About a year ago, I got interested in novels that center around minor characters from canonical works. I suddenly noticed that there were quite a few of them floating around out there, and it seemed like a good, fun way to structure a reading list. So I promptly hauled off and read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, and Wicked, by Geoffrey Maguire. Now, I think everyone should read the original Wizard of Oz, which is vastly different from the sanitized movie version. (Plus it's just better, to my mind.) And Wicked is fabulous in its own right. Both are quick and perverse and so much fun to read.

Then, on a trip to Chicago and Purdue, I read Nabokov's Lolita and Lo's Diary, by Pia Pera. Yeah, so Lolita isn't exactly a minor character, but she's more minor than Humbert Humbert. (Terrible pun intended. Sorry.)

So I made up the rest of my list, and haven't had a chance to touch it since. It's been almost a year. Then, today, I bought Moby Dick and Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund. I would love to find a copy of Laurie Anderson's Moby Dick, which was planned for video and CD release and never made it. I'm sure something exists somewhere, but I doubt I'll ever get my hands on it.

I also picked up Gone With the Wind and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Strictly speaking, they don't fit the project, since Randall pretty much invented a character for her book. But it's still a derivative work, and it's my project and so cheating is allowed. I'm hoping to get through these four this summer, in between all the Foucault and intellectual property stuff I'm also going to be reading. That will leave these still to go:

Emma, Jane Austen (which I read about 10 years ago)
Jane Fairfax, Joan Aiken

Hamlet, Shakespeare
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

Cinderella, folktale
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Geoffrey Maguire

Plus whatever else I run across, of course. I'm even more fascinated by this now that I'm working on my Creative Commons project (more on that later), since these are all derivative works. Anybody know of any others that I should tack onto the list?