Shame!

As an avid reader, I was once again confronted with evidence that my reading list is quite shallow. I have not plunged very deeply into the waters of classic literature. My required reading from school has left me shockingly short of the standard European texts (not to mention the fact that I rarely read, only scanned my required texts).

This may surprise some of you, but I never really read books--and certainly never finished them--until the spring of my senior year in college. It was then that I became fascinated by words and books and learning. Since then, I have always had something (or several things) that I am actively reading--and I have developed a great interest in history. But I have never caught up on the classics, having instead invested too many hours in the collected Alex Cross oeuvre (a middling James Patterson character).

I was referred yesterday to a list of The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written and found I have only read 10. Two of these, I'm not even sure that I've read from cover to cover (Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, but I've certainly seen them enough for this to count). Still, I promise to read these two over again. Actually, I probably own 30 of the books on this list.

So today I am challenging myself--not to read every book on the list (I'm a realist), but to reach the point that I've read at least 40 of them--and soon. Maybe I'll give myself three years, and see where I'm at. Who knows? Maybe I'll want to keep on reading all the way through. I'm sure that there are other lists that disagree with some of these choices (no To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby?).

And watch for a future post containing my greatest 100 reads so far...

Books I've Read From "The Greatest 100":
#7  A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
#11 The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan)
#20 The Sea Wolf (Jack London)
#34 Animal Farm (George Orwell)
#35 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
#37 Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
#54 Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
#57 Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
#63 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
#98 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

Comments

[Carp]

I have read 19 from the list. Here is my group:

Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Mobt Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
The Odyssey by Homer
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Candide by Voltaire
Oedipus The King by Sophocles
The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
The Iliad by Homer
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Aesop's Fables by Aesop
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare
Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Republic by Plato
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain