In Which I am Not Dead nor Disappeared

Ariel could use some highlights.

It's been awhile? I guess? Somehow this always happens to me in the fall. I've been reading and doing stuff but I haven't really had anything to SAY about it. Plus I talk to most of you via social media pretty much every day, so it's no like you MISSED me or anything. 

Y'anyway. In the last couple of weeks, my library queue has shrunk and I am left only with the Ambitious Non-fiction on my nightstand. I have every intention of reading it because Reza Aslan is an incredibly amazing historian and also a quite engaging writer. But every time I look at it, I get intimidated and think of him just mentioning in that interview with Fox News how he can't help but imagine that the interviewer did not read his book. 

So instead I combed my shelves for some comfortable sci-fi I haven't read in awhile, and since I finished C.S. Friedman's latest trilogy recently, I picked up the first book in her Coldfire trilogy (sensing a theme here, Friedman...), Black Sun Rising. There are several sci-fi/fantasy series that get an extra point from me because I've been reading them since I was a teenager, and this is one of them. It takes place in the far distant future after Terrans took to the stars, colonized a planet at the far edge of the galaxy, ran into some serious trouble because said planet is prone to serious earthquakes and those earthquakes let loose rivers of fae that manifest the strongest emotions of the people around them. So while you're happy, that's fantastic, but the moment you have a nightmare or are afraid, the planet will try to eat you. 

There's just one thing missing.

In other news, this post should be subtitled "But I Do Succumb to Peer Pressure," because Alice has been BADGERING me for over a week via gchat about joining this Saturday's readathon. She even invoked the California contingent and told me that Megs had already joined.

Which, by way of this post, I am doing. 

I am compelled to point out at this juncture that it was roughly this time last year that the GIF Admiration Society coalesced and decided that a whole 24 hours was FAR too many for us, and that we needed to establish a shorter period of time to work up to participating in the Dewey madness. Since then, we have done two mini-thons - complete with mini-snacks and the mini-theme - with varying degrees of success depending on what your measurement is (a plethora of snacks planned and consumed: success! reporting on said snacks to Twitter and other social media: success! reading of actual books: varying). 

Saturday's readathon probably starts waaaaay too early for me and there's definitely no way I'm going to be able to stay up for 24 hours straight - much less read for that long without going crazy - so my current plan is to set my alarm for a somewhat reasonable hour of a Saturday morning, read and eat until I need to do something else, then knit and listen to an audiobook and maybe take a walk, then probably meet a couple of girlfriends for sangria margaritas. Then I'll come home and stare at my book in confusion before giving up and eating more food. 

I'm anticipating a lot of success in the first two categories, is what I'm saying. 

The 2013 TBR Pile Challenge!

Adam over at Roofbeam Reader is hosting the annual TBR Pile Challenge, in which we choose 12 books from our TBR Piles and read them over the course of the year. But before we talk about all the books I want to read (and will genuinely try to finish but let's be honest,

I'mma tell you a story.

Soooooo last year around this time, I tore through my library and put little pink Post-it Flags on the spines of all the books I have not yet read. There were over 100 of them.

And in June I packed everything into boxes and into storage with the secret hope that the flags would all magically disappear, which would have been awesome and a little creepy. But alas, when I unpacked the library in my new place, they were still there.

But then as I was putting the books on the shelves, I realized that the next best thing had happened: some of the flags had fallen off or gotten stuck on books I had, in fact read, making the WHOLE SYSTEM ineffective. And there's nothing I loathe more than an ineffective system (Reason #45198 that I decided not to become a teacher and/or a parent).

SO, I took all the flags off and felt vaguely guilty about it, since I really should read the books I buy.

And then, along came Adam's challenge!

