Catch up on my reading: Year 2

My first year of "reading Up" had a slow start. Unfortunately, this means that I did not complete the list of 4o books that I had made for myself, despite my Speed-Reader-Extrodinare status. (sigh) Ah, well. I did manage to finish 26 books on that list, which was no small feat (see post about Atlas Shrugged).

Onward to this year's reading quest! I am going to try to finish the fourteen books from the previous list along with the following 40. (Yes, I know that total is 54~more books than there are weeks in the year....It's a goal, okay?) This year I stuck with all male authors...and boy, are there a lot of them to choose from! When you start poking around famous novel lists (which are everywhere, btw), you see the disparity in the number of male vs. female authors. Anyway, it was even harder to narrow down this list than it was the last one...but I already have the beginnings of a list for AFTER I turn 40! (But that is another blog idea entirely.)

So without further ado, here it is, in no particular order whatsoever:

1. A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith


2. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis


3. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol


4. Watership Down by Richard Adams


5. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden


6. Night by Elie Wiesel


7. Walden by Henry David Thoreau


8. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques


9. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett


10. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame


11. A High Wind in Jamacia by Richard Hughes


12. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas


13. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens


14. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway


15. Dracula by Bram Stoker


16. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien


17. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne


18. The Godfather by Mario Puzo


19. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson


20. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum


21. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy


22. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck


23. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale


24. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson


25. In Defense of Food by Mihale Pollan


26. Winning Thru Intimidation by Robert Ringer


27. On the Road by Jack Kerouac


28. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert


29. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


30. Crime and Punnishment by Fydor Dostoevsky


31. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey


32. A Study in Scarlett by Arthur Conan Doyle


33. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming


34. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren


35. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe


36. The Call of the Wild by Jack London


37. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving


38. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty


39. 1984 by George Orwell


40. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

I learned a valuable lesson from my first list...make sure you counter heavy reading (ie: Anna Karenina, Crime and Punnishment) with light reading (ie: Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz), else your head might explode.

Visiting Mansfield Park by-way-of my Blog!

So when I started this blog, everyone told me I could cross off #1. on my Cupcake List immediately...but what I have discovered is that Starting My Own Blog is going to be more ongoing than #21 (Make flossing a daily habit)!! I confess to often being frustrated with blogging overall...trying to make the different elements of the blog work has had me banging my head against the desk more than once. "It's never as easy as it looks" has become my motto about blogging in general.

HOWEVER...last night my spectacular fantabulous husband (who, btw, is appalled that I told anyone that he watches Family Guy) helped me add a Library Thing list, a Flickr badge, and a link for Operation Nice AND The Happiness Project! He gets all the praise and my eternal devotion. And now I have a clue how to do these things and hold out hope that perhaps I can figure out how to add a RSS feed all on my own.

Not only have I now made this amazing progress in keeping my blog layout interesting, I received my very first non-friend/family comment! Emily Bouchard at Blended-Families.com left me such a nice sentiment! So she gets my eternal thanks for visiting as well. And suddenly I am inspired to continue once again.

As part of the book I mentioned previously, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (see Happiness Project badge to the left! Ta-Da!), I realized that sometimes the "process" towards increasing our happiness (or completing our Cupcake List) isn't exactly warm & fuzzy.

For example, preparing to run a marathon would be very exhausting, but the actual running of the race and the satisfaction upon its completion would bring a great deal of happiness! An example of my own that is much closer to my heart (since I have no plans to run a marathon---ever) would be #2. Catch up on my reading. Since I have been mickey-mousing around in the months since October, I now have to read SIX books per month from my list to get the first 40 completed by October 8th of this year. So. In an effort to get my behind in gear, I picked up Mansfield Park by Jane Austen on Sunday. After plowing through half of the 430 pages, I can say definitively that this is not going to be my favorite of Jane's novels.

The first problem is that I own the movie version of the novel, which I have loved for years. I (erroneously) assumed that since the movie versions of Persuasion and Sense & Sensibility tracked the novels quite closely, that the other stories would be the same. Not so!!! Which has me all thrown off. But I am enjoying comparing the two versions, and know that even if the reading of it is a bit of work, I will be very pleased when I can check it off of my list and talk intelligently about the storyline.

Perhaps I will have to join the Jane Austen Society so I can debate the merits with like-minded readers! It is honestly amazing that a woman who authored only six books in her lifetime has been the inspiration behind so many spin-off stories. All 6 movies are wonderful and make the novels accessible to the masses, which I fully condone. And then there are the fun movies and novels: The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane, Lost in Austen, and a few more that I haven't even seen! I'm waiting on someone to make Pride and Prejudice and Zombies into a movie and then my life will officially be complete. (hee hee!) Happy St. Patrick's Day!