I’ve had my booklist for next year building quite rapidly over the last few months. As cliche as it sounds, there really are so many books I want to read! It’s the joy and curse of reading.
There’s so much enjoyment in reading through discovery and experience, then extend that to an endless amount of topics and the potential of books to read is limitless!
My goal is to read a few books that have been sitting on my shelf awhile, return to some favorites, and focus on women’s issues. It’s quite extensive (and a bit daunting) and I’m pretty confident I won’t get to all of them. These are just some of the books that have caught my eye over the last year.
Here’s where my list stands as of now:
Fiction
The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Eight Cousins, Lousia May Alcott
The Making of a Marchioness, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Opposite of Love, Julie Buxbaum
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
1984, George Orwell
A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Nonfiction
A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit
Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect & Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, Wendy Shalit
The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued, Ann Crittenden
What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, Danielle Crittenden
The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti
Unprotected, Miriam Grossman
Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau
The Witch Hunts: A History of Witch Persecutions in Europe & North America, Robert Thurston
Biography/Memoir
George Mueller
Children/Youth
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
Christian Nonfiction
The Feminist Mistake: The Radical Impact of Feminism on Church & Culture, Mary Kassian
This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence, John Piper
Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists, Collin Hansen
“Favorites” in Review
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Sea of Memory, Erri de Luca
The Princess, Lori Wick
I’m reading Brave New World now and 1984 is in my top 5 of all time. I would suggest Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott for non-fiction, Watership Down by Richard Adams for fiction, and The Fidelity of Betrayal by Peter Rollins for religious (non-)fiction.
All of them are great reads — Ian
Ooh, I see we have some overlaps for reading ’10. Exciting! Here’s my list if you want to take a peak:
http://thebluebirdandthemountain.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-classics-book-club-goals.html
Also, I do “Twice-a-Month” book reviews as well, if you care to check them out:
http://thebluebirdandthemountain.blogspot.com/search/label/Book%20Reviews