Jump to content

Lara's Book Log 2018


Lara

Recommended Posts

I'm going to try this again this year. :)

 

Reading Goal: 52 books

 

For Fun Mini Goals:

*crossed off as completed

-Read a graphic novel or comic book

-Read a memoir or biography

-Read a book in Spanish

-Read a mystery novel

-Read a book published this year (2018)

-Read a book I was supposed to read for class but didn't (ha ha)

-Read a book set in my hometown

-Read a book of poetry cover to cover

-Read 2 Shakespeare plays

-Read at least 7 plays

 

Books Read:

 

January

1) Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4 stars)

2) An Attic of Ideals by Karen Swenson (3 stars)

3) We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4 stars)

4) Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen (4.5 stars) 

5) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (4 stars)

6) Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (3 stars)

7) Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (3 stars)

 

February

8) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (5 stars)

9) Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (2.5 stars)

10) Woyzeck by Georg Buchner (3.5 stars)

11) Hunting and Gathering by Brooke Berman (3 stars)

12) Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets (4 stars)

13) A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (4 stars)

14) Miss Julie by August Strindberg (3 stars) 

15) Ruined by Lynn Nottage

 

March

16) Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov (3 stars)

17) Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (3.5 stars)

18) Angels in America (Part One: Millenium Approaches) by Tony Kushner (4.5 stars)

19) Angels in America (Part Two: Perestroika) by Tony Kushner (4 stars)

20) The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt (4 stars)

 

April

21) Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (4 stars)

22) Dead Man's Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl (3 stars)

23) A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (4 stars)

24) The Drunkard: Or, the Fallen Saved by William H. Smith (2 stars)

25) Dutchman & The Slave by Amiri Baraka (3 stars)

 

May

26) A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (4 stars)

27) The Homecoming by Harold Pinter (4 stars)

28) Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway (4 stars)

29) Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook by Mark Bray (4 stars)

 

June

30) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (4 stars) 

31) Genocide by Jane Springer (2 stars) 

32) Pastrix by Nadi Bolz-Weber (4 stars)

 

July

33) Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (5 stars)

34) Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland by Christopher R. Browning, Nechama Tec (5 stars)

 

August

35) The Liars' Club by Mary Karr (4 stars)

36) Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis (4 stars) 

37) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (4 stars)

38) Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing (4 stars)

39) Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O'Connor (2 stars) 

 

September

 

October

 

November

 

December

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Lara
Link to comment
Share on other sites

To Read:

*edited continually; crossed off  as read 

 

-All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

-Americanah by Chimamanda Ngoz Adichie 

-Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner

-As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

-The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

-Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

-Backstage Handbook: An Illustrated Almanac of Technical Information by Paul Carter

-Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris

-Beloved by Toni Morrison

-The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam 

-The Best We Could Do by The Bui

-Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

-Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

-Born Both: An Intersex Life by Hida Viloria

-A Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

-Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

-The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

-Children Playing Before A Statue of Hercules by David Sedaris

-Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

-The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

-The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

-A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

-Dracula by Bram Stoker

-Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

-Endgame by Samuel Beckett

-Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

-The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty by Mary Hollingsworth

-The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen

-The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

-The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

-The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

-Florida by Lauren Groff

-Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

-For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

-Freud's Mistress by Karen Mack

-Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

-The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee

-The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

-The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 

-Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

-The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien 

-Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

-The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston

-How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

-I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

-In The Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks

-In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka 

-The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

-An Ishmael of Syria by Almohammad Asaad

-Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith

-A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

-Just Kids by Patti Smith

-LaRose by Louise Erdrich

-The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Daphne Scholinski

-Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen

-The Likeness by Tana French

-The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

-Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

-Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

-The Lover by Harold Pinter

-Maggie Now by Betty Smith

-The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories by Tim Burton

-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

-Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

-The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

-The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

-Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

-My Life With Bonnie and Clyde by Blanche Caldwell Barrow 

-My Louisiana Sky by Kimberly Willis Holt

-My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult 

-The Name of God is Mercy by Pope Francis

-Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

-The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

-No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

-Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

-On Liberty by John Stuart Mill 

-O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

-Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

-Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

-An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina 

-Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

-Othello by William Shakespeare

-The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

-Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders

-A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

-The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani 

-A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline

-The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

-Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

-Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

-Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 

-Remainder by Tom McCarthy

-The Road by Cormac McCarthy

-Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories by Roald Dahl

-The Santaland Diaries and Season's Greetings by David Sedaris

-The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

-A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing by William Ball

-Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

-Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility by Germaine Greer

-The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class by Bernie Sanders

-The Spice Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen

-A Spot of Brother by Mark Haddon

-Stupid F*****g Bird by Aaron Posner

-The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

-The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin

-Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal

-The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond

-Threepenny Novel by Bertolt Brecht

-To The Novel by Michael Chekov

-Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

-The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart

-A Vindication on the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

-We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

-We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

-We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch 

-The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

-The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman 

 

The Well Educated Mind Suggested Reading List:

