Fall Apart
Agee, James — A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane — Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James — Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel — Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul — The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily — Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert — The Stranger
Cather, Willa — Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey — The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton — The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate — The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph — Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore — The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen — The Red Badge of Courage
Dante — Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel — Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel — Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles — A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor — Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore — An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre — The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George — The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph — Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo — Selected Essays
Faulkner, William — As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William — The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry — Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott — The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave — Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox — The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von — Faust
Golding, William — Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas — Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel — The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph — Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest — A Farewell to Arms
Homer — The Iliad
Homer — The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor — The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale — Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous — Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik — A Doll's House
James, Henry — The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry — The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz — The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong — The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper — To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair — Babbitt
London, Jack — The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas — The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García — One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman — Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman — Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur — The Crucible
Morrison, Toni — Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery — A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene — Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George — Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris — Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia — The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan — Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel — Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas — The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria — All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond — Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry — Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. — The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William — Hamlet
Shakespeare, William — Macbeth
Shakespeare, William — A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William — Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard — Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary — Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon — Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles — Antigone
Sophocles — Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John — The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis — Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher — Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan — Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William — Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David — Walden
Tolstoy, Leo — War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan — Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire — Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. — Slaughterhouse—Five
Walker, Alice — The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith — The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora — Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt — Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar — The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee — The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia — To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard — Native Son

So, I have been wondering lately ever since my boss pretty much called me an idiot (ok not exactly but if I told the story you would see that is what he did), what really makes a person "smart"?

Here is what webster says about the definition of smart:

smart /smɑrt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[smahrt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, adjective, -er, -est, adverb, noun
–verb (used without object) 1. to be a source of sharp, local, and usually superficial pain, as a wound.
2. to be the cause of a sharp, stinging pain, as an irritating application, a blow, etc.
3. to feel a sharp, stinging pain, as in a wound.
4. to suffer keenly from wounded feelings: She smarted under their criticism.
5. to feel shame or remorse or to suffer in punishment or in return for something.
–verb (used with object) 6. to cause a sharp pain to or in.
–adjective 7. quick or prompt in action, as persons.
8. having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capability: a smart student.
9. shrewd or sharp, as a person in dealing with others or as in business dealings: a smart businessman.
10. clever, witty, or readily effective, as a speaker, speech, rejoinder, etc.
11. dashingly or impressively neat or trim in appearance, as persons, dress, etc.
12. socially elegant; sophisticated or fashionable: the smart crowd.
13. saucy; pert: smart remarks.
14. sharply brisk, vigorous, or active: to walk with smart steps.
15. sharply severe, as a blow, stroke, etc.
16. sharp or keen: a smart pain.
17. Informal. equipped with, using, or containing electronic control devices, as computer systems, microprocessors, or missiles: a smart phone; a smart copier.
18. Computers. intelligent (def. 4).
19. Older Use. considerable; fairly large.
–adverb 20. in a smart manner; smartly.
–noun 21. a sharp local pain, usually superficial, as from a wound, blow, or sting.
22. keen mental suffering, as from wounded feelings, affliction, grievous loss, etc.
23. smarts, Slang. intelligence; common sense: He never had the smarts to use his opportunities.


Well, I know that I fit some of those things, not all for sure, but come on. If I fit one doesn't that mean I am smart? so, what does smart mean?