Lara

I'm totally like this too, Frankie. I actually had a similar conversation with my boyfriend. We were at the library and I checked out a stack of books and he says, "Do you really think you can read all those books before they're due?" This is why I always have more than one book going at once! Sometimes I don't want to read something even if it's really good, if it just doesn't fit my mood.

After much thought and deliberation, I believe I am done. Happy reading in 2016, everybody! (This thread is officially open for business )

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I tutor reading, and because of that I've read a quite a large amount of picture books with my student. It has got me thinking about how many beautiful, quality children's books there are out there. What are some of your favorite picture books? Either from when you where young or that you've come across lately. With a little bit of thought, some of my favorites are: The Little House - Virginia Lee Burton Chicka Chicka Boom Boom - Bill Martin Jr Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs - Judi Barrett Very Last First Time - Jan Andrews The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein Oh, The Places You'll Go - Dr. Seuss Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak Make Way For Ducklings - Robert McCloskey Blueberries for Sal - Robert McCloskey The Monster at the End of This Book - Jon Stone

I'm amazed by how many books you manage to read in a year, Athena! I feel like I read very fast, but I couldn't read as many as you if I tried. I don't think I'd ever get enough time in the day! It's quite an accomplishment Also, I've borrowed some of your categories in your statistics post for mine this year, so thank you for that. I'm brand-new so I'm trying to develop a system of my own. I love how involved your blog/list is

I used to love those books! I read so many of them but it seems like they never ran out! I felt so attached to those characters. Ah, it brings me back

I always had lots of poetry in English class too. There was a unit on it every year (except maybe one, if I remember correctly). It took up a pretty big part of the curriculum, especially my senior year. We read Shakespeare sonnets, Frost, Chaucer, Poe, Wordsworth, Byron....definitely more that I can't remember.

That's a beautiful book. Is the copyright date on the front cover something different than what you are looking for?

Definitely the most important thing! School should inspire a love of learning.

I've heard some differing opinions on whether or not plays should be assigned as reading in English classes in school. People who don't think it is a good idea generally seem to be of the mind that plays are meant to be seen, not read, which I don't neccessarily disagree with. Personally, I had to read several different plays in English throughout my high school/primary school years. I found that the times I retained the most and was most engaged was when my class read Hamlet and Death of a Salesman out loud together, with each person being assigned a different part. Hearing the play out loud definitely aided in comprehension. Those two also ended up being some of my favorite pieces of literature I read in school, too. I feel as if there are both pros and cons to it. On the negative side, you are not getting the full picture of what the play was intended to be by just reading it, and trying to make sense of a play by just the written words can be frustrating (shoutout to Shakespeare). I recall a great deal of my peers disliking it. On the positive side, reading plays in school exposes students to a whole area of literature they may not otherwise be exposed to, especially considering that not everybody has the means or interest/motivation to go see live theatre. Seeing it written out like that, it seems like there's a lot more negatives than positives, but I still feel like there is something really valuable in exposing students to plays as literature. What do you guys think? Is it a good, bad, or neutral? I'm also only looking at this from my experience with the American school system. Are plays usually part of the English curriculum in U.K. schools?

I feel like this occasionally. Reading a book that is really good can sometimes be so emotionally exhausting. I think it is a mark of great writing! I can actually remember the first time I ever felt like that from a book. Oddly enough I can't remember what the name of the book was, I was in sixth grade and it was years ago, but it was a children's/YA book about a girl who travels back in time 10,000 years. At the end I was in shock. I had this empty feeling in my chest like I'd lost something. I couldn't take my mind off it. It took me a couple days to process I remember I had another book to read for school but I just couldn't bring myself to do it right away.

