My 2012 Reading Challenge Lists

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

1. The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoyevsky
2. Bleak House- Dickens
3. Middlemarch – Eliot
4. Belly of Paris (Emile Zola)
5. Last Call – Tim Powers (not a true classic, I know … but still a “challenging” read which is what all these are for me)
6. A Movable Feast – Hemingway
7. The Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot
8. Wuthering Heights

2012 Religion

1. Introduction to the Devout Life – St. Francis de Sales
2. The Way of Perfection – St. Teresa of Avila
3. The Sabbath – Abraham Heschel
4. Introduction to Christianity – Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)
5. Joan of Arc – Mark Twain

2012 Rereading

1. The Sand Pebbles
2. Fahrenheit 451 – Bradbury
3. Fire and Hemlock – Diana Wynne Jones
4. Lark Rise – Flora Thompson

2012 Nonfiction

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bryson
2. Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life – Margaret Kim Peterson
3. On Pilgrimage – Jennifer Lash
4. Twain’s Feast – Beahrs
5. Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature