another update

I'm getting this blog all caught up again! I realize I haven't posted many of my reactions yet in 2010, but that doesn't mean I'm not reading anymore. On the contrary, I've got 12 books under my belt thus far (a pathetic number, but Term III and graduation are coming up, so pretty soon I'll have a lot less time being taken up by homework).

Over the next few days, I'll be filling in my reactions/reviews of the books listed below. I have finals on Monday and Tuesday, and I'll be at a conference from Wednesday-Sunday (the 18th), so if all else fails I'll be back around the 19th, diligently filling in the empty spots and hopefully adding more completed books!

So I haven't disappeared...I've just been ridiculously busy. I'm still a bibliophile in remission, and I know the only way I can go back to buying books is to read more! It's been pretty difficult, but I honestly haven't strayed too much from my original goal of not buying any more books until all of the others are completed. On that vein:

• I've sold quite a few more books on Amazon
• To get rid of books that are selling for like $.01 on Amazon, I joined a site called Bookmooch, which allows you to swap books for free with others. So far I've sent out 4 books to happy new owners! I've created a wishlist on that site, so if any of the books I really want become available, I can mooch them from others. But I won't really be using this site to accumulate more, don't worry!
• I did pick up some books at a sale in February. But let me explain: the proceeds went straight to the public library in my city (and I'm ALL FOR supporting local libraries, of course). Also, the only reason I bought some was that the sale was ending, so buyers could fill a plastic bag with books and pay only $3! A friend and I filled the bag with 26 books, and seriously, they were only $3. And NOT all of them were mine. So I think that was an okay digression from the book-buying thing.

Besides that, I've been good about refusing to buy! My to-read pile has diminished somewhat, but I still haven't made a big dent. I guess that means I'll just have to read more. :)

just a note

I've been on Christmas break! Sadly, I accidentally left The Chronicles of Narnia at school, so I haven't made any progress there. I've actually only had time for one book so far! Tonight I'm jetting off to go skiing in Colorado until Sunday, so I'll definitely be reading on the plane.

Since I last updated, I have finished:
The Botany of Desireby Michael Pollan
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

These are the books I'm bringing on the plane:
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger--which I've already read half of
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Beloved by Toni Morrison
oliver Twist by Charles Dickens--please excuse the lack of capital "o." I accidentally spilled water on my keyboard and thus my "o"key and parenthesis no longer work, and I'm forced to paste an "o" every time I need one...so annoying.


So when I get back to school in a week, blogs shall be posted!

Correction

Upon going through my library on Excel and reorganizing, I have a correction to make. There are only about 240 books I have to read, not 300. This is because:

1. The original list included a LOT of duplicate books (e.g. both hardcover and paperback editions of the same book).

2. It also included books I never read as a child (a few in the American Girls series, for example, and some Tamora Pierce). I recategorized most of these children's books because, quite frankly, I'll probably be donating a lot of them to libraries rather than reading them.

3. There have also been a few books I've sold on Amazon. This project has caused me to sift through books and evaluate whether I'll ever read them. For example, I recently sold Philippa Gregory's Wideacre because reading it the first time, I couldn't finish due to the explicit incest going on. Normally I try to keep an open mind, but I just had absolutely zero interest in reading it. So rather than either forcing myself to read it or never truly achieving my goal of reading ALL of my books, I just sold it. Another example: At a harvest festival a few years ago, I bought some ancient Jean Plaidy paperbacks for 25 cents apiece. Some of them were parts of a series. At the time of their purchase, I didn't realize the series were out of print. So rather than purchasing the rest of the series, I just have been selling them.

So the plan remains to keep chugging along. I'll read all the stand-alone novels by themselves first, without buying any new books. Toward the end of this project, however, I have determined that I will indeed have to buy a few books. This is because I have some incomplete (and in print) series that will need to be filled in. For example, I have the first 3 books in the Outlander series. I've read the first. When I finally get around to reading the rest of the series, I'm going to be finishing the WHOLE series, not just the first 3. So I'll need to purchase the other books.

So there's an update for you! I'm still rereading Harry Potter, so there's nothing new at the moment. Next week I'll have finished 2 books, so there will be 2 updates. Until then!

