Category Update

I'm thinking we should say the end of January is the cutoff for changing categories or else this could go on forever and ever. haha.

I changed my last category to fit miscellaneous books I come across. Maybe that goes against "the rules" but I like being a rebel.

Mostly, as I look for the books I have decided to read or as I read the books on my list, I come across others that look good. Some of them fit into a category and some of them probably won't. Since J.D. Salinger didn't write 10 books, I'm combining the last category. It's basically books I want to read that won't or can't fit in a category. The Narnia books will be in that category since they are books I've read several times before but I just wanted to read some of them again.

Also, J.D. Salinger died. That is sad. I love Franny and Zooey and Catcher in the Rye (Franny and Zooey first) but I didn't read them till I was in the middle of college so maybe that made a difference. I have been wanting to read his other stuff since I finished Franny and Zooey but I just haven't gotten to it. No better time than the present I guess.

I wrote this in a comment, but I'm thinking maybe Franny and Zooey as a MML book? Thoughts? Comments? Concerns?

Miri's Final Categories

I finally figured it out! My tenth and final category is going to be Series(...es). That is how the Narnia books will fit into the challenge; I'm just going to go back and read the first three now, so I can say I did them all in 2010 (I was going to do The Magician's Nephew now anyway since I haven't read that in a while), and then it will be counted. Plus, this fixes the problem in which I was concerned about there not being enough books in the challenge. So, my final categories are:

• Award-Winners
• Recommended
• Adult Fiction
• Foreign
• Self-Improvement
• Authors I've never read
• Megan/Miri/Lindsey
  
• Nonfiction
• Books I Own/Unfinished Business
• Series
  

That said, I would like to mention how much I love The Chronicles of Narnia. I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in second grade, and while I don't remember my first time reading the other books, I do remember reading the whole series over and over, countless times in my childhood. C.S. Lewis has such a beautiful way of writing, and--I know this is silly but it's a big thing for me--I just love the font in the versions I've been reading, and overall it was just a wonderful pleasure reading them again.

A Small Detour...

I may have accidentally interrupted my 10/10/10 reading to reread the Narnia books. I started with Prince Caspian, since I have read the first three books more times than I can count, and the last four not nearly so many; I am now in the middle of The Silver Chair and will probably go ahead and finish the last book before I get back to The Lacuna (which I am enjoying, but is easy for me to get distracted from).

Anna Karenina

I FINALLY FINISHED!!!

And it was good. I have some mixed feelings about the secondary characters, because a lot of times it seemed like Tolstoy was just using them to put forth his political or religious agenda for pages and pages. On the other hand, it was nice to see some semi-functional but still imperfect people to contrast the despair and craziness of the main characters - it just got in the way of story flow sometimes and then I would hate the Levins and their peasants.

Anyway. It was good, and I feel very accomplished. Now I can hurry through some shorter and half-finished ones to catch up. :)

Three!!!

My count is up to three (almost four) completed books!

The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie)
Through the Wardrobe (an interesting collection of essays about The Chronicles of Narnia)
The Magician's Nephew (C.S. Lewis)

I have one CD left on The Silver Chair so that will soon be finished as well.

Another thing I started doing is keeping a journal dedicated to this year of reading. There was a paragraph in Enchantress that stuck out to me enough that I typed a note on my cell phone with the page number. I figured if I would do that, why not keep track of things like that so as to actually retain something from each book, whether I like the book or not. I also had some thoughts with the essays I read, some of which pertained to the religious symbols and whatnot in the Narnia books and a note about why I read (listened) to The Magician's Nephew again and what I thought of it this go round.

I also started my own rating system (1-10) so as I get more into books and genres I don't actually read as much, I can look back and quickly see what I thought of things in case I want to go with something similar or something completely different.

Progress Report

Finished: Adult Fiction, The Gathering Storm; Recommended, The Alchemyst, Abarat; Self-Improvement, Forced to be Family; MML, The Enchantress of Florence

In the works: Adult Fiction, The Lacuna

Up next: Award-Winners, Interpreter of Maladies, March

New categories:

• Award-Winners
• Recommended
• Adult Fiction
• Foreign
• Self-Improvement
• Authors I've never read
• Megan/Miri/Lindsey
• Nonfiction
• Books I own/Unfinished Business
• _________

I am pretty sure picking the categories is going to end up being the most difficult part of this challenge for me. I just cannot come up with ten I like!

Current Progress

I was planning on this post mostly just to make myself feel better. Then Megan posted hers and I feel like I'm way behind. haha. Here we are anyway.

I'm 3/4 of the way through Through the Wardrobe (which is a collection of essays about The Chronicles of Narnia). Unfortunately, it's mostly making me want to just re-read Chronicles. We'll see about that.

I started reading Alice in Wonderland out loud to my nephew and figure I'll just go through that one over the course of the year with him for the most part. It will be slow going, but why not introduce him to reading bigger books out loud? It should certainly help his vocabulary and he seems to be enjoying it so far.

Forest Born. I read one page. It's the next one I'll get to when I'm finished with Through the Wardrobe.

I'm about 1/4 of the way through The Actor and The Housewife. Hopefully I will finish it up after Forest Born.

I'm jumping on the comic bandwagon and will be reading the Buffy season 8 comic as well as the Dr. Horrible comic. Not sure what category they will fit into.

I'm heading down to visit my parents this weekend and plan on renewing my library card and trying to get a bunch of books to last me through till Valentines day (the next time I'll get down to MD to return them). Or, you know, one or two books since I'm already so far behind.

Still Going!

I just want to post so you know I'm working on this even though I haven't checked anything off yet. Here's where I am right now:

• 200 pages from the end of Anna Karenina. I have about a week and a half to finish it in time for book club, and if I get a few low key days this weekend I should be golden. 
• 65 pages into Julie and Julia and enjoying it. 
• About halfway through Enchantress of Florence (haha - remember how I picked this book? Yeah. Distractions.) 
• Almost through with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It's fun, but the novelty wears off after awhile. I think I have 50 pages or fewer at this point. 

I've also decided that something in the "genres I don't normally read" category is going to be a Buffy comic book or the Dr. Horrible comic book or both. (And by the way, I think the Dr. Horrible comic book could be a great one for the combined effort if we can get our hands on it. Thoughts?) 

Categories

I'm editing my category list; I'm going to combine two of them, which means that I have to come up with another one now. The "I can't believe I've never read this" category is bugging me, because there's a reason I haven't read a lot of those books, and that is that they haven't appealed strongly enough to me yet. I don't want to have an entire category of books that I avoid until the end of the year because I don't feel like reading them, so I'm going to combine that one with the "Unfinished Business" category and take out the ones that are really holding me up. Consequently... what should my last category be now? Should I do the one with books that have been adapted to movies? Or should I think of a totally new one, and just watch the movies associated with the books I read, which I was planning on doing anyway?

Reading List: Updated

Okay. First of all, technically one of the rules of this challenge is that you are allowed to overlap between categories (I think the rule was up to 9 books may overlap, which for our purposes would be adapted to 10). I mention this because some of the books I own but haven't read also fit into the books I can't believe I've never read category; in the interest of making this challenge actually a challenge, I'm not going to let myself do any overlaps (if you'll remember, one of my original concerns about this was that the total number of books comes to 100, which is fewer than I read this year). All right. End of disclaimer, on to lists.

Books I own but haven't read:

1. Villette, Charlotte Bronte
2. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
3. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
4. The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
5. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
6. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
7. The Winds of War, Herman Wouk
8. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
9. Howard's End, E.M. Forster

Adult fiction:

1. *The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
2. possibly one of the Dresden files, by Jim Butcher
3. The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
4. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
5. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
6. The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho
7. Serena, Ron Rash
8. The Postmistress, Sarah Blake

Recommended

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer (Megan)
2. Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson (Mike)
3. *Abarat, Clive Barker (Joseph)
4. *The Alchemyst, Michael Scott (Nathalie)
5. The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown (Dan)

I can't believe I've never read this...

1. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
3. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred C. Taylor
4. The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
6. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
7. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
8. A Separate Peace, John Knowles

Unfinished Business

1. The Glass Castle, Jeanette Wells
2. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Rise of Silas Lapham, William Dean Howells

Authors I've never read

1. Neil Gaiman
2. Norman Mailer
3. Cormac McCarthy
4. Ken Follett
5. John Milton

Award Winners

1. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
2. March, Geraldine Brooks
3. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
4. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
5. Ironweed, William Kennedy
6. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Foreign

1. The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan
2. Pandora in the Congo, Albert Sanchez Pinol
   
3. Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe
4. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
   

Self-Improvement

1. *Forced to be Family, Cheryl Dellasega
2. Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, Karol Truman
3. The Four Agreements Companion, Miquel Ruiz

Finished:

Forced to be Family, by Cheryl Dellasega, in my Self-Improvement category. It wasn't very good.

5 - 5 - 10

Having two small children, I know that there's no way I would get 100 books read in a year. Not without some serious neglect, which would lead to even more serious mommy guilt. But I think this is an awesome idea. So upon mulling it over I've decided that I'm going to try for 5 books in 5 categories in 2010. I'm pretty sure this is a goal I can reach without feeding my kids cold cereal for weeks or letting them repeatedly watch Thomas for hours at a time. If I do reach my goal, I might go for 5 books in 10 categories. We shall see.

So here's my list of categories:
1. Authors I've never read before
* Heat Wave (done)
2. Books I should have read, but haven't
3. Young Adult
I'm sure I'll come up with a list soon - there are a bunch I want to read
4. Comic Books (maybe this one is cheating, but I really want to read these!)
* Rapunzel's Revenge
* Calamity Jack
* Dr. Horrible
5. Books suggested by other people (since comic books is kinda cheating)
6. Books I've been wanting to read but haven't made the time
* The Host
* How to train your puppy

Obviously this needs some work because 7 is obviously not 5, but some of the books on the list could fall into multiple categories. And the "Books I should have read, but haven't" will probably be more difficult to read and will take more time, so a catch all category is probably a good thing. Anybody else want to try the "slimmed down" version of the 10-10-10?

Take one down, pass it around...

99 left to go!
One down for me too. I finished The Gathering Storm, the twelfth Wheel of Time book, which went in my adult fiction category. (Megan, you should read this, by the way--it was sooo good.)

One down...

I just finished The Enchantress of Florence so I get to cross one off my list! I won't say much yet, but the ending kind of comes out of nowhere. I still haven't decided how I feel about the ending but I really liked the book overall. Rushdie's writing is beautiful.

Some math.

Has anyone realized that this is like a book every 3.6 days? And than I'm still in the middle of Anna Karenina? I'm going to need some short books in there to catch up. Yikes.

More potentials

I'm going to organize these later when I've decided for sure what my categories are going to be, but for now I need to get them down so I don't forget.

Additions to my reading list based on a conversation I just had with Elise Crane:

Dante's Inferno - it's just inexcusable that I've never read this.
Erasmus, "Praise of Folly," translated by Robert M. Adams.

I'll also finally finish Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and one of my nonfictions (or one of the things that has been on my shelf forever) has to be Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. Which kind of makes me want to do 10 WWI-related books - Jacob's Room, Goodbye to All That, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom Tender is the Night, All Quiet on the Western Front . . . it has a lot of potential to be awesome.

Animal Farm - I enjoyed my first Orwell, and this one is much shorter.

For nonfiction (which I am really excited about) I want to try something by Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson's African Diary, I'm a Stranger Here Myself. There's also an Erik Larson I've been meaning to read called Isaac's Storm. (I almost have my nonfiction section filled out already. If I throw in one of the Shakespeare books on my shelf I'll be golden!) There are a few NPR writers I kind of want to check out as well, namely AJ Jacobs and David Sedaris. I'll be looking into some of their books to see what I want to read.

I have Crime and Punishment on Audiobook, so that's probably how I'll finally finish that one. I also have a great audiobook of A Clockwork Orange, which will either go in my "things I don't normally read" or "recommended" category, because I'm probably not going to watch the movie. The clips on AFI freak me out. (Audiobooks aren't cheating, right? Because I think that's how I'm going to make it work with some of the longer ones. I have 1776 and Atlas Shrugged (abridged - there is no way I will ever care enough to get all the way through that book) as well.)  

Also for recommended: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (or whatever Stegner Katherine was just reading) and Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen. I'll be raiding Ann's shelf for sure.

It occurs to me that I run a book club, so if books don't fit into any of the categories, I may have to form a book club category. Hmm.

I just noticed that Miri has Norman Mailer on her list - I have The Castle in the Forest on my shelf and am excited to read it (I think it's about a Nazi?) so that might go into one of my categories. I also want to read Middlemarch, but we'll see how many big long books I get through after the Tolstoy.

I'll be adding to this post I'm sure, but I had to get down the right translation of Erasmus from Elise before it got lost in my facebook inbox.

Lin: Reading List

Here's what I have as possibilities so far:

Books I own but haven't read
Through the Wardrobe (A collection of writings from different authors about the Chronicles of Narnia)
The Wednesday Letters
The Glass Castle
Mansfield Park
Sense and Sensibility
Pride & Prejudice & Zombies
Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters
Madame Bovary
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Cranford

The above list is mostly coming from the set of beautiful Penguin classics I got last year for my birthday. I hadn't read most of them (hence the reason for buying them) so now I'm going to do it. This list may change, although it's the most set in stone due to the nature of the category.

