Reading

Finished Uncle Tom's Cabin on Friday. Loved every single page of it and cried. A lot.

Started The Glass Castle Sunday and finished it Monday. Seriously awesome, amazing book. Read it. Please?

I've got Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Unholy War:Terror in the Name of Islam next on my list. Anyone want to read a Mark Twain classic with me??

Reading

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I'm reading it here.

and

Touching Stars by Emilie Richards

3 down, 41 to go!

I love reading, but my bookshelves are stocked with lots of great fluffy fiction. You know, stuff that doesn't have a lot of substance. I really enjoy fiction since it doesn't require a lot of thinking, you just sink yourself in the pages for a couple hours and emerge feeling a little dumber. Teehee! That's good reading!

But I also really like reading all kinds of stuff. I've always wanted to read the classics, so I'm challenging myself to read the following classic titles in the next year. I'm also planning on hiring a full time nanny so I can actually sit and enjoy these wonderful works. Ha, wouldn't that be nice? No, it will certainly take a huge investment of time, but I am so ready to put it in.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I read this book in 8th grade and am very interested in reading it again to see how much more I get from it!)
by Mark Twain

All Quiet on the Western Front (Read this one in 11th grade honors, which caused quite an uproar among parents. It was a little mature and violent for school.)
by Erich Maria Remarque

Beloved
by Toni Morrison

The Best Short Stories
by O. Henry

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

The Call of the Wild
by Jack London

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye (Read it in maybe 7th grade? Don't remember a thing about it!)
by J.D. Salinger

The Complete Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle

Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Cry, the Beloved Country
by Alan Paton

Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes

Ethan Frome (Read and studied an excerpt in 9th grade)
by Edith Wharton

Gone with the Wind (Studied in 10th grade, really loved this book!)
by Margaret Mitchell

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby (Really enjoyed too. This was 11th grade honors English also!)
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison

Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte

Little Women
Louisa May Alcott

Lord of the Flies (8th grade and again in 12th grade)
by William Golding

Moby Dick (Read and studied excerpts in high school)
by Herman Melville

My Antonia
by Willa Cather

Native Son
by Richard Wright

Nineteen Eighty Four (Read in 10th grade, don't remember much about it!)
by George Orwell

Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham

The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway

Pride and Prejudice (Semi read in 8th grade)
by Jane Austen

The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe

The Scarlet Letter (Studied in 11th grade English)
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Separate Peace
by John Knowles

Silas Marner
by George Eliot

The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

The Stranger
by Albert Camus

A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens

Tales
by Edgar Allan Poe

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston

To Kill a Mockingbird (12th grade English)
by Harper Lee

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe

War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy

Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson

Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte

A sure sign of our technological advances, you can read some of these classics online. A couple of good sites are Life Optimizer, Literature.org and Sparknotes. Not to mention the local library.

So (*rubbing my hands together in anticipation*) anyone want to join me? Want to have an online classic literature reading club? I know, try to quiet your enthusiastic squeals, it sounds wildly exciting right? *wink*