One Sunday a couple of weeks ago, when we’d gone to the Vigil Mass on Saturday to avoid getting embroiled in a local marathon that shuts down all the streets around our church (don’t ask … Tom has been enraged before to the point of risking arrest for civil disobedience) …
Wait, what was I saying?
Oh. Right.
Anyway, we were sitting around until about 1 p.m. in our jammies talking about cabbages and kings and whether pigs have wings … and about reading and classics. I realized that I have a handful of certifiable classics which I really want to read but that I keep acting as if the Reading Fairy is going to drop extra time and a book on my lap when I’ll suddenly begin reading.
Bravely taking responsibility on myself, I made a list.
I love making lists. Don’t you? And crossing things off them.
I’m super excited to begin The Brothers Karamazov. SUPER! EXCITED!
Then those lists came up in conversation over at A Good Story is Hard to Find so I put together an actual blog page. Which I’m sharing here.
So here are my “must reads” … I may not get through all of them in 2012, but I will be trying to always be reading one of them despite other distractions. In no particular order.
(By the way, Scott is also making a list with a bit of a different twist. Check it out at his blog, Rivets and Trees.)
2012 Classics
- The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoyevsky
- Bleak House- Dickens
- Middlemarch – Eliot
- Belly of Paris (Emile Zola)
- Last Call – Tim Powers (not a true classic, I know … but still a “challenging” read which is what all these are for me)
- A Movable Feast – Hemingway
- The Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot
- Wuthering Heights
2012 Religion
- Introduction to the Devout Life – St. Francis de Sales
- The Way of Perfection – St. Teresa of Avila
- The Sabbath – Abraham Heschel
- Introduction to Christianity – Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)
- Joan of Arc – Mark Twain
2012 Rereading
- The Sand Pebbles
- Fahrenheit 451 – Bradbury
- Fire and Hemlock – Diana Wynne Jones
- Lark Rise – Flora Thompson
2012 Nonfiction
- A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bryson
- Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life – Margaret Kim Peterson
- On Pilgrimage – Jennifer Lash
- Twain’s Feast – Beahrs
- Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature