Thursday, March 20, 2008

Back to the Books

Do you like booklists? Yeah, me too. Do you also like to cross off how many you've read? I thought so! You seem like the type.

Here's a few links for you:

Books you can't live without Not a bad list! I've read lots on here...I must have excellent taste. Either that or I'm a sheep. Baa.

101 Great Books for college-bound students That would be one well-read college student. Or, person in general.

Time's Complete List This is the kind of list that makes me feel really dumb. Although usually if I haven't heard of the book, I've at least heard of the author, and vice versa. Usually.

Modern Library's 100 Best Novels I read somewhere that these were voted on, and the cultists stuffed the "box", so that's how The Satanic Verses made it on there. Whew.

ALSO, here's a fun blog that I came across somehow. This girl, Sonya, photographs and interviews people she finds reading out and about in San Francisco. She's very unbiased in her interviews, and it's really interesting the stories people have. Plus, she updates VERY frequently. Check it out! People Reading

So here's how I keep track of what I've read. I choose a pretty journal, and on each page I make an entry of each book. Title, author, # of pages, brief synopsis, any language/sex/gore ('cause you tend to forget that stuff if you liked the book, and then you go and recommend it to some poor 7th grader....), grade level appropriateness, and then any other notes. If the movie version stunk, I'll put that there, or if I have a cool teaching idea, I'll stick that in too.

I also keep track of how many books I read each year. I like statistics. (In practice. NOT the class, just to clarify.) I noticed that you can totally tell which years I had my babies, just by looking at my book totals.

2000 - 55 books. This is the year I started subbing, and I would literally read a book in A day sometimes. I started journaling about my books that year because after a month I couldn't remember what I'd read. Just plain sick.

2001 - 33
2002- 26
2003- 17
2004-6
2005-17
2006-8
2007-16
2008- 10 so far.

Can you pick out the baby years? In case you're wondering, I primarily read while nursing or in the bathroom. I'm dedicated, I tell ya.

My favorite book of all time, all genres, is The Count of Monte Cristo. It's got it all...action, comedy (kind of), romance, intrigue...and the movie does not do it justice.

Of course, I have favorites within genres, too...fav play, The Glass Menagerie and Macbeth.
British lit, Jane Eyre and Emma. And Persuasion. Historical Fiction, The Red Tent. Mystery, And Then There Was None. Chick lit, Bridget Jones' Diary. Fantasy, the Harry Potter novels. Yes, all of them. I can SO do that - just TRY to stop me!

Do you have any favorites? Or just a favorite genre? I'm not too adventurous...I know what I like, and I stick to it! How about you?

6 comments:

Noel said...

The lists were interesting even though they were almost all fiction. The blog was unique which got me thinking about our family's reading vacations. A flavor from the 1990s can be seen at http://members.aol.com/NoelsHouse/NorShore.htm . In the 2000s, our two daughters join us.

I keep two lists of books. One is for the books read at the North Shore. _The World is Flat_ is a recent example. The second is books read for work which end up in my performance management documentation. A current read is _Competing on Analytics_. Both lists are heavily non-fiction. Noteable fiction would be Vilhelm Mobergs' "Emigrants tetrology" at the North Shore in the late 1990s.

Stacie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Stacie said...

I really like your journal idea. You're rubbing off on me Lyz! Also, how long do you think it would take you to read every book on that top 100 list?! I dare you ;)

Aaron said...

Just to clear the air: I can't imagine why "cultists" would stuff a ballot box for The Satanic Verses (a work of fiction that is about the life of Mohammed). It's a pretty well known novel, not an apocryphal tome of satanic liturgies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_(novel)

Aaron said...

On the other hand, the top two books on that list are by Ayn Rand, so who knows what kind of freaks voted on it.

Anonymous said...

I'll have to read Monte Cristo since I loved the movie. Thanks for the recommendation! My most recent favorite is Survival of the Sickest...if you're looking for some non-fiction. Aneesh and I had fun discussing it.

Steph