Tuesday, December 16, 2008

I am now participating in the Read Your Own Books Challenge 2009. All the books listed below are on my shelves, its time to get on with it.

http://readingwise.wordpress.com/ryob-2009/#comment-163
Another year is imminent, lets try again!

Classics I have yet to read but intend to in 2009
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
Moby Dick
David Copperfield
Madame Bovary
Anna Karenina
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Frankenstein
Villette

Future classic
Atonement

The Big Kahuna – to attempt again, to perhaps succeed this time
Ulysses

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Now known as The Day of the License Plate!!!!!!

Last Friday we cancelled our two charity license tags, took the tag off a vehicle in storage, and paid the money saved on a home store account that charges high interest on the revolving balance. From now on, any purchases that dont qualify for the interest deferred for a year plan must be paid for in cash. Goal: Obliterate the revolving balance on this card by 1/1/09. Actual completion date: 3/15/09.

Words to live by in the upcoming years (especially with the holiday season so close):

Re-use, Re-gift, Re-home, and Remodel.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Just joined up with the Classics Challenge! Must read Five Classics and One Bonus Classic-to-Be by December. My Five and One are:

madame bovary
david copperfield
moby dick
villette
main street

atonement

I have been trying to read three of these for some time (see thursday thirteen post below in 2007). Its time to just do it!

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Finished Winesburg, Ohio yesterday evening. A respected professor had recommended this book to me many years ago and I failed to see anything in it then. I see quite a bit in it now. Must look at some other Anderson work now. And look at other works from the same time to see it in its context as a work of art and cultural commentary. Am thinking Lewis Main Street and Sister Carrie would be good choices.

Friday, May 02, 2008

from Philip D. Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation: What we were reading in the Sixties. U GA Press, 1994, 0-8203-1787-x

Alpert, Richard (pseud. Baba Ram Dass)
Be Here Now, Remember
Anonymous
Go Ask Alice
Baldwin, James
The Fire Next Time
Blake, William
Poetry
Boston Women's Health Book Collective
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Brautigan, Richard
Trout Fishing in America
Brown, Claud
Manchild in the Promised Land
Brown, Dee
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Brown, Helen Gurley
Sex and the Single Girl
Brown, Norman O.
Life Against Death
Carson, Rachel
Silent Spring
Castaneda, Carlos
The Teachings of Don Juan
Cleaver, Eldridge
Soul on Ice
Dillard, Annie
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Fanon, Frantz
The Wretched of the Earth
Farina, Richard
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
Coney Island of the Mind
Friedan, Betty
The Feminine Mystique
Gibran, Kahlil
The Prophet
Ginsberg, Allen
Howl and other Poems
Golding, William
Lord of the Flies
Greenberg, Joanne (pseud. Hannah Green)
I Never Promised you a Rose Garden
Greer, Germaine
The Female Eunuch
Heinlein, Robert
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heller, Joseph
Catch-22
Herr, Michael
Dispatches
Hesse, Hermann
Steppenwolf
Hoffman, Abbie
Revolution for the Hell of It
Kerouac, Jack
On the Road
Kesey, Ken
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
"Letter from the Birmingham Jail"
Knowles, John
A Separate Peace
Kunen, James S.
The Strawberry Statement
Laing, R. D.
The Politics of Experience
Leary, Timothy
The Psychedelic Experience
Mailer, Norman
Armies of the Night
Malcolm X
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Marcuse, Herbert
One Dimensional Man
Millett, Kate
Sexual Politics

Mills, C. Wright
The Power Elite
Morgan, Robin, ed.
Sisterhood is Powerful
Pirsig, Robert
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Plath, Sylvia
The Bell Jar
Portola Institute
The Last Whole Earth Catalog
Pynchon, Thomas
The Crying of Lot 49
Reich, Charles
The Greening of America
Rubin, Jerry
Do It!
Salinger, J. D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Skinner, B. F.
Walden Two
Spock, Benjamin
Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
Thompson, Hunter S.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Thoreau, Henry David
"Civil Disobedience"
Tolkien, J. R. R.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse-Five
Watts, Alan
The Way of Zen
Webb, Charles
The Graduate
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
also
Roszak, Theodore
The Making of a Counter-Culture

How many of you read some of these in junior high and high schools back in the sixties and seventies and perhaps even in college? interesting to look back and see how much influence such texts thought to be so important at the time have had on our lives. Wolfe, Pynchon, Heller were all significant influences on me.

Bolds are ones that I read. Also Camus' The Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus. How odd to recall them after such a long time. Guess they made an impression!