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.)