Reading Lists

Summer Reading Challenge

14 Comments / Books in Bed, Meme, Reading Lists /

Src4Amanda is running a Summer Reading Challenge and it’s interesting. I’m not sure what such a challenge would be, for me. 28 books is not all that many, probably about what I’d read when it wasn’t summer, ya know? The other problem is that while some people have more time to read in the summer, I tend to have less. Maybe what I should do is create a list of a certain type of book? That doesn’t seem like it would work well either though because of how I choose books in general – and because almost all of my books come from the library so my reading is based on the speed at which others return books that I’ve reserved.

Updated on May 23rd: I’ve decided what my challenge is – only 20 19 books but these will definitely be a challenge for me since I’ll also be trying to keep up with the “normal” reading we’ll be doing aka keeping up with TW’s normal reading:

Updated June 26: Only 2 down, I’ll never make it!

Updated July 2: Cloud Atlas, Crucible and the Mark Twain – done!

Updated July 15: Kindred, The Ancient Child – 7 finished, just 7! Ack!

Updated: July 21: Vanity Fair – DONE! Taking a break for something GOOD! Heh.

Updated July 23: The Shadow of the Wind – Done! From the “meme section”. 10 down and starting the scarey stuff now…

Updated August 2: Kristin Lavransdatter – finished. 10 down, more scarey stuff on tap!

Updated August 6: 2 more finished, 175 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow but I’ve given up, for now. I might make it after all… maybe… 12 0f 19 finished.

Updated August 13: 16 of 19 finished (plus 1/3 of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I’ve given up on in favor of another Pynchon novel…)

Updated August 19: 17 down, finished The Crying of Lot 49 which I substituted for Gravity’s Rainbow. I have Possession on audio and am ordering Odd Women now, hopefully it will arrive quickly and I can finish before the end of the month. I’m almost impressed with myself!

Updated August 31: Yea! I’m done, I did it! Well, sort of. I am listening to the last book right now, on audio. I’m on cassette 5 (there are 16 cassettes). So I won’t really finish by midnight tonight but I will finish it in a week or so. I’m pretty pleased that I managed to complete this challenge. It was much harder than I thought it would be, too.

Read 1 book I own but haven’t read – 5 (thanks Sassymonkey) Here are the 5: The Girls, The Land of Women, Midwives, Mrs Shakespeare, The Effect of Living Backwards Done 8/13/6

Read The doggone Moonstone – Done 6/6/6

Read The doggone Dragonriders of Pern – Done 6/20/6


Read a classic that I haven’t read before 5. Here are the 5 I’m going to read (thanks to Jules and Sassymonkey for assisting in the creation of this list!) : Odd Women, Vanity Fair, The Diaries of Adam & Eve, The Crucible, Kindred –Done 8/30/6


Read the books on this meme that I haven’t read (3) (2) (1)- problem, it appears I have read all three of the books in His Dark Materials. I reserved the one I don’t own/thought I hadn’t read and it turns out, I have read it after all!

Read books from the Teachers First’s Lifetime Reading List that I have not read 5 (the list: Possession, The Woman Warrior, The Ancient Child, Gravity’s Rainbow (substituted The Crying of Lot 49, Kristin Lavrandsdatter)

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The Ancient Child

2006, Books in Bed, Fiction, Reading Lists /

So, The Ancient Child. Ummm, Summer Reading Challenge Book. Errr, chosen because it is on that interesting Teacher’s Lifetime Reading List. Hmmm, I feel like I should say something really deep, and moving, and errr whatever.

There were parts of The Ancient Child that I liked very much. I believe those can be found between pages 100 and 200. Before that and after that, I wasn’t feeling it. There were some problems for me. The first 50 pages were confusing, even with the character list in front. The “vision quests” early in the book were confusing. Later they were either better written or I had gotten used to them so it wasn’t as difficult. I liked Grey’s character very much but I was more interested in the Grandmother. I liked Grey’s character except when she was with Billy the Kidd, weird. I didn’t give a damn about Set at all. I found Worcester Meat more interesting.

So, The Ancient Child. I read it. Onto the next Summer Reading Challenge book.

