This was a big year for books in that I tackled some large page counts in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and George Eliot's Middlemarch. They were worth it! I now have a favorite protagonist in Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch: "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
This year, these are the books that caught my attention:
• War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy's description of burdock root, "black from dust but still alive and red in the center … It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other had asserted it."
• Middlemarch, George Elliot
• The Faber Book of Utopias, Ed. John Carey (Excellent!)
• The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy (Read at Burning Man)
• Gazelle, Rikki Ducornet
• Lavinia, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Unit, Ninni Holmqvist (This dystopia lingered.)
• Island, Aldous Huxley (re-read, "What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango!")
• Simple Plan, Mother Teresa (The plan "... is composed of six essential steps: silence, prayer, faith, love, service, and peace.")
• The Case for God, Karen Armstrong
• In Defense of Dolphins, Thomas White and reminded me of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
• The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (My bon-bon books of the year i.e. I devoured them like candy.)
• Freefall, by Mindi Scott (I knew her when. Congrats, Mindi)
This year, these are the books that caught my attention:
• War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy's description of burdock root, "black from dust but still alive and red in the center … It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other had asserted it."
• Middlemarch, George Elliot
• The Faber Book of Utopias, Ed. John Carey (Excellent!)
• The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy (Read at Burning Man)
• Gazelle, Rikki Ducornet
• Lavinia, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Unit, Ninni Holmqvist (This dystopia lingered.)
• Island, Aldous Huxley (re-read, "What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango!")
• Simple Plan, Mother Teresa (The plan "... is composed of six essential steps: silence, prayer, faith, love, service, and peace.")
• The Case for God, Karen Armstrong
• In Defense of Dolphins, Thomas White and reminded me of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
• The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (My bon-bon books of the year i.e. I devoured them like candy.)
• Freefall, by Mindi Scott (I knew her when. Congrats, Mindi)
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