Tag: book lists

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? January Report

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In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?

Well, unlike Simon, who seems to have a huge library of unread books from just about every decade, I have just been reading through my pile, and my worst fears are being justified. Just in the first weeks, I read seven books written in 2023! I had to decide whether, on my page for keeping track, I would list just one book per year or go ahead and list every book I read for that year, and I decided to do the latter, because the former was just too frustrating. I also had to decide, because my first few book reviews for the year were for ones I read in 2023, whether to list those. I decided to do that even though it might seem like cheating, because it’s unlikely that I am going to meet this challenge at the rate I am going. And in any case, by the end of the year, I won’t have posted reviews of the books I read towards the end of the year yet.

I will summarize my progress so far by decade. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: 4 books (however, 3 of them are for 1934—I don’t know how I did that)
  • 1935-1944: 1 book
  • 1945-1954: 1 book
  • 1955-1964: 2 books
  • 1965-1974: 2 books
  • 1975-1984: 1 book
  • 1985-1994: 0 books
  • 1995–2004: 0 books
  • 2005-2014: 2 books
  • 2015-2024: 16 books, but 7 of them are from 2023

So, although Simon said the first half of the year you could just plug in the years and later begin to purposefully look for books for the years you don’t have, I may have to come up with a plan that is more specific sooner, because random reading doesn’t seem to be working well for me.

I’ll post this report each month, so you can see how I’m doing.

12th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

Today I’ve been blogging for twelve years, which means it’s time for my anniversary post, where I list my top 10 books of this year of blogging. This year I found it much more difficult to pick this list than in previous years. Working from my Best of Ten list, I had several cases of more than one book by the same author that I had to choose between. I also didn’t have as many books that I was absolutely sure would end up in my top ten for the year as I usually do. (When I’m sure, I mark them in purple on my list.)

Of the books I’ve chosen, six are historical novels, three are vague as to time, and only one is clearly contemporary, but harks back to the 1970s (which some of us can remember). Eight are by women. This is an international group of novels. I’ve chosen books set in far northern Canada, islands off the coast of Denmark and in the Moluccas, France, Iceland, Michigan, Texas, and Ireland. My choices are by Canadian, Danish, American, Icelandic, Indo-European, French, and Irish authors. Seven of the books were written relatively recently, while three are older books. This year, all are novels.

So, in the order in which they appeared on my blog, here are my top ten books of the year:

  1. The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
  2. The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen
  3. The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer
  4. Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
  5. The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût
  6. News of the World by Paulette Jiles
  7. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  8. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
  9. The Child and the River by Henri Bosco
  10. Foster by Claire Keegan

Classics Club Spin #36!

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It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. What’s it all about? Members of the Classics Club select 20 books from their Classics Club lists (here’s mine) and list them by number on their blogs before Sunday, January 21. On that day, a spin number is selected by the club, and that number determines which book on the list the member will read by the spin deadline, which is Sunday, March 3. I am always ready to play, so here is my list:

  1. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
  2. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  3. The Prophet’s Mantle by E. Nesbit
  4. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  5. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  6. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  7. The Book of Dede Korkut by Anonymous
  8. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton
  9. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  11. The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos
  12. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  13. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  14. Merkland, A Story of Scottish Life by Margaret Oliphant
  15. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  16. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  17. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  18. Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe
  19. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
  20. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton

I Insanely Decide to Join the Century of Books Challenge

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Last Wednesday, Simon Thomas put up a Century of Books challenge, in which he selects 100 years and attempts to read a book published in each of those years. This time, he selected 1925-2024. I have insanely decided to join him, even though this challenge may determine 2/3 of my reading for the year.

As if I’m not doing enough challenges. We’ll see how I do! I’ll post a link under my Projects tab so you can watch my progress.

What’s Your First Book This Year?

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I frankly stole this idea from Book Journey after reading about it on This Reading Life. She has folks submit photos of themselves holding the first book they’re reading for 2024. A really cute idea. I couldn’t submit my photo, because my flip-around feature on my very old phone doesn’t work anymore, but I sent her a picture of the book cover for my first book, which is Homestead by Melinda Moustakis.

I see now as I look back at Book Journey’s original post that I missed the deadline, because she asks people to submit their first books between December 17 and 31. But I’m not that good a planner, so I would have had to know about this on December 31, which was when I started this book, and I didn’t see Brona’s post until today.

