Reread November

*Edit (11/11/12): So I got four books into this challenged and realized I wasn't going to be able to do it. There are too many books I'm dying to read just sitting on my shelf and I'm not interested enough in these rereads to read them as quickly as I would have liked to. So instead, I'm going to start rereading one book every month from now on. You'll see more of this in the future, but that's my compromise. This way I don't feel like a complete idiot for proposing this idea. Well, I'd better go read The King of Attolia now . . . 

I literally have thirty-nine books overflowing a specifically designated shelf and continuing atop my barely used television set in my room right now that I either own or have checked out of the library. These are all books that I haven't yet read and am eagerly awaiting to read.

Regardless of that fact, and the fact that many of those library books will have to be returned within the month, I've decided to declare this month "Reread November."

In other words, I've been itching to reread some old (and not so old) favorites of mine, but I've been so busy reading all my new ones that they've been neglected and it's about time I cracked open their spines once again.

So I've decided to set aside ten books of my choice that I have already read and would like to read again during the month of November. Hopefully, these won't be the only books I read this month (because I still have quite a lot to read if I want to reach 100 books this year), but I'd like to finish these first. I figured that setting a time aside to reread them would encourage me to do just that.

These are my choices:
1. Or Give Me Death by Ann Rinaldi
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
4. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
5. Dovey Coe by Frances O'Roark Dowell
6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
7. Emma by Jane Austen
8. Paper Towns by John Green
9. Girl in a Cage by Jane Yolen & Robert J. Harris
10. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

I won't read them in any particular order, but I'm more than excited about getting started on these.

Are you rereading any books this month? If so, I'd love to hear which ones you chose and why.

Patterning Works

I'm currently in the midst of reading Book by Book by Michael Dirda, basically a book written about the importance of reading and how books and learning change our lives. Look forward to the review of it soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share a particularly interesting passage at the beginning of Dirda's book. It is essentially a list of books one ought to read in order to have a good grasp of world literature and a firm foundation in one's reading.

I have already read some of these, but there are plenty here that I haven't arrived at just yet. Rest assured, they are now being taken into consideration when it comes to books I need to read in the near future.

Anyway, here's the passage. You may do with it what you will:

What should a person know of the world's literature? It has always seemed obvious to me that the great patterning works ought to lie at the heart of any structured reading program. By "patterning works" I mean those that later authors regularly build on, allude to, work against. There aren't that many of these key books, and they aren't all obvious classics. Here's a roughly chronological short list of those that the diligent might read through in a year or two. For such famous works you can hardly go wrong with any good modern editions, though for the Bible the Authorized, or King James, Version is the one that has most influenced the diction and imagery of English Prose.

The Bible (Old and New Testament)

Bulfinch's Mythology (or any other accounts of the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths)

 Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey

Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

Dante, Inferno

The Arabian Nights

Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur (tales of King Arthur and his knights)

Shakespeare's major plays, especially Hamlet, Henry IV, Part One, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest

Cervantes, Don Quixote

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen

Any substantial collection of the world's major folktales

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes