Sunday, December 27, 2009

Bookshelf Purge Challenge

OVERVIEW
If you're an avid reader, you may find you have more books than shelves. There are the books you've read and loved, but most of your shelves are likely filled with books you haven't read--gifts, recommendations, books that seemed interesting, books you want to read but haven't had time. If you find you acquire books far faster than you read, this challenge will help you clear out your shelves and make room for more books!

WHAT TO DO
The method is how book editors evaluate fiction submissions. You read the first 50 pages. If the book holds your attention and you're invested in the story and characters, keep reading. Give yourself permission to not finish a book if you lose interest at any time. In some cases, you may not even make it to 50 pages, or you may be willing to give it more of a chance to interest you. But generally, if a book hasn't hooked you by page 50, it's not going to. If you want to find out what happens without reading the whole book, read a few pages in the middle, and the end. If you want to skim, read the first few words of every paragraph to get the gist of it.

Set yourself a goal of a book a week. Those books that don't hold your interest can go in a box to get rid of.  You can also use those environmentally friendly shopping bags which are large and generally sturdy enough to carry a lot of books. You can find them for about $1 at most grocery stores and big box retailers (WalMart, Target, etc.) When you've filled a box or bag, you can donate them to a local shelter or charity like Goodwill (http://locator.goodwill.org/), or to your library (libraries often sell book donations to raise funds for new acquisitions).  A local school may be interested in children's, young adult, or classic books--call ahead to find out if the school takes donations and what kind.

You can also search on line for local used bookstores, where you can sell or more often trade books in for store credit. You may want to call ahead as some stores have specific hours for when you can bring books in, or may not be acquiring certain kinds of books. Granted, this means refilling the shelves, but you'll walk out with fewer books than you brought in if you limit yourself to only using the store credit.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

The Classics Challenge

OVERVIEW
This is one of the challenges I'm doing for 2010, along with some of my friends and family. Below is a list of 150 novels, novellas, short story collections, epic poems, and plays. All of these works are considered classics and were published about 50 years ago or more. There is only one book listed per author, so feel free to substitute a different book by the same author, or even add an author you believe should have been included. I'm aware that a few of these books are controversial, some books are classics within a genre, others have cultural relevance. It's up to you to decide what books suit you best.

WHAT TO DO
Copy or print this list and mark which books you've read. Then choose ten books you haven't read to read this year. If you think 10 books is unrealistic for you (or not challenging enough) feel free to adjust the number and time period (one book from this list in the next three months, for instance).

If you have any friends or family members who want to join you, I'd suggest marking any books you'd be open to reading, then comparing lists to see which you have in common. There are quite a few children's classics if you want to try this with your kids. You also might choose to only read a few books together instead of all ten, and then read the rest individually.

THE LIST
1. Aesop’s Fables
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. A Death in the Family - James Agee
4. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
5. Fairy Tales - Hans Christian Andersen
6. Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
7. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
8. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
9. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
10. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac
11. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
12. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
13. The Mandarins - Simone de Beauvoir
14. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
15. Beowulf
16. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
19. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
20. Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
21. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
22. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
23. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
24. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carre
25. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
26. My Antonia – Willa Cather
27. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
28. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
29. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
30. The Seagull - Anton Chekhov
31. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
32. Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie
33. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
36. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
37. The Enormous Room – e. e. cummings
38. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
39. Inferno - Dante
40. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
41. The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
42. Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
43. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
44. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
45. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
46. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
47. Camille – Alexander Dumas fils.
48. Middlemarch - George Eliot
49. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
50. Medea - Euripedes
51. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
52. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
53. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
54. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
55. The Good Soldier – Ford Maddox Ford
56. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
57. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
58. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
59. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
60. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
61. Riders of the Purple Range – Zane Grey
62. Grimm's Fairy Tales - Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
63. She – H. Rider Haggard
64. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
65. A Raisin in the Sun  - Lorraine Hansberry
66. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
67. Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings - Joel Chandler Harris
68. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
69. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
70. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
71. Cabbages and Kings - O. Henry
72. The Odyssey – Homer
73. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
74. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
75. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
76. A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
77. Daisy Miller – Henry James
78. From Here to Eternity – James Jones
79. Ulysses - James Joyce
80. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
81. Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
83. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
84. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
85. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
86. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
87. The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
88. Le Morte d'Arthur - Thomas Malory
89. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
90. Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
91. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
92. Selected Short Stories - Guy de Maupassant
93. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
94. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
95. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
96. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
97. Tales of the South Pacific - James Michener
98. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
99. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
100. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
101. Tartuffe - Molière
102. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
103. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
104. A Good Man Is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
105. Mourning Becomes Electra - Eugene O'Neill
106. One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. Arabian Nights)
107. The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy
108. Animal Farm - George Orwell
109. Selected Short Stories - Edgar Allan Poe
110. The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter - Katherine Anne Porter
111. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
112. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
113. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
114. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
115. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
116. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
117. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
118. Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
119. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
120. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
121. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
122. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
123. Oedipus Rex - Sophocles
124. The Faerie Queene - Edmund Spenser
125. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
126. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
127. Dracula - Bram Stoker
128. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
129. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
130. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
131. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
132. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
133. Lady Anna - Anthony Trollope
134. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
135. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
136. The City and the Pillar – Gore Vidal
137. Candide - Voltaire
138. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
139. All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren
140. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
141. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
142. A Curtain of Green - Eudora Welty
143. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
144. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
145. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
146. Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
147. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
148. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
149. Native Son - Richard Wright
150. Germinal - Emile Zola

Introduction

I wanted to create a place to encourage people to read more books, and share their passion for reading. As a book editor for over ten years, I see every day how an idea can become a proposal, a manuscript, a finished book, and ultimately change a reader's life. Books have the ability to meaningfully impact us in a way other media generally doesn't. Most books can't be finished in two hours like a movie--you have to take more time and absorb them. Without a set and actors, you customize your own vision of what the characters look like, you make them personal to you. My authors sometimes forward me letters from readers who identify with the characters in a way that gives them solace, are inspired by a memoir to change their own lives, or manage to reach a personal goal through the author's guidance and advice. A good genre novel can help you wind down and escape for a few hours each night, and a travel narrative can take you to a place you've never been.
This blog isn't about me. It's about reading, but I will share some of ways I motivated myself to spend more time reading, finally getting around to the classics I'd never read in school, exploring genres I'd never tried, discovering new favorite authors, or just making room on my shelves for new books by reading (and donating) the ones I had. If you have a passion for reading, some of these motivations may sound familiar. For me, it helps to have a clearly defined goal to work toward (I can't tell you how many business/motivation/self-help books I've seen that have setting a goal as the foundation for achievement). I'm going to post reading challenges here that I've tried, or would like to try. I'll also offer reading lists that may inspire you.
Remember, this is about you. While I'm making suggestions, set your own goal that will be a good challenge for you. If you feel like it's too hard or too easy, or you lose interest in the challenge, don't give up--think what adjustments you need to make it work. You might want to invite friends or family to join you (the interest of my own friends and family is what inspired this blog), or to select a challenge of their own.
My goal is to create a community space for those who like to read. I cannot encourage you strongly enough to participate here. If you think I've left a book off a list, add a comment. If you want to share your progress toward whatever goal you choose, do so regularly. If you have a variation or a new challenge you want to try, by all means share it--it may inspire others to try. If you discovered a new author you love, found a classic surprisingly easy to read (or way too hard), or are looking for recommendations, let us know. The act of reading may be solitary, but the passion for reading is something we share (I know this, because if you didn't care about reading, you wouldn't have read this far.) And now, let's get to the books!