I love to read. I doubt that's a secret to anyone who has known me for more than ten minutes. It is probably one of the reasons I did well scholastically. Recently though, I have found that my reading feels aimless; I read whatever I happen to pick up at the library, or that catches my eye at the bookstore, or is suggested to me by the ever-helpful, up selling logarithms of Amazon. The thing is, I have a large (OK, huge) To Be Read pile which I have made very little progress on. In the spirit of de cluttering and reorganizing, I want to whittle that down. I know it will never go away, that is not in the nature of TBR piles. But right now, I do not know if any particular book is one I will want to keep or not, because I haven't read it yet. But if it is not a "keeper," then I want it out of the house. This is also true of my e-books, except that those don't have to be dusted nor do I trip over them. The solution, I have decided, is a reading list. I do well with lists and structure. So here's my reading list for 2016 (so far). I don't plan to be tied to it too tightly--I'm leaving room for serendipity--but these are certainly the core.
Some are books I am slightly embarrassed to be including--I was an English major as an undergrad, you would think I had read all of Shakespeare, at least, but no. Others are re-reads of beloved books (and we can just assume the constant re-reading of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo, Lymond Chronicles, and King Hereafter), recommendations from friends, and a few gift books. They are a mishmash of topics, too--fiction, drama, theology, devotional/spiritual, history, science fiction, and LGBT history/studies--among others!
Note: I reserve the right to edit this in the future as I come across others I want to
Complete H P Lovecraft
Complete O. Henry
Complete Shakespeare
Railroaded
The Silent Cry (Dorothee Soulle)
Sacred Pause (Hackenberg)
Far Pavilions
Anna Karenina
Crafting a Rule of Life
Enigma:: Alan Turing
When HARLIE Was One (David Gerrold)
God Will Find You (John. Stuart)
Speaking Christian (Marcus Borg)
The Liturgical Year (Joan Chittester)
Migraine (Oliver Sacks)
Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)
Musashi
Living Buddha, Living Christ
Bisexuality: Making the Invisible Visible
Archeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication
Brave Journeys
The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (James Palmer)
People's History of the United States
People's History of Christianity
Selected Readings of Meister Eckhardt
The Bible's Yes to Same-Sex Marriage
The Great Emergence (Phyllis Tickle)
Dog-Whistle Politics
A Wilder Rose
The Divine Milieu
The Divine Milieu Explaned
City of God (Augustine)
George Fax, an Autobiography
But I Don't See You as Asian
Complete Poe
Who's Your Daddy? And Other Writings on Queer Parenting (Rachel Epstein, ed.)
American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
Foundation (Isaac Asimov)
My Real Children (Jo Walton)
Kindred (Octavia Butler)
Dhalgren (Samuel Delany)