So, just for fun, for all you nonplanners like me, what was your first book to read in 2024? Are you still reading it, or have you already finished?

Nonfiction November: Week Five

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This week’s host is Hopewell’s Public Library of Life, and the theme is New to my TBR:

It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book!

I haven’t participated in this event before, and I am not a big nonfiction reader, but I got a lot of ideas during the month for further nonfiction reading. Here are the nonfiction books mentioned this month that piqued my interest. I’m just dividing these up by weeks to give me a little space between cover images.

Books from Week Two

The theme for Week Two was what attracts you to a book, so a lot of people were just showing interesting covers. But even though I don’t think I use covers to attract me to nonfiction books generally, these made me look at a few books more carefully.

I saw A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders posted on She Seek’s Nonfiction‘s page during week two. It sounds right up my alley, and it has a beautiful cover. I hadn’t heard of it before.

Entering the Enchanted Castle had the cover of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn on the post for Week Two. That reminded me that one of my best friends told me about the book, so I put it on my TBR. And again, what a great cover!

I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice what’s going on in our political arena, so when Silver Button Books put the cover of Cultish by Amanda Montell up in Week Two, I immediately added it to my TBR.

Books from Week Three

The theme for Week Three was pairing a nonfiction and fiction book. I admit that in a few cases, the fiction book looked more interesting to me than the nonfiction. However, here were four nonfiction books that struck my interest.

The cover of Shy Love Smiles and Acid Drops that Whispering Gums listed for Week Three as well as its subject matter made me put it right on my TBR. OK, this time I admit picking a nonfiction book for its cover.

Books Please featured a memoir called The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell for Week Three, and as I love the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint and have read some fiction by Faviell, I’m definitely putting this one on my TBR.

I love Amitav Ghosh, and I was unaware of the nonfiction book he’d written, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis until I saw it on Unsolicited Feedback‘s post.

Entering the Enchanted Castle listed The Wild Silence, also by Raynor Winn, and I have to read it because of the cover and because it’s about Iceland.

Books from Week Four

For some reason many of the participants’ choices for Week Four weren’t grabbing me. The theme was Worldview Shapers, and maybe it was because some of participants didn’t really explain much about their choices but just posted their covers. Many of the participants posted several books on one subject, so I felt a little overwhelmed to pick one of them, even if I was interested in it, as I was by the holocaust books and the ones on the aboriginal experience, for example. In any case, Shoe’s Seeds and Stories selected the graphic nonfiction book Ducks by Kate Beaton, which I was already planning to read and in fact have in my pile right now.

Nonfiction November: Week Four

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

This week’s host is She Seeks Nonfiction, and the theme is Worldview Shapers:

One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone?

I can’t answer this one with just one book, and I can think of a few books that I read before blogging that made me see things differently. However, I’ll stick mostly to ones that I have reviewed on this blog.

One was a book recommended by my brother called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan, an acclaimed religious scholar. Aslan’s goal was to try to find as much evidence as possible about the man Jesus aside from the religious claims. In other words, the historical record. What he found was that most of what we think we know about his life is myth, created by the gospel writers years after his death to further the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.

On the subject of religion, another book that affected me profoundly before I started the blog was Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, about the beliefs and behavior of some fringe apostolic Mormon groups.

Cover for Killers of the Flower Moon

A book that might be popular again now that told me something I didn’t know about from history is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which profoundly shocked me when I read it four years ago. As most of you probably know, it’s about members of the wealthy Osage tribe who were murdered by their guardians (the government deeming they were not able to look after their own interests) or white family members in order to get claims to their share of the oil money. The movie that is out now by Martin Scorsese is excellent.

Cover for Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman explains the results of years of scientific experiments that show that most of our decisions are made by our unconscious rather than our conscious mind. This was an entertaining book full of intellectual surprises and little exercises that you can try yourself that show the profound implications of how we make our decisions.

I was aware that DDT was banned as a result of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring, but her book about the poisons that we still use every day in agriculture and other industries made me realize why the world seems to be dying of cancer. This book may have been written in 1962, but it still needs to be paid attention to. I think everyone should read it.

Cover for The Omnivore's Dilemma

Finally, for me personally, the first book I ever reviewed on this blog was revelatory. That is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, about the foods we eat and how our basis in corn and soy is not really good for us. I was even more profoundly affected by his In Defense of Food, but I read it before starting this blog.