Thank God for Books...

So in a world that seems to be falling apart, and where people are drawing themselves further and further away from each other from the help of technology, it's good to know that one universal love that most people have for books still exists. I swear if the future ever becomes a place where all the fundamentalist end up burning all the books or censoring them, it would be a world I would quickly remove myself from by any means possible. And I mean VERY quickly. Because I honestly couldn't live without books. They are my escape and my connection to the minds of some very brilliant people. If I could only write half as well as my favorite writers I would be truly happy..

But anyway, this year I have read several wonderful books. Of course I've always loved reading, but after Olivia was born it kind of took a backseat, but now that she is older I am trying to consume as much literature as I possibly can. So I'm trying to set a goal this year (a small one) to read at least 40 of the classics (and some newer ones if they strike my fancy) by the end of the year. I'm sure I can exceed that but it's just a minimum I've set. Plus there are like a million more books I want to list but I'll just start with this for now. Now when I was in college I read a ton of the classics (mostly the Greek stuff) but because of what I've done to my brain over the years I've forgotten most of the details and want to re-read all of them. So I've made of list of the books I plan to read along with my own personal favorite books that I believe everyone should read before they expire to the big library in the sky..

Goal Books (to read and re-read):
1. The Divine Comedies by Dante Alighieri
2. Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus
Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles
Hippolytus & The Bacchæ of Euripides
The Frogs of Aristophanes
3. Æneid, by Vergil
4. Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes
5. Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
6. The Odyssey by Homer
7. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
9. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
10. In Cold Blood by Truman Copete
11. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
12. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
13. The Communist Manifesto by Carl Marx
14. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
16. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
17. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
18. To Kill a Mockinbird by Harper Lee
19. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
20. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
21. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
22. The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemmingway
23. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
25. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
26. The Picture of Dorain Grey by Oscar Wilde
27. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
28. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
29. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
30.Take it or Leave it by Raymond Federman
31. Going Native by Stephen Wright
32. Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowery
33. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
34.Crash by J. G Ballard
35. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
36. Native Son by Richard Wright
37. Memoirs of A Geisha by Arthur Golden
38. Go Ask Alice by Annonymous
39. Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein
40. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

My Personal "must-reads" that I love:
1. The Dark Tower #1-7 by Stephen King
2. Night by Elie Weisel
3. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
4. The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath
5. Poems by Dorathy Parker
6. The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills by Charles Buckowski
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
8. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
9. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
10. Naked Lunch by William Burrows
11. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
12. The Haindmaid's Tale by Margerate Attwood
13. Beasts by Joyce Carol Oats
14. The Story of O by Pauline Reage (for mature audiences only....very mature)
15. Justine by the Marquise De Sade (again for very mature audiences)
16. Metamorphasis by Franz Kafka
17. 1984 by George Orwell
18. Poems by Edger Allen Poe
19. Short stories by Raymon Carver
20. Dracula by Bram Stoker
21. Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
22. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
23. The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum (most effed up book i've ever read in my life)
24. The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff
25. Disco Bloodbath by James St. James
26. The Art of Racing in the Rain my Garth Stein
27. Les Miserable by Victor Hugo
28. The Golden Compass Trilogy by Phillipe Pullman
29. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Sallanger
30. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
31. The Witch and Vampire Books by Anne Rice

Now I know there are SO MANY more but right now I cannot think of them! *frustrating*

Well I hope I meet my goal. I really can't wait to read them all. I'm the type of person who gets super super excited when I'm about to start a new book. Seriously, when Paul comes home with new books from the library for me, nothing can make me happier!

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