I'm joining to alleviate my post-Post-it flag guilt, is basically what I'm saying. Behold my tentative list (complete with commentary, por supuesto):

1. Moby-Dick by Hermann Melville (This title still makes me giggle like a 13-year-old. Dick. Haha.)
2. Wings of the Dove by Henry James (I heart you even though you talk shit about other authors, HENRY.)
3. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (I am a HUGE Hardy fan, maybe because I've never read this?)
4. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Oh, EVELYN. Be my melancholy gay friend! /sigh)
5. Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (I... have never read any Eliot. I KNOW.)
6. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (ditto)
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (I bet Anna closed her mouth occasionally, but to see KK play her YOU'D NEVER KNOW.)
8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseni (handsome local author! I have an unread signed 1st edition. Go me.)
9. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (Eeedith! Let's hang with Evelyn and be fabulous together.)
10. Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders (is that non-fiction you see? I must be growing as a human being...)
11. How Fiction Works by James Wood (yep, clearly I'm growing.)
12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Because I haven't grown THAT much. Dick. Haha.)

Alternates:
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace

The Classics Club - Everyone in the Pool

The more book blogs I read, the more The Classics Club comes up, and the more I think, "I can do that... I should totally do that." And then I look at other peoples' lists and get all excitable and want to read errrrthing. Except... that's not really true because I am what you call a Book Snob. But I digress.

What I really like is organization and direction. This is why I am excellent at my job: I really like to check things off of lists. And what better list than a book list? Plus, as my friend Tex is always telling me, I'm very buttoned-up and Victorian myself,* and 19th c. Tika would totally have joined a Classics Club. She would also have kept a better diary. You know - for posterity.

And speaking of posterity, I've been talking (via Twitter! @tikabelle) with Rayna over at Libereading about our choices and how it's so hard you guys to get up a classics list that involves an appropriate amount of female/minority authors because if you think your first world problems are bad, consider being Other in an English-speaking country 150 years ago and getting a book published. And then couple that with being Me in 2012 and having a decided preference for giant-foreheaded white male authors with whiskers and you come up with a list that is highly alphabetical but singularly lacking in the wimminz and the non-white people.

1. Adams, Douglas The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1979
2. Aeschylus The Oresteia 458 BCE
3. Aristophanes The Frogs 405 BCE
4. Aristophanes Lysistrata 411 BCE
5. Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid's Tale 1985
6. Austen, Jane The Big Six 18**
7. Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan 1911
8. Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron 1351
9. Bronte, Anne The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1848
10. Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre 1847
11. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh 1856
12. Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth 1931
13. Bulgakov, Mikhail The Master and Margarita 1967
14. Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game 1985
15. Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote 1605
16. Collins, Wilkie Poor Miss Finch 1872
17. Collins, Wilkie Armadale 1866
18. Collins, Wilkie Antonina 1850
19. Dante The Divine Comedy 1321
20. de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1782
21. Dickens, Charles Bleak House 1852
22. Dickens, Charles Pickwick Papers 1837
23. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 1866
24. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov 1880
25. Dreiser, Theodore Sister Carrie 1900
26. Eliot, George Middlemarch 1871
27. Eliot, George Mill on the Floss 1860
28. Euripedes Medea 431 BCE
29. Euripedes The Trojan Women 415 BCE
30. Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby 1925
31. Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 1857
32. Forster, E.M. Howard's End 1910
33. Fowles, John The French Lieutenant's Woman 1969
34. Galsworthy, John The Forsyte Saga 1921
35. Gaskell, Elizabeth Wives and Daughters 1865
36. Gaskell, Elizabeth North and South 1854
37. Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure 1895
38. Hardy, Thomas The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886
39. Hardy, Thomas Tess of the D'Urbervilles 1891
40. Hardy, Thomas Under the Greenwood Tree 1872
41. Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast 1964
42. Herbert, Frank Dune 1965
43. Hugo, Victor Les Miserables 1862
44. James, Henry Portrait of a Lady 1881
45. James, Henry The Wings of the Dove 1902
46. Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterly's Lover 1928
47. Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea 1968
48. Lewis, M.G. The Monk 1796
49. Lindgren, Astrid Pippi Longstocking 1945
50. Melville, Henry Moby Dick 1851
51. Mitford, Nancy The Pursuit of Love 1945
52. Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita 1955
53. Naylor, Gloria The Women of Brewster Place 1982
54. Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar 1963
55. Proust, Marcel Swann's Way 1913
56. Richardson, Samuel Clarissa 1747
57. Smith, Betty A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1943
58. Smith, Zadie On Beauty 2005
59. Sophocles The Theban Plays 470 BCE
60. Steinbeck, John Cannery Row 1945
61. Steinbeck, John The Winter of our Discontent 1961
62. Steinbeck, John Grapes of Wrath 1939
63. Steinbeck, John East of Eden 1952
64. Sterne, Lawrence Tristram Shandy 1767
65. Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina 1877
66. Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace 1869
67. Voltaire Candide 1759
68. Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead, Revisited 1945
69. Waugh, Evelyn The Complete Stories 2000
70. Waugh, Evelyn Decline and Fall 1928
71. Waugh, Evelyn A Handful of Dust 1934
72. Waugh, Evelyn The Loved One 1948
73. Wharton, Edith The Custom of the Country 1913
74. Wharton, Edith Ethan Frome 1911
75. White, T.H. The Once and Future King 1958
76. Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass 1855
77. Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792
78. Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse 1927
79. Xuequin, Cao The Story of the Stone 1760