Attempting to find order in this chaos

I would just like to make it known that I have still been reading! It's just that I'm taking 19 credits of advanced classes this term and thus far have had no time to blog about individual books (or blog at all, really).

The books I've read thus far are:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald (8/31/09)
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (9/9/09)
The Tale of King Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (9/13/09)

I've also reread Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but since they're rereads, they won't get individual blog posts. Whenever I get a free five minutes, I eagerly snatch at the opportunity to work on Prisoner of Azkaban. Right now, a light dose of Harry Potter is all I can handle when compared to reading Emerson, Malory, literary criticism, gender criticism, Woolf, and botany things.

As I've already had 2 stress-related ice cream emergencies this term, I can't say when I'll be able to return and do full-length blogs. Most of my time is allocated between classes, preparing for classes, stressing about classes, and friends/boyfriend. Probably on a weekend when I'm not in Vermont or at home I'll have time. But I haven't abandoned the blog, nor have I accumulated or purchased any more books. I shall return as soon as possible. In the meantime, all I can do is apologize for the current state of disarray that is Project Bibliophile.

Preliminary school year plans!

On the 30th of August, I'll be shipping out and heading back to school for my senior year. I don't want to turn this project into a rigid regimen or anything (which would probably take the fun out of it), but at the same time, I need some sort of structure in order to get myself out of this mess of unread books.

So after some quick deliberating, I came up with a tentative goal :

I'm going to read at least one book per week throughout the school year.

Since I start quivering in my boots at the thought of reading so much during a time overflowing with homework, I also added a few clauses (let's call them pansy clauses):

1. This rule does not apply to midterm week or finals week and/or the week preceding finals week.
2. It is okay to miss a week or two because things come up.
3. I am not to beat myself up if I miss a week.

Accomplishing this goal will require me to read about 17-20 books between now and December 31 (yay!), and I'm itching to choose which books to bring to school with me. I just have to make myself pick books I can actually read in about 7 hours, which is probably all I'll have per week! Thaaat should be interesting.

I'm having a hard time reading at the moment. I feel like an utter failure. The books I have left at Jon's are all either too long to read at the moment (the likes of Anna Karenina and Atlas Shrugged) or they require too much thought to be able to get through them quickly. Since today is my last day of work, and tomorrow is Jon's, we're about to start 10ish days of relaxing and fun and road trips, not to mention that his 21st birthday is Wednesday. Needless to say, I will not be having a lot of reading time until I get to school.

The book I really have been wanting to read is The Jane Austen Book Club, but when I bought it (for $1!) I wanted to wait to read it until I'd read all of Austen's novels. Well...after a summer of almost solely Austen, I'm pretty sick of her (don't shoot me!), so I'm saving her remaining novels until later. But I still want to read a fluffy, comfortable, feel-good book about her books! Maybe I'll just read it anyway. Who knows.

Also, Le Morte is being chipped away at. The Slaugherhouse and Emma posts will be updated. That is all.

Still kicking

I have many excuses for why I have not yet finished Emma.

1. Trips to Vermont
2. Working daily
3. Using my spare time for other things, i.e. running/writing/washing the car/going to the movies/cooking
4. I've been knitting the ginormous and amazing baby blanket (beautiful basketweave squares of yellow, blue, and green)
5. I have a life
6. I don't often take lunch breaks at work anymore

I know this is disappointing! But I thought I'd update with a bit of what will be coming up after Austen.

Provided that nothing else occurs in the form of alien invasions, meteor strikes, hurricanes, nuclear war, etc, I'll be finishing Emma at my usual lightning speed. Then comes... TEXTBOOKS!!!

Yes, you read that correctly. Yes, there were exclamation points and capitalization involved. That's because these textbooks aren't just any boring old textbooks. Oh no. These are multiple versions of Malory's Le Morte Darthur!!!



