One Woman, One Year, 200 Books
I would love suggestions for books to read this year. I will have to be selective of course. I have two semesters of graduate school and a thesis to write in 2010, after all. Still, any books you think I might enjoy, please tell me about.
Comment over on the “Reading in 2010” page.
I’m reading at a tremendous rate these days. Since school got out I’ve finished 9 books. I’ve written a little, though not as much as I’d like to have done. I’ve cooked a lot too; and hosted many parties. In two weeks I pulled out the table, ironed the cloth, and set the places for eight or more five different times. Celebrating is serious business. Food and wine and fudge and happy laughter are both means and glimpses of God’s Grace. I am enormously grateful for the table and the means to set and fill it. Grateful also for the happy faces around it; blessed that I find joy in the cooking and cleaning as much as the eating. Grateful too for all these books I find neatly shelved in my library, eager to be read.
Yep Twilight.
I attended a wonderful annual party yesterday, hosted by some of my favorite and most bookish friends. They believe New Years Day to be a useless holiday and so invented the annual white-elephant book exchange. We gather with our most awful books wrapped in leftover Christmas paper and do the white-elephant thing. And I got Twilight. It was the last package opened. No one could (or would) steal it. It was kind of perfect and perfectly hilarious. I’m not quite sure what to do with it. Burning is too good for it. Reading it is unnecessary for writing a ranting screed about how it is not only a rotten excuse for prose, but it is also emotional pornography of the worst sort, promotes an abusive relationship to the most vulnerable of readers, and makes blood money off the cavernous need in our culture for good fathers and loving husbands. I think I shall make an altered book out of it. Possibly something sculptural, possibly a collection of 500 haiku created by whiting out the unnecessary words. Ideas are welcome.
It’s nothing earth-shattering, but I enjoyed Samuel Shellabarger’s Tolbecken last night. Shellabarger wrote historical novels like Captain from Castille and I’ve enjoyed his books as pleasant distractions with fun plotlines and thoughtful treatment of historical ideas and events. Tolbecken is one of his better books (and they are all good stuff), and I found myself crying as I finished it. I joke about becoming sentimental in my old age, but I actually think my tears were the opposite of sentimentality. The more I live, the more perilous life becomes. The choices really are life-altering; the consequences dire. The sacrifices are really heroic; the story epic. And so, reading of tragedies, even minor ones, or reading of losses that would devastate me: I weep.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise – One of the greatest love stories!
The Confessions by St. Augustine
The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen – to be read with - The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
If on a winter’s night a traveler… by James Calvino
The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Man’s Unconquerable Mind by Gilbert Highet
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer – Try to read them each in as short a time frame as possible: preferably one day each.
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence – Every mother of sons should read this.
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Lilith by George Macdonald
Typee by Herman Melville
A Canticle for Lebowitz – Walter Miller Jr.
Little Britches by Ralph Moody
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
The Aeneid by Virgil
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster
Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson – Another good one for mothers of sons.
I had one other thought about graduate school that I forgot to include in the last post.
.
My inner procrastinator is dead.
.
Really. I have always been a wait-’till-the-last-minute kind of person but since having children and keeping such a full schedule I have changed. I almost never delay my responsiblities any more. I finished and turned in almost all of my assignments this semester early. This is a happy development in my life. Procrastination is one outworking of laziness and I am happy to see it going away.
Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I finished two books. One: the first published work by Benjamin Merkle The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great was fun, informative, and engaging. I highly recommend it for the amateur history buff or the high-school student studying British history. I also read Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia. It was incisive and philosophical, but too short and not fully developed. Rumor has it that he wrote in a week in order to raise funds to care for his dying mother. The back-story is almost more interesting than the book! It feels so good to be reading just for fun…
We had a fun Christmas morning here with many wonderful gifts exchanged. Of course the highlight was watching the boys. I’m sorry for the poor video quality (they’re jumpy and rambling), but I’m sure family will enjoy viewing them.
Enjoy!
First off, I just want to reiterate here what I’ve said many times before: I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity. I actually get paid to go to school. Really. And while the pay isn’t much it works out pretty nicely. I study and teach a combination of about 40 hours per week. In exchange for the teaching portion of that (about 10 hours a week), BSU pays my tuition (about $8,000 per year) and gives me a “stipend” of about $10,000. I hear plenty of others complain about pay scales, and as a Teaching Assistant, I’m on the absolute bottom rung of the ladder, but I just cannot understand anything but gratitude for this situation. I get paid real money for reading books and teaching freshmen how to write papers.
Second, I know I tweeted and Facebooked this news already but let me just say again: I rocked a 4.0 GPA this semester. I’m ridiculously proud of this since it is my first. When I was an undergrad I never did better than a 3.75 in any one semester and I graduated with a 3.3 something. I know you all are probably a little surprised by that since I’m such a bookish sort but there is a legit explanation; I promise. You see, I worked a lot: sometimes two full-time jobs! I payed for my school out of my own pocket and never took out a student loan. I also lived on my own much of the time. I finished my BA in 5 full time and 2 part time semesters. I managed that by testing out of 45 of my core credits. Those test credits were pass/fail and didn’t contribute to my GPA. So while I kind of hate that I didn’t graduate with honors – and hate that I honestly didn’t know that honors were an option until my graduation ceremony – I also really justify the low GPA to myself in order to maintain a sense of self-esteem.
Third thought: intellectual work is hard. I spent much of the semester with glazed eyes complaining that my head was full and I couldn’t think any more thoughts. I also had a hard time finding anything truly relaxing to read or do since I had so many things I had to think about and ‘figure out.’
Finally, I miss my blogging friends and hope to be around a bit more…
I had bought this book by N.D. Wilson some time ago. I’ve followed Wilson’s writing since he was a teenager publishing odd but amazing short stories in his church’s “Trinitarian Cultural Journal” Credenda Agenda. That journal is now found online here and Wilson is the managing editor. In addition to editing Credenda, Wilson writes short fiction (published in Esquire), creative non-fiction, and children’s books. Leepike Ridge is the first young readers novel he published and it was a great pleasure to read. I gave it to my mom some time ago and she enjoyed it thoroughly. Then she gave it back to me this year for my birthday so I could enjoy it too. I am very grateful that she returned it as I read it in one sitting last night. It went fast and I simply couldn’t put it down. I highly recommend it and the rest of his stuff too. Definitely look for the 100 Cupboards trilogy if you have any reading youngsters in the house! My little brother and sister adored the first two.
Luc turned two today. We had a very low-key birthday party for him. We’re planning to celebrate the boys’ half-birthdays in the summer with a big blow-out since their parties are so over-shadowed by Christmas. Anyway, enjoy the cute.