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Statistics: ***Updated for March*** *Updated monthly 2016 total number of books read so far: 13 Number of books read for school: 3 Number of books read for pleasure: 10 Number of non-fiction: 5 Number of fiction: 8 Number of audiobooks: 0 Number of graphic novels: 0 Number of plays: 1 Number of new authors: 9 Number of known authors: 4 Number of books with male authors: 10 Number of books with female authors: 3 Nationality of authors: Unknown - 1 U.S. - 9 U.K. - 2 South Africa - 1 Number of books not originally in English: 0 Number of books not in English: 0 Time period written: -Pre 1700: 0 -18th century: 0 -19th century: 1 -1900 to 1950: 0 -1951 to 1980: 3 -1981 to 1999: 0 -21st century: 9 Longest book: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (390) Shortest book: The Crucible by Arthur Miller (152) Average number of pages: 304 Number of books acquired: 32 Books purchased: 7 Books received as gifts: 15 Books acquired for free (other than gifts): 9 Number of books borrowed from the library: 2 Average rating: 4.4 Five stars: 3 Four stars: 6 Three stars: 4 Two stars: 0 One stars: 0

Books Acquired in 2016: *Including books given to me during the holidays because that's when the year starts over in my head Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins The Republic - Plato Collection - Oscar Wilde David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell Dame Agatha Abroad (Collection) - Agatha Christie Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini The Story of Edgar Sawtelle - David Wroblewski Speeches that Changed the World (Collection) - Multiple A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith The Long March - Robert Kimball The French Revolution - Owen Connelly and Fred Hembree The Illusion of Peace - Sally Marks Environmental Overkill - Dixy Lee Ray Henry VIII - M.D. Palmer In the Name of God - Paula Jolin The Crucible - Arthur Miller Anthony and Cleopatra - William Shakespeare The Elephant Man - Bernard Pomerance Founding Myths - Ray Raphael Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik Frankenstein - Mary Shelley World War Z - Max Brooks Contending Forces - Pauline E. Hopkins Monsters - Andrew J. Hoffman Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

Harvard Bookstore's Top 100 Books: *Books read are crossed off 1). Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 2). Pride and Predjudice - Jane Austen 3). Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut 4). 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 5). The Wind-Up Bird Chronical - Haruki Murakami 6). To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf 7). Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 8). The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R Tolken 9). Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison 10). Beloved - Toni Morrison 11). Ficciones - Jorge Louis Borges 12). The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri 13). The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 14). The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon 15). Mrs. Dalloway - Virgina Woolf 16). The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bugakov 17). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 18). Middlemarch - Georg Elliot 19). A Wrinkle in Time - Madeliene L'Engle 20). A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 21). Slouching Towards Bethleham - Joan Didion 22). If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino 23). To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 24). Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 25). Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling 26). Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 27). Dubliners - James Joyce 28). Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 29). Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh 30). White Noise - Don DeLillo 31). Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder 32). Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 33). Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 34). His Dark Materials series - Philip Pullman 35). The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers 36). Little Women - Louisa May Alcott 37). A Wizard of Earth Sea - Ursula K. Le Guin 38). A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway 39). Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut 40). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 41). The Histories - Herodotus 42). The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner 43). A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami 44). The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 45). Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neal Hurston 46). The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster 47). Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson 48). Dealing with Dragons - Patricia C. Wrede 49). The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 50). Cannery Row - John Steinbeck 51). Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami 52). Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - J.D. Salinger 53). Shadow and Claw - Gene Wolf 54). The Scarlett Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne 55). Watchmen - Alan Moore 56). The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor 57). Orlando: A Biography - Virginia Woolf 58). Moby Dick - Herman Melville 59). High Fidelity - Nick Hornby 60). Watership Down - Richard Adams 61). Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 62). The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz 63). The Stanger - Albert Camus 64). Pale Fire - Vladimir Nobokov 65). Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank 66). Good Omens - Neil Gaiman 67). The Chronicles of Narnia series - C.S. Lewis 68). For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway 69). Enormous Changes at the Last Minute - Grace Paley 70). Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie 71). You Shall Know our Velocity - Dave Eggers 72). Baudolino - Umberto Eco 73). Been Down so Long it Looks Like Up to Me - Richard Farina 74). Dead Souls - Nickolai Gogol 75). I, Claudius - Robert Graves 76). In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway 77). Jayber Crow - Wendel Berry 78). Little, Big - John Crowley 79). Popol Vuh - Dennis Tedlock 80). The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin 81). The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle 82). The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham 83). The Sea, the Sea - Iris Murdoch 84). The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera 85). The Bone People - Keri Hulme 86). Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger 87). Drown - Junot Diaz 88). Hamlet - William Shakespeare 89). Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace 90). The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton 91). The Blue Sword - Robin McKinley 92). The Odyssey - Homer 93). Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison 94). Gilead - Marilynne Robinson 95). A Little Princess - Francis Hodgson Burnett 96). A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn 97). Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 98). Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey 99). Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 100). Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

