ramblings
Awesome cheap leather bound classics at Costco!!!
100 best children’s books of all-time via childrensbooksguide.com…see if your favorite made the cut :)
Reading Goal — 2013
So I’m hoping to do a solid year of primarily classics in 2013. I know this will of necessity knock my annual reading goal down tremendously. However, I would appreciate recommendations of books to read. I have already read all of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, much of Dumas, some Tolstoy, most of Hardy, etc. I prefer English lit and detest American lit. I would love to hear of books that are further off the beaten path to try for next year. Let me know what you’ve read and loved.
What shall I read next year?
"Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."
— Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint Exupery
"We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today."