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Psycho Bums er Butts

2006, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Reading Lists /

In May, I saw this list of books recommended for kids, by kids. The list comes to us from Australia which made it extra interesting to me. I like all book lists but book lists from interesting places are the best. I scrolled the list and “The Day My Bum Went Psycho” caught my eye. Okkkkk, never heard of it but I decided I really needed to check it out.

I went to Amazon and discovered “The Day My Butt Went Psycho“. Of course it got a name change for the US market. Bum is not politically correct. Americans must say BUTT. I clicked my little library search tool, never expecting our library to have it, and they did have it. I reserved it and found myself number THREE on the list. Sheesh. Two people ahead of me for this book. Interesting!

Ten days later, I picked it up from the library and presented it to RJ, our 10 year old bookaholic. She started reading it on Memorial Day Saturday as we drove to the Corn Festival. She pretty much didn’t stop reading ’til she was done (except to eat fair food and ride fair rides). She read one page and announced, “Yep, his butt went psycho”! There was all sorts of interesting discussion about psycho butts as we drove toward the corn. When she finished, RJ said it was good – weird but in a good way.

TW read it next and said it was funny in that 10 year old butt humor sort of way. I didn’t think I wanted to read it. I have enough butt humor in my life already, thank you very much. But, I changed my mind after making it through The Moonstone (yea me!). I needed some butt humor after all.

And butt humor was what I got. We know butt humor but the author has gone above and beyond the call of butts err duty. If you have a kid who likes butt humor, this is your book. If you know people who find phrases like “cluster butt” and “butt-catcher” funny, then this is your book. If you know some folks who walk around with their butts where their heads should be (like bosses or idiot ex husbands or something like that) then this is your kind of book.

Butt humor. Sheesh.

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I am not ashamed

14 Comments / Meme, Reading Lists /

I’m participating in yet another list thingy, you know the routine – bold the books you’ve read, italicize those you might read, cross out the
ones you won’t, put an asterisk beside the ones on your bookshelves,
and place brackets around the ones you’ve never even heard of , only because I felt badly for M MV and you all know how I feel about her.  She thinks she’s the only book blogger who has read and is not ashamed of reading The DaVinci Code.  Well she’s not alone.  I read it.  I’m not ashamed.  I actually enjoyed it.  I know there are more of us lurking – come out of the closet and admit you’ve read it.  And if you’re really brave, you might even admit you sort of enjoyed it.  A little.  (And admit to having read Angels & Demons too)

The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
* The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
* The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
* To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)
The Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
* Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (George Orwell)
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
* The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
* Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
* Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
* 1984 (George Orwell)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
*Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
* Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
* Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
* The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
* Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
[The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)]
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
* The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
* The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
* Sula (Toni Morrison)
* Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)
* White Teeth (Zadie Smith)
* The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)

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Women’s Writer Meme

4 Comments / Meme, Reading Lists /

The first Literary Luna-day was held today! Yea for Literary Luna-days!  I wonder what next week’s will be… I guess we should work on this week’s before we start thinking about that, shouldn’t we?  This one is the Women Writers Meme!  Just BOLD those you’ve read, ITALICIZE the ones you’ve been meaning to read and ??? the ones you have never heard of.

Allcott, Louisa May–Little Women
Allende, Isabel–The House of Spirits
Angelou, Maya–I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Atwood, Margaret–Cat’s Eye
Austen, Jane–Emma
Bambara, Toni Cade–Salt Eaters
??Barnes, Djuna–Nightwood
de Beauvoir, Simone–The Second Sex
Blume, Judy–Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret
Burnett, Frances–The Secret Garden
Bronte, Charlotte–Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily–Wuthering Heights
Buck, Pearl S.–The Good Earth
Byatt, A.S.–Possession
Cather, Willa–My Antonia
Chopin, Kate–The Awakening
Christie, Agatha–Murder on the Orient Express
Cisneros, Sandra–The House on Mango Street
Clinton, Hillary Rodham–Living History
Cooper, Anna Julia–A Voice From the South
Danticat, Edwidge–Breath, Eyes, Memory
Davis, Angela–Women, Culture, and Politics
Desai, Anita–Clear Light of Day
Dickinson, Emily–Collected Poems
Duncan, Lois–I Know What You Did Last Summer
DuMaurier, Daphne–Rebecca
Eliot, Geroge–Middlemarch
Emecheta, Buchi–Second Class Citizen
Erdrich, Louise–Tracks
Esquivel, Laura–Like Water for Chocolate
Flagg, Fannie–Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Friedan, Betty–The Feminine Mystique
Frank, Anne–Diary of a Young Girl
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins–The Yellow Wallpaper
Gordimer, Nadine–July’s People
Grafton, Sue–S is for Silence
Hamilton, Edith–Mythology
Highsmith, Patricia–The Talented Mr. Ripley
hooks, bell–Bone Black
Hurston, Zora Neale–Dust Tracks on the Road
Jacobs, Harriet–Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
??Jackson, Helen Hunt–Ramona
Jackson, Shirley–The Haunting of Hill House
Jong, Erica–Fear of Flying
Keene, Carolyn–The Nancy Drew Mysteries (any of them)
Kidd, Sue Monk–The Secret Life of Bees
Kincaid, Jamaica–Lucy
Kingsolver, Barbara–The Poisonwood Bible
Kingston, Maxine Hong–The Woman Warrior
Larsen, Nella–Passing
L’Engle, Madeleine–A Wrinkle in Time
Le Guin, Ursula K.–The Left Hand of Darkness
Lee, Harper–To Kill a Mockingbird
Lessing, Doris–The Golden Notebook
Lively, Penelope–Moon Tiger
Lorde, Audre–The Cancer Journals
Martin, Ann M.–The Babysitters Club Series (any of them)
McCullers, Carson–The Member of the Wedding
McMillan, Terry–Disappearing Acts
Markandaya, Kamala–Nectar in a Sieve
Marshall, Paule–Brown Girl, Brownstones
Mitchell, Margaret–Gone with the Wind
Montgomery, Lucy–Anne of Green Gables
Morgan, Joan–When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
Morrison, Toni–Song of Solomon
Murasaki, Lady Shikibu–The Tale of Genji
Munro, Alice–Lives of Girls and Women
Murdoch, Iris–Severed Head
Naylor, Gloria–Mama Day
Niffenegger, Audrey–The Time Traveller’s Wife
Oates, Joyce Carol–We Were the Mulvaneys
O’Connor, Flannery–A Good Man is Hard to Find
Piercy, Marge–Woman on the Edge of Time
Picoult, Jodi–My Sister’s Keeper
Plath, Sylvia–The Bell Jar
Porter, Katharine Anne–Ship of Fools
Proulx, E. Annie–The Shipping News
Rand, Ayn–The Fountainhead
Ray, Rachel–365: No Repeats
Rhys, Jean–Wide Sargasso Sea
??Robinson, Marilynne–Housekeeping??
Rocha, Sharon–For Laci
Sebold, Alice–The Lovely Bones
Shelley, Mary–Frankenstein
Smith, Betty–A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Smith, Zadie–White Teeth
Spark, Muriel–The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spyri, Johanna–Heidi
Strout, Elizabeth–Amy and Isabelle
Steel, Danielle–The House
Tan, Amy–The Joy Luck Club
??Tannen, Deborah–You’re Wearing That?
Ulrich, Laurel–A Midwife’s Tale
Urquhart, Jane–Away
Walker, Alice–The Temple of My Familiar
Welty, Eudora–One Writer’s Beginnings
Wharton, Edith–Age of Innocence
Wilder, Laura Ingalls–Little House in the Big Woods
Wollstonecraft, Mary–A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Woolf, Virginia–A Room of One’s Own

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Thinking Out Loud – 10th Grade Reading List

5 Comments / Homeschool, Reading Lists /

**Originally posted in September 2005 and Edited on March 27, 2006**

We’ve made some deviations in the plan, as expected. Some good deviations, others not so good

Original plan:

  • Herland
  • Watership Down
  • Anthem
  • The Scarlett Letter (up next)
  • Jane Eyre
  • Clockwork Orange
  • The Good Earth
  • Gone With the Wind
  • Odd Girl Out

Added:

  • Persepolis – my mom insisted, she was bored, she read 1/4 and gave up
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s – good addition
  • Stupid White men – she got annoyed by “stupid white men” and put it down halfway
  • Night – great addition
  • Lion, Witch & Wardrobe – ok addition – she didn’t like it and I never did either, which is why she never read it when she was young
  • White Oleander – great for her, not necessarily a great educational choice
  • City of Beasts – good addtion, Allende for young adults

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