Reading Update

I'm still on my quest to read all of the books listed in the lists I linked to here. I'm making slow but steady progress, and am discovering some great books along the way. Here, partly in case you care and partly because I want to keep track for myself, are the ones I have read so far.

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
My Antonia, by Willa Cather

Funny, I didn't realize until I wrote those down that all of them so far have been written by women. Interesting. I enjoyed all of these books, which gives me great hope for the rest of the ones on those lists. Of the five I've finished so far, I think To Kill a Mockingbird was probably my favorite, and Middlemarch was the hardest to read by far. The story isn't hard to understand, but the language is old fashioned and harder to get through. I enjoyed it, though.

On deck to be read next:

Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence (there goes my streak of women writers)
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

This quest is going to take me years - even though there are overlaps on some of the lists, there are still hundreds of books listed. It's a good quest, though, and I look forward to every single book I'll encounter along the way. Although I have to say I may skip a couple, namely Schindler's List, because I saw the movie and it depressed me so much that I don't know if I can take the book, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, because they just don't interest me at all. I don't know - I might make myself try with that one, though. Millions of people loved them, so they can't be bad, even though I didn't find the first movie at all interesting, and never saw the other two. It will be put off until the end, though, so I don't have to think about it for a long time.

I feel like I should mention here, too, that most of these books are being taken out of the library, but I'm also reading some of them online - go to www.gutenberg.org to check out their collection. They only seem to have older books, most likely because of copyright issues, but there are a lot of older books on these lists, so it's working out for me. It's a great resource if you don't want to purchase the books or make a trip to the library.