reading list 2005

New books: 57 ( 12,843 pgs )

Longest book: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (652 pgs)
Shortest book: The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (83 pgs)
Oldest book: Hamlet (1601)
Newest book: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (July 2005)
Best book: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Best children’s/YA book: The Wouldbegoods
Worst book: Through the Ice
Most disappointing book: The Dogs of Babel

Cathy Day, The Circus in Winter
Wendelin Van Draanen, Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief
Polly Horvath, Everything on a Waffle
Piers Anthony with Robert Kornwise, Through the Ice
Pat O’shea, The Hounds of the Morrigan
Alexander Mccall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods
Kate Dicamillo, The Tale of Desperaux
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, The Great Chicken Debacle
Carl Hiaasen, Hoot
Roald Dahl, Matilda
Michael A. Stackpole, The Grand Crusade
Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons
Diane Wynne Jones, Cart and Cwidder
Louis L’amour, Milo Talon
Wendelin Van Draanen, Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary
Sharon Creech, Ruby Holler
Ema Mclaughlin & Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries: A Novel
Jerry Spinelli, Wringer
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Jerry Spinelli, Loser
Kevin Henkes, Olive’s Ocean
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
P.G. Wodehouse, Three Men and A Maid
Louis Sachar, The Boy Who Lost His Face
Wendelin Van Draanen, Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
E. Nesbit, Five Children and It
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Blue Balliett, Chasing Vermeer
Louise Rennison, Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging
Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
Megan Mcdonald, Judy Moody
Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue
Jeanne Duprau, The City of Ember
Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Dodi Smith, I Capture the Castle
Carlo Collodi, Pinnochio
Mark Haddon, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel
Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand
Judith Viorst, The Tenth Good Thing About Barney
Chris Van Allsburg, The Wreck of the Zephyr
Brock Cole, Fair Monaco
Daniel Pinkwater, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
Sharon Creech, Love That Dog
Jon J Muth, Zen Shorts
Peter H. Reynolds, The Dot
Esphyr Slobodinka, Caps For Sale
Chris Van Allsburg, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
Ruth Stiles Gannett, My Father’s Dragon
Russell Hoban, A Birthday for Frances

Previous: 2004

satisfaction

yes, that about sums it up. satisfaction.

well over a year and a half ago, when I first went out to byu for my sophomore year, I read about 8 books in one month. the weather was pleasant, my homework load was light, and I enjoyed devouring books like that. quite a few quotes got written down, but I wasn’t smart enough back then to also write down where I found them. five or six months later I found the papers I wrote the quotes down on, and went back to figure out the sources. I got all but one: “I felt sore, as though something inside me had been bruised.”

my suspicion was that it came from a madeleine l’engle book — specifically, one of the austins series, since it was first-person. I know a wrinkle in time well enough to rule that out, in case it was a spoken line instead of narrative like I thought. so I re-read troubling a star and a ring of endless light, without finding the quote. later I bought a copy of a ring of endless light because I enjoyed it so much, and I’ve read it at least three times since then. well… last night I was reading it again, and lo and behold, there on page 180, what do you think it says? yep. “I felt sore, as though something inside me had been bruised.” how I managed to miss it so many times, I’m not sure. but, satisfaction at last!

another satisfaction is finally finding a cute black shirt that fits me. I loved the one I had, but it was getting rather worn out. besides, this was at ross, where you can dress for less. so they say.

third: silk pajama bottoms at target. holy hannah. talk about comfortable. it makes me almost sorry that I’m the only one who gets to enjoy me wearing them. it could be so pleasant for someone else, too. but it will have to wait.

fourth: no work to bring home for quite a while. hallelujah!

and fifth: today marks exactly 3 months until jarom leaves korea. while that does terrify me exceedingly, I’m also super excited to see him again after so long. there’s that whole thing about making him glad he came home. yeah, he’ll be very glad if my plan works out. mwahaha.

so that’s that. work is going… well, let’s just say it’s going. the plan is for pscu folks to finish onsite today — they actually should be leaving (or already left) as I write this — and someone will go down there tomorrow to make sure all the files get transferred. if adam has more than one person go, he’d better have a good reason for it. I can’t think of any need to do that. but, whatever. I’m new huh? maybe I should just keep quiet.

Reading List for a Lifetime

Compiled by Arthur Henry King. Taken from Arm the Children. Names following the title are recommended translators or editors.

The standard works
Homer, The Iliad (Richmond A. Lattimore)
The Odyssey (Emile V. Rieu)
The Bhagavad-Gita (Christopher Isherwood)
Aeschylus, Aeschylus I—Oresteia (Richmond A. Lattimore)
Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle (Dudley Fitts, Robert Fitzgerald)
Plato, Phaedo
The Republic
Euripedes, Euripedes One (Richmond A. Lattimore)
Herodotus, The Persian Wars (George Rawlinson)
Virgil, The Aeneid (John Dryden or Robert Fitzgerald)
Livy, The Early History of Rome
Josephus, The Jewish War
Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Lives of the Noble Romans (ed. Edmund Fuller)
Eusebius, The Essential Eusebius
Augustine, The City of God
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Dante, The Divine Comedy (John D. Sinclair or Dorothy L. Sayers)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Nevill Coghill)
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Othello
Measure for Measure
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Walter Starkie)
René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Wollaston)
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Samson Agonistes
George Fox, Journal (ed. Rufus M. Jones)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Jean Baptiste Racine, Athaliah
Phaedra
Molière, Tartuffe
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Precious Damsels
The Misanthrope (Morris Bishop or Kenneth Muir)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Antoine Prévost, Manon Lescaut
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Part I)
Clarissa
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Thomas Nugent)
Voltaire, Candide
James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
John Wollman, Journal
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, II (Walter Kaufmann or Charles E. Passage)
Wilhelm Meister
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Books I & II)
John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers (ed. A. Hacker)
John Keats, Letters (ed. Robert Gittings)
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Emma
Sendhal, The Red and the Black
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
The Sickness unto Death (Walter Lowrie)
Honoré de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet
Karl Marx, Early Writings
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Civil Disobedience
Parley P. Pratt, Autobiography
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
Great Expectations
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (Robert Baldick)
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Rosemary Edmonds)
Anna Karenina
Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Painted Firs and Other Stories
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Walter Kaufmann)
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt (Michael Meyer)
Rosmersholm
Ghosts
Hedda Gabler
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Henry James, The Ambassadors
What Maisie Knew
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
The Seagull
Uncle Vanya
The Three Sisters (David Magarshack)
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (James Strachey)
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Joseph and His Brothers
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (C.K. Scott Moncrieff)
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
The Glass Bead Game (chapter 7)
George Santayana, The Last Puritan
Montaigne, Essays (John Florio)