I read a lot of the Norton Critical edition of Le Morte during my freshman year for a different class. However, this fall, I'm taking a class solely devoted to my beloved Sir Thomas Malory, and that involves new versions of Le Morte (Oxford and Signet) and a looooot of reading. The Oxford is written in Middle English (as in, nothing is spelled correctly or consistently and there are all sorts of weird phrases), while the Signet is in modern English. As soon as I get a notebook (to jot down family trees, character explanations--there are TOO MANY KNIGHTS to keep track of, and other thoughts as I read) and finish Emma, I'll be a scholar once again. I can't wait to dive back into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tristan and Iseult, Merlin, etc.

Once I go back to school, I'll be doing something I've been eagerly anticipating ALL summer-- rereading the Harry Potter series!!! I like reading easier things during the school year, since the books I read for class are usually pretty difficult. So while I couldn't justify a complete series rereading this summer, it'll be happening come September 7th.

And you'll be hearing from me again in a few days when I finish Emma.

An Update

So the official count of books to read is...*drum roll*...almost exactly 300!!! It might be a few more or less than that, but it's the most precise count I can get at the moment. Luckily awhile ago I started a computerized library catalog for my books in Microsoft Excel, complete with a color-coding system. I haven't finished it completely, but most of it is done. First, I cataloged my books using the following columns: author's last name, author's first/middle name(s), book title, publication date, category, subcategory 1, subcategory 2, subcategory 3. The final column lists where/when I came into possession of the book, if I remember (what store and in what city, who I was with, what other books I got there, etc. Yes, I'm strange). Then, I color-coded each book:

Green = books I read
Pink = books I haven't read
Purple = books I read part of (for instance, I had to read a few short stories from James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son for a class this winter, but I didn't read the entire book. So it's classified as purple.)
Yellow = books that "don't count" toward the read/unread lists (these are mostly textbooks and reference books)

This system is really useful to me, because I can see at a glance exactly where each book stands. I can also sort the books into genre and sub-genre with a few clicks of the mouse, so that's helpful too. I just have to remember to keep updating the colors as I finish books.

I probably sound like a crazy person, but books are one of my major hobbies, and I LOVE organizing things, so making my library electronic was honestly really fun for me. Knowing that I have this resource at my disposal quiets my brain, somehow. It's like iTunes. I have to have my iTunes library organized perfectly all the time-- I'm talking title/artist/album all typed correctly and with capital letters (because sometimes when I download them they turn up crazy-looking), and everything has to have album artwork and a genre. Otherwise I feel like it's a big mess.

When did I get so OCD?!

So in other news...last week while I was interning at ABC, I realized that--GASP--I had forgotten to bring a book to read during my lunch break! Yes, I succumbed and purchased a book to read during lunch. Yes, I felt so guilty afterward that I subsequently returned the book in shame and mortification. So I don't know if that counts as breaking my vow not to buy books, but I'm definitely learning to quell my book-purchasing tendencies. It's a lot easier this summer because I'm not actually making any money (not even from babysitting, since I'm living in PA), and it's hard for me to even fill up my gas tank (and that's pathetic because I get freaking 40 mpg and my car only holds 11 gallons), so it's not like I have money for extra stuff right now anyway, haha. Which is good. I've got to save up for next year and independence.

I have, however, acquired a few books for free. I'm currently doing a second internship at a tutoring center at a college in Pennsylvania, and every single classroom building has all these bookshelves full of free books. I can't help but take advantage of this, AND I've put a few of my books on the shelves for others to take, so it's more acceptable. Yesterday I found a brand new hardcover copy of David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, along with Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, a book by my darling John Fowles, The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon (also brand new, and the big version, not the mass market paperback), a Shakespeare biography, and a Norton reader. In exchange, I put a few books on the shelf that I'll never ever read but somehow acquired: The Firm by John Grisham, a few things by James Patterson, Prague by Arthur Phillips, etc.

So that's where I am now. I'm currently halfway through Jane Austen's Emma, which is pretty good considering that I only read for an hour per day (my lunch break) Monday-Thursday, and I just started it Monday. I should have more time to read it Friday, since that's my day off. For now, evenings are dedicated to snuggling with Jon and the puppies, watching Everybody Loves Raymond, and knitting a baby blanket for Angela (and I have quite a few more squares to finish!).