To read list: *Continually added to, books read are crossed off A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway Antony and Cleopatra - William Shakespeare An Ordinary Man - Paul Rusesabagina A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving A Room with a View - E.M. Forster Beloved - Toni Morrison David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell Eleanor and Park - Rainbow Rowell Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Hollow City - Ransom Riggs I am Malala - Malala Yousafza In Cold Blood - Truman Capote Jacob Have I Loved - Katherine Paterson Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Lord of the Flies - William Golding Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Luna - Julie Anne Peters Men Explain Things to Me - Rebecca Solnit Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie My Grandfather's Gallery - Anne Sinclair None of the Above - I. W. Gregorio One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey Oranges are not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson Prayers for the Stolen - Jennifer Clement Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession - Janet Malcolm Reckless - Cornelia Funke Redefining Realness - Janet Mock Seed - Lisa Heathfield The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger The Color of Christ - Edward J. Bloom The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon The Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood The Future of Us - Jay Asher The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman The Hope We Seek - Rick Sharpero The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe The Other Wes Moore - Wes Moore The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd The Sociopath Next Door - Martha Stout The Thing About December - Donal Ryan The Walls Around Us - Nova Ren Suma Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neal Hurston Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell Wise Children - Angela Carter

I've decided that since I'm doing this log I may as well try to challenge myself! In the past few years I've really just been sticking with what I know I like, so I've set myself a few goals. Main goal - read 100 books Other goals: -Read a graphic novel -Read a Shakespeare play -Read a biography -Read a mystery novel *Goals are crossed off as they are reached * All books rated out of 5 Books read in 2016: Total so far: January: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime- Mark Haddon (5/5) David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell (3/5) Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut (5/5) Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris (4/5) The Crucible - Arthur Miller (4/5) Freakonomics - Steven J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt (3/5) February: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (3.5/5) A Fighting Chance - Elizabeth Warren (4/5) March: World War Z - Max Brooks (4/5) Micro Terrors - Tony Hart (3.5/5) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs (4/5) April: Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee (4.5/5) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (5/5) Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff (5/5) May: June: July: August: September: October: November: December:

This is great, thank you so much! I think I'm definitely going to check out Kelly Armstrong. Thank you for your recommendations everybody!

I was actually looking for a book series recommendation! Haha thank you, though. I actually do like Criminal Minds. It's funny, I didn't even think there might be a confusion because in the U.S. we very rarely refer to TV shows as series. What an oversight on my part!

To be fair, there's plenty of books you can find free online because they are in the public domain. For example, if the author is dead and the copyright runs out. There's nothing wrong with that; it doesn't harm the author.

It's pretty easy to find the classics for cheap online! If you haven't read it, I'd recommend The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's a great story even if you usually aren't into the classics. Same goes for To Kill a Mockingbird. If you are into philosophy or history at all, I love Candide by Voltaire. It's very short. I'm not sure if you can get it online, but I got it at Barnes & Nobles for a few dollars. For some light/easy fiction, I'd recommend John Greene and maybe some other YA authors. I read 13 Reasons Why as a pdf online for free. It should come up if you google search it. That book is a little heavy emotionally, but it's not too long. I'm pretty sure I read it in two days. If you like non-fiction, Malcolm Gladwell's books are pretty short reads, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is really interesting and not too long.

Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction? There's lots of great non-fiction on sociology/psychology and philosophy out there. For non-fiction I would recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence by Robert M. Pirsig. Malcolm Gladwell has a lot of interesting pop psychology kind of books. They aren't too heavy, but are very engaging. For fiction, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Alright, I'm looking for a series recommendation. I want something I can really get invested in! I'm a little bit picky, so here are some guidelines: -Preferrably no romance that is center to the plot. Some action on the side is fine haha -No sci-fi -I'm a little wary of dystopian, didn't like Divergent or the Pretties and some other popular ones. I did like the Hunger Games though -Very compelling character development is a must I'm excited to hear some of your recommendations! Thank you!

I'm definitely somebody who jumps around authors. Lately I've been on a David Sedaris kick. Funniest non-fiction around, for sure!