Have you read it?

I missed this meme until a friend highlighted it. Shows you how behind I am on my feed reader...(don't ask).

LibraryThing has a meme going about the top 106 books tagged "unread" by users. It looks like people are marking them in their posts different ways. Also, the actual titles and order of the list seems to change from blog to blog, presumably because the actual top 106 changes regularly depending on LibraryThing users tagging (I took my list from my friend's post).

My markings:
bold = books I've read
italics = books I read for course work/school (some used this for those you started but didn't finish...but I honestly don't have any so I re-purposed it)
* = books I own but haven't read yet

Do you get extra credit for reading something once in translation and once in the original language? I've gone marked those in a different font color (red) altogether. These titles could also be filed under "particularly tortuous." Have I mentioned that I can't stand Gabriel Garcia Marquez before? Yes? Oh. Well, it bears repeating. And Dickens...there's a lot of Dickens on this list. Again, it bears repeating that while I've read a lot of Dickens, I do not like his works. I'd rather poke my eyes out than read him again.

Anyway, back to the list:

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
*Anna Karenina (I know I have this...the same copy my mom read while pregnant with me!)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
*The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
War and Peace
Madame Bovary
A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin (want to read it, but don't own it...yet)
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian: A Novel
The Canterbury Tales
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault’s Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Sound and The Fury
Memoirs of a Geisha
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
*Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver’s Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
*The Fountainhead
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
*A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (read it a second time because I enjoyed it)
The Once and Future King (read it a second time because I enjoyed it)
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
*A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
Oryx and Crake
Angela’s Ashes
Beloved
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables (in English, and an abridged version)
The Amber Spyglass
The Prince
Watership Down
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The History of Tom Jones
The Road
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

It's interesting just how many of these more recent ones I haven't heard of. I guess I'm a bit behind. And I'm amazed at how many of the classics I had to read either in high school or college. Even more amazing is the relatively few number of things on this list I own but haven't read. Of course, the ever growing pile of things to be read (my TBR pile) largely is not represented by this list. I wonder what that says about me and my taste in books?

Your turn. How many have you read?

Side note: yes, I have a LibraryThing account. No, I haven't had the time to go through and actually add and tag my books. One of these days...

Rest in peace, Madeleine L'Engle

The passing of yet another of the fantastic authors from my childhood.

From the NYT Books article: "Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88."

She's best known for the A Wrinkle in Time series. I remember reading her books over and over. Her books were always the type to be enjoyed by adults and children alike. They still have a spot on my bookshelf right next to some of her adult fiction like her Crosswicks Journal series and Certain Women (about a father-daughter relationship). The pages are starting to fall out in at least a few of the volumes. She had such amazing talent and gave us such beautiful stories.

May she rest in peace.

Balancing books and the environment

I'm a bit of an environmentalist. Always have been. I recycle everything I possibly can. I thought curbside recycling was the coolest thing ever when we moved to the Pacific Northwest when I was a kid. I hate throwing away things that can be recycled. What I can I donate (or Freecycle) rather than throw things away. I try to use reusable containers, refillable pens, rechargeable batteries, cloth napkins, etc. I take my travel coffee mug everywhere, along with my well-used (and abused) Nalgene bottles. I try to buy local produce (so easy when the grocery stores here carry New Jersey produce all the time and there's farmers markets all over the city). I commute by bike and try to use public transportation whenever possible (my car doesn't move sometimes for weeks at a time). I don't profess to go as far as No Impact Man (wow! that's extreme), but I do try. I choose to do these things, and everyone has to make their own choices (in other words, you are free to make your own decisions about such things and it's not my place to judge your choices).

But there are some things I can't get away from and aren't exactly environmentally friendly. I love books. I always have. I could never switch completely to an electronic book reader, I need to hold the nice paper book. It's as much about the tactile experience of the book as it is the reading (I've discussed my love of reading before). Yes, I use the library all the time, but there are some books I desire to own. And then there's the books I read for classes (both for my BA and the in-process MA in Spanish) and other various textbooks. I can't give up my books. Yes, I buy used (some of you know my love of Powell's Books and feel the same), but sometimes that's just not possible.

Today I saw a post on a blog (my apologies for the lack of a reference, if I could remember where I'd tell you) about a great and relatively new idea. It's a group called Eco-Libris: Plant a Tree for Every Book You Read. I absolutely love love love this!! It's brilliant. And it's so very cool. And it's affordable. For each book you donate only one dollar, and they work with their "planting partners" around the world to plant a tree. This is somethings I can support whole-heartedly. It blends perfectly my love of reading and books with the environmentalist in me.