That's roughly 38,500 pages worth of classic books - why yes, I did add them all up via spreadsheet, thank you for asking! - and I'll have finished reading them by... let me see... August 31, 2017. BAM!

*I am not certain this is a compliment, but I'm going to assume so as it's almost always followed by, "and then you go and tell me THAT story!"

Edit 9/5 to add various Greeks, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hemingway, and others.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Confessions

This post is brought to you by the Book Blog World's fabulous

from the lovely folks over at The Broke and the Bookish. 

Top Ten Bookish Confessions:
Everyone has at least one bookish confession (and in my case I have six). Join us in spilling our deepest held secrets around one of our most beloved pastimes. Everyone has a bookish confession. What's yours? If you have one feel free to share it, if not feel free to commiserate with ours -Julia


I dunno if this will go to ten, but usually once I've started to plumb my psyche for dark secrets, it's difficult to stop.

1.  I have broken up with (or refused to date) people because they don't read books. I don't mean "books I like;" I mean that they are self-described "non-readers," a word that sounds like Swahili or some other 100% incomprehensible-to-me language when it comes out of someone's mouth.

Arghlbarghl? 

Now, in my defense, the guy I refused to date because he doesn't read also loves camping, hiking, snow sports, guns, and martial arts; which is basically a list of Tika-Repellent. Too bad - he was hot, but I like to have something to talk about between shenanigans.

2. I used to dog-ear the pages of library books. I KNOW.

3.  I have, on occasion, professed to have read a book that I either have not actually read (but usually own), have only read part of, intend to read, or have seen the movie of.

3a. I have also on occasion mocked people for not having read books I haven't read myself for the reasons previously stated.

4.  This New Year's week I marked all the books on my shelf that I haven't yet read; there were over 100 of them. Then I packed to move and am secretly hoping all the markers fall off in the boxes. Or magically disappear.

5. I read more blogs about books than I do actual books. This is partly due to Google reader on the sly at work and partly because I can't look away from my computer screen for more than 5 minutes. It's an addiction except there are no meetings. Just more blogs.

6. While I like lit-nerd discussion about character development and plot and author intention as much as the next girl, I enjoy the subset of book bloggers who are into snark and gifs and making fun of Wilkie Collins's giant forehead SO MUCH MORE.

7. I don't really care if I read enough women/minority authors. I very rarely register the gender or ethnicity of an author until I get to the back book flap, although since I lean heavily toward 19th c. British, it's a good bet I'm reading mostly white and male, and I generally like it that way.

8. I forget what 8 was for.

9. I was late to the Twilight bandwagon, but when I got there I read all 4 books in under a week. This is partly because I saved them for a Mexico vacation so I read them on a beach with unlimited tequila nearby, which probably kept me from throwing them across the room quite as often as I did. But I suspect I would have cruised through them no matter what.

10. I MADE IT! Let's see, 10 should be a big one. Hmm. Oh yes: I think that listening to an audiobook is just as beneficial - and sometimes more so - than reading the printed words on the page. Good audiobook narrators do their homework and know where the emphasis should be, which is something I often skip when I'm reading in bed at night. Audiobooks force you by their very nature to give each word the amount of time it takes to speak, and for classics especially I appreciate it.

What are your bookish confessions?

Wilkie's brain is big enough for all of them.