Progress! ...Sort Of.

books I own but haven't read
1984--George Orwell


[Main Street--Sinclair Lewis]
[The Three Musketeers--Alexander Dumas]
[Villette--Charlotte Bronte]
[Jude the Obscure or The Return of the Native--Thomas Hardy]
[Billy Budd, Sailor--Herman Melville]
[The Bonesetter's Daughter--Amy Tan]
[Jane Eyre--Charlotte Bronte]


recommended by others
Abarat--Clive Barker (Joseph)
Running with the Demon--Terry Brooks (Mike)
The Alchemyst--Michael Scott (Nathalie)
Wicked--Gregory Maguire (Talia)

[Same Kind of Different as Me--Ron Hall and Denver Moore] (Lori)
[Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--Jonathan Safran Foer] (Megan)
[A Thousand Splendid Suns--Khaled Hosseini] (Meredith)
[Mistborn--Brandon Sanderson] (Mike)
[The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake--Aimee Bender] (Lori)


adult fiction
The Gathering Storm--Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
The Lacuna--Barbara Kingsolver
Prodigal Summer--Barbara Kingsolver
City of Dragons--Kelli Stanley
Shanghai Girls--Lisa See


[Bel Canto--Ann Patchett]
[The Elegance of the Hedgehog--Muriel Barbery]

books adapted to movies 
(this category is allowed to overlap other categories)
[V for Vendetta--Alan Moore]
[Jane Eyre--Charlotte Bronte]

foreign
Say You're One of Them--Uwem Akpan
Pandora in the Congo--Albert Sanchez Pinol


[Rooftops of Tehran--Mahbod Seraji]
[Absurdistan--Gary Shteyngart]
[Mendelssohn is on the Roof--Jiri Weil]



authors I've never read
The Road--Cormac McCarthy
The Handmaid's Tale--Margaret Atwood
Mrs. Dalloway--Virginia Woolf


[The Naked and the Dead--Norman Mailer]
[The Catcher in the Rye--J.D. Salinger]
[After Dark--Haruki Murakami

award-winners
March--Geraldine Brooks
The Good Earth--Pearl S. Buck
The Bridge of San Luis Rey--Thornton Wilder


[Interpreter of Maladies--Jhumpa Lahiri]
[The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay--Michael Chabon]

Megan/Lindsey/Miri
The Enchantress of Florence--Salman Rushdie
The Book Borrower--Alice Mattison (Miri)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower--Stephen Chbosky (Miri)


[Franny and Zooey--J.D. Salinger] (Lindsey)

nonfiction
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--Barbara Kingsolver
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children--Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Dreams from My Father--Barack Obama
Going Rogue--Sarah Palin
Fast Food Nation--Eric Schlosser 
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Ranch Culture--Ariel Levy
The Omnivore's Dilemma--Michael Pollan


[Lies My Teacher Told Me--James W. Loewen]
[Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions--Gloria Steinem]

miscellaneous
Mockingjay--Suzanne Collins
Inferior--Peadar O Guilin




As you can see, I still have quite a ways to go. I've been getting a teensy bit carried away with "extras"... as in, I've read 70 books so far this year and only 22 of them were for the challenge. Yeah... It's time to buckle down. 


I'm in the middle of three books right now, one that will finish up the Michael Scott series, one Nonfiction, and one for the Recommended section. Once I finish one of these three I'll be picking up The Road, and then I think I'll get started on the Books as Movies category with The Mists of Avalon... which is, of course, really long. Hoo boy.


Okay, also, one more thing. Any more thoughts about the MML category? So far I've picked one... That leaves three for Lindsey and Megan to choose, and two for me. Plus we have to actually read them. :) Let's find some good ones to pick!

Miri's Update

Finished so far:

nonfiction
Going Rogue--Sarah Palin
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--Barbara Kingsolver
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children--Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Dreams from My Father--Barack Obama

recommended
Running with the Demon--Terry Brooks
The Alchemyst--Michael Scott
Abarat--Clive Barker

foreign
Say You're One of Them--Uwem Akpan

award-winners
March-- Geraldine Brooks

adult fiction
Prodigal Summer--Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna--Barbara Kingsolver
The Gathering Storm--Robert Jordan

MML
The Enchantress of Florence--Salman Rushdie
The Book Borrower--Alice Mattison

series
The Chronicles of Narnia--C.S. Lewis

self-improvement
Forced to be Family--Cheryl Dellasega

15 from my 1o/10/10 challenge, plus 15 extras (17 with the two that I'm reading now)

Some of them have taken a long time (AVM, Sarah Palin) but hopefully I'll be able to pick up the pace a bit now. I'm starting to question that self-improvement category, by the way... It's a good one and I probably should make myself do it, but I'm envisioning a November/December cram to fit them all in because I neglected them the whole year because they're boring... So we'll see. :)

Finished:

Say You're One of Them, in my foreign category.

http://mirishorten.blogspot.com/2010/03/say-youre-one-of-them-by-uwem-akpan.html

March

Finished March, by Geraldine Brooks, in my Award-Winners category (it won the Pultizer in 2006). In other news, I think this book was given to me by Sam and Jennie for my birthday one year while we still lived at Glenwood.
But I digress. It was a pretty intense book, and I would have liked it a lot if the protagonist hadn't been the father from Little Women. I had very mixed feelings about him and ended up not liking him all that much, which was a little sad because of how I love Little Women. But judging it independently, it's an amazing, heartbreaking book; one of those horrible war books that just makes you wonder how anyone can ever live through such a thing.

One Series Down

Yay for finishing books! I finished my first series, the Narnia books (started over and read books The Magician's Nephew through The Horse and His Boy so I could say I'd read them all in 2010), and now I'm in the middle of a Nonfiction, an Adult Fiction, and an Award-Winner. It's taking me longer than it should to read them, but I'm really enjoying them all so it's okay.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

Just finished The Lacuna for my Adult Fiction category. It is amazing. If your "recommended" categories aren't filled yet, feel free to add this one on there as a recommendation from me! I think you will love it.

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!

Finished:

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

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.)