Those of you that get books as gifts from me, you can pretty much guarantee that from now on all your books will arrive with a pretty little sticker that says "One tree was planted for this book" (made from recycled paper and non-toxic ink, of course).

Now I need to go home and count all my books so I can balance out all the books in my life with new trees...I'm definitely going to have to save up some money for this one (says the woman with never enough bookshelves).

On books and reading

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I remember reading him for the first time in high school. Slaughterhouse Five was required reading. I loved it. Also required that year was George Orwell's 1984. Heavy stuff for teenagers, but, I believe, good in that they made us all think (well, at least it made me think).

I've been reading and thinking about what I'm reading or what I've read my whole life. And no, my love of reading is not why I became a librarian. My mom says I started reading at about age 2. One of her favorite pictures of me is from around that time. I have pigtails in and am reading with a frown on my face and a pair of Mr. Potato-head glasses perched on my nose. I was a very serious reader. Still am. I still frown when I read. I always have and probably always will. It's unconscious, and try as I might, I can't not frown when I read (I've tried, I lose my place on the page). I also get very absorbed in what I'm reading...to the point that I don't hear anything around me. I swear I'm not intentionally ignoring you, I'm just deep into my book.

My parents, to their credit, gave me free reign over the bookshelves in the house. Nothing was off limits. And they made themselves available to discuss things I read should I want or need to talk about it. This was especially helpful when I read one of the books from my dad's collection on the Vietnam War, or a book on feminism or socialism or democracy. Even a Tom Clancy novel. Our discussions were often an exchange of ideas or debates, heady stuff for a child. But it encouraged me to think about what I was reading and what it meant to me. They never told me that my ideas were wrong, I just had to have a solid foundation for them so I could defend them ("just because" was never a valid reason in our house). They just wanted me to think for myself, one of the best gifts they've ever given me.

This exchange of ideas and books is still going on today with my parents. Packages are often sent with books in them and arrive that way too. You can tell the books from my parents because they usually clip out a book review or two and place them in the book when they give it away. They'll even send along a review after the fact so it can be put in the book. I do the same thing. Our phone conversations almost always involve a discussion or a comment about a book we recently read or are reading or an interesting book review we saw. Since we all have vastly different tastes in literature, this exchange has added considerable breadth to my reading lists. Breadth I welcome, it balances out the depth I have in certain genres and languages.

When people ask me my favorite author, I can never pick just one. I have many. It depends on my mood, my "goal" in reading the book (escape? thought? research?), what I've read recently, genre, topic, etc. The things I read originate from all around the world and are in multiple languages and cover everything from "chick lit" to serious non-fiction. I have authors I love to go back to, again and again, like Jorge Luis Borges or Ray Bradbury. I have authors who's latest work I snap up as soon as I can like Nick Earls, or Jeanette Winterson, or Isabel Allende (see? never can list just one!). But this list is never constant, it changes from week to week, month to month, year to year. And like all readers, I have lists of authors I'd rather not read again. I never say "no" to an author until after I've read more than one work by them. At this point, I can say with confidence that I am not a fan of the following: Charles Dickens (after 5 works), William Faulkner (after 3 1/2 works, couldn't make it through the 4th work) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (read everything he's done, many more than once, particularly tortuous because we read him a LOT in my classes for Spanish lit degrees). Fortunately, the list of authors I'm not fond of is short, and doesn't change very often.

Today, April 12th, is Drop Everything and Read Day, or Beverly Cleary's birthday. Ramona Quimby was just one of my favorite characters as a kid. I still have my Beverly Cleary books in a box with all my other favorite authors from my childhood: Zilpha Keatly Snyder, Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and lots and lots of other joys. Other authors I read as a child, for example, Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle, J.R. Tolkien, and Isaac Asimov, are still on my ever growing bookshelves. And despite the ever growing pile of "books to read" on the floor, and the ever growing file of book reviews of books I want to read, I still go back and re-read my favorites, even if it means pulling them out of boxes temporarily. Often I see new things in these books, sparking new thoughts and new discussions. And reading them is still a joy. And that's the way reading should be, always.

So in honor of D.E.A.R. Day and Kurt Vonnegut's memory, turn off the television and read a book tonight instead.