Books with movie adaptations
The Road
Stardust
The Black Cauldron
The Outsiders Jane Eyre The Lovely Bones
Derby Girl
The Princess Bride
The Thin Man
The Iron Giant

That's what I've tentatively settled on for the movie/book category. I took most of these from lists found over at the A.V. Club, although the three in bold are on there because I also already own them. The Black Cauldron is the one I'm most excited about because I always thought that movie was so strange and the A.V. Club tells me the source material is much better than the movie. The Princess Bride is on there because I have never read it and I somehow feel like less of a girl for not having done so before this point.

10-10-10

Okay, I guess it's my turn to post my category list. I think I'm also going to include a few books that I've already listed in those categories so that I can remember them, and then I'll refer back or add things.

My tentative categories are as follows:

-Books I own but haven't read.
-Books I'm embarrassed that I haven't read or that I started and haven't finished.
This includes a couple of Jane Austens, Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables, Heart of Darkness, Invisible Man, Brave New World and a few others.
-Books written by authors who aren't British or American.
Yes, I'll be counting Anna Karenina.
-Nonfiction (including biographies and memoirs)
Includes the Wilberforce biography I just got, Endurance, possibly a biography of Victoria and Albert, something by David McCullough, and The Year of Magical Thinking.
-genres I don't usually read
This will give me an excuse to read Interview with a Vampire. 
-Megan/Lindsey/Miri category
-Recommended books
This will include These is My Words, which at least 3 different people have drooled about to me.
-Books adapted to movies
I want to read The Painted Veil and could always through those Jane Austens in there. Plus I always have the option of throwing in some Agatha Christies if I run out of time at the end.
-Authors I've never read
-Either award winners or something in a category like postmodern or modernist books.


 I reserve the right to change these or juggle things into other categories at any time to serve my own nefarious purposes. I also reserve the right to pad things with short stories if I come up short at the end, but I'm hoping Tolstoy won't put me behind enough for that to be an issue.

10/10/10 Challenge

For my New Year's "resolution" I decided to complete the 10/10/10 challenge--ten books in ten different genres in 2010--and I am really excited to do it. Megan and Lindsey read my post and have expressed an interest in it as well, and we've been discussing possible categories with each other. For right now, here is my tentative list.

--books I own but haven't read yet
--recommended by others
--adult fiction
--nonfiction
--self-improvement
--foreign
--authors I've never read (this is one that I just remembered was on that list online)
--genres I don't usually read
--Megan/Lindsey/Miri category (a predetermined list of ten books that all three of us will read)
--award-winners (?)
or, books adapted to movies?

I am deciding between the last two categories, since one of them will take me over ten. I like the idea of books that have been adapted to movies (which came from Lindsey) because it adds the extra element of watching those movies and comparing them with the books, and I'm sure that would be interesting; however, that also means I have to find the movies, and that isn't always easy.

Lindsey's Challenge Categories

When Miri mentioned doing this on her own blog and then later asked Megan for category suggestions, it got me interested. Granted, it doesn't take much to get me interested in anything these days. Also, I hardly read any books in 2009 - in fact, I think the grand total is like 15 or something. I haven't read that little since I was in college. Mostly I was all depressed and retreated into a world of TV and movies, which wasn't bad, but I'm ready for my brain to get some more exercise.

So here we go. 100 books. 10 categories. The categories I have chosen are as follows:

• Books I own but haven't read
• Recommended by others
• Young Adult/Children's Lit
  
• Adult Fiction
• Biographies
• Authors I have never read
• Megan/Lindsey/Miri (a predetermined list of 10 book we will all read)
• Books with movie adaptations
• Books for the blogject (self-improvement)
• 10 things written by J.D. Salinger
  

That last one is a little bit of a cheat because I will probably count his Nine Stories as 9 actual books...mostly, it's been on my list of things I would like to read and I think this is a good way to finally cross that one off. Also, I'd like to re-read Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey. But it's all in the spirit of accomplishment and I'm sure there will be other things that will balance it all out.

The first book that I will finish will fall under the Megan/Lindsey/Miri category as we have all been reading The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie since this summer. I've got 30 pages left and will be moving on to read Forest Born by Shannon Hale which will either count as a YA book or a book I own but haven't read.

I really hope I can stick to this and get it done. I'm excited about branching out and also getting through the books I already own but haven't had the time or patience to read.

Changes

Changes have quite obviously been made. I am going to use this blog for our 10.10.10 challenge.

Megan and Miri and I are going to be reading 10 books in 10 categories (of our choosing) in 2010. This is mostly for us to keep track of everything.