*hidden for the sake of saving space 

*to be slowly chipped away at

*crossed off as read

 
Spoiler

 

Fiction:
 
  1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes 
  2. The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan 
  3. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
  4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
  5. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens  
  6. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
  7. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
  8. Moby Dick - Herman Melville  
  9. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
  10. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  11. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  12. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
  13. The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
  14. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
  15. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 
  16. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
  17. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad  
  18. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton 
  19. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald  
  20. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe
  21. The Trial - Franz Kafka
  22. Native Son - Richard Wright 
  23. The Stranger - Albert Camus 
  24. 1984 - George Orwell  
  25. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
  26. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow 
  27. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez  
  28. If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino 
  29. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison  
  30. White Noise - Don DeLillo  
  31. Possession - A.S. Byatt
  32. The Road - Cormac McCarthy


 

 Autobiography
 
  1. Augustine - The Confessions 
  2. Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
  3. Michel De Montaigne - Essays
  4. Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
  5. Rene Descartes - Meditations
  6. John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
  7. Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
  8. Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
  9. Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
  10. Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
  11. Henry David Thoreau - Walden 
  12. Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 
  13. Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery 
  14. Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
  15. Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf 
  16. Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth 
  17. Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 
  18. Thomas Merton  - Seven Storey Mountain  
  19. C.S. Lewis - Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
  20. Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
  21. Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  22. May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude 
  23. Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
  24. Charles W. Colson - Born Again
  25. Richard Rodriguez - Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriguez
  26. Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain
  27. Elie Wiesel - All Rivers Run to the Sea 
 
History/Politics
 
  1. Herodotus - The Histories
  2. Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
  3. Plato - The Republic  
  4. Plutarch - Lives
  5. Augustine - The City of God
  6. Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
  7. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
  8. Sir Thomas More - Utopia
  9. John Locke - The True End of Civil Government 
  10. David Hume - The History of England, Volume V
  11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
  12. Thomas Paine - Common Sense
  13. Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  14. Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 
  15. Alexis De Tocqueville - Democracy in America 
  16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Communist Manifesto
  17. Jacob Burckhardt - Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
  18. W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
  19. Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
  20. Lytton Strachey - Queen Victoria
  21. George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier 
  22. Perry Miller - The New England Mind
  23. John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash
  24. Cornelius Ryan - The Longest Day
  25. Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
  26. Eugene D. Genovese - Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
  27. Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
  28. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - All the President's Men
  29. James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
  30. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
  31. Francis Fukuyama - End of History and the last Man
 
Drama
 
  1. Aeschylus - Agamemnon
  2. Sophocles - Oedipus the King
  3. Euripides - Medea
  4. Aristophanes - The Birds
  5. Aristotle - Poetics  
  6. Everyman (14th Century)
  7. Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
  8. William Shakespeare - Richard III
  9. William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
  10. William Shakespeare - Hamlet
  11. Moliere - Tartuffe 
  12. William Congreve - The Way of the World
  13. Oliver Goldsmith - She Stoops to Conquer 
  14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The School for Scandal 
  15. Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House 
  16. Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
  17. Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard 
  18. George Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
  19. T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral 
  20. Thornton Wilder - Our Town
  21. Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night
  22. Jean Paul Sartre - No Exit 
  23. Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire 
  24. Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman 
  25. Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot 
  26. Robert Bolt - A Man for All Seasons
  27. Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
  28. Peter Shaffer - Equus 
 
Poetry 
 
  1. The Epic of Gilgamesh 
  2. Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey
  3. Greek Lyricists 
  4. Horace - The Odes 
  5. Beowulf 
  6. Dante Alighieri - Inferno 
  7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
  8. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
  9. William Shakespeare - Sonnets 
  10. John Donne 
  11. King James Bible - Psalms 
  12. John Milton - Paradise Lost 
  13. William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience 
  14. Williams Wordsworth 
  15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
  16. John Keats
  17.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  19. Walt Whitman
  20. Emily Dickinson 
  21. Christina Rossetti
  22. Gerald Manley Hopkins
  23. William Butler Yeats
  24. Paul Laurence Dunbar
  25. Robert Frost 
  26. Carl Sandburg
  27. William Carlos Williams
  28. Ezra Pound
  29. T.S. Eliot
  30. Langston Hughes 
  31. W.H. Auden

Science
  1. Hippocrates - On Airs, Waters and Places
  2. Aristotle - Physics
  3. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
  4. Nicolaus Copernicus - Commentariolus
  5. Francis Bacon - Novum Organum
  6. Galileo Galilie - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
  7. Robert Hooke - Micrographia
  8. Isaac Newton - excerpts from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica 
  9. Georges Cuvier - Preliminary Discourse
  10. Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology 
  11. Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
  12. Gregor Mendel - Experiments in Plant Hybridization
  13. Alfred Wegener - The Origin of Continents and Oceans
  14. Albert Einstein - The General Theory of Relativity
  15. Max Planck - The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
  16. Julian Huxley - Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
  17. Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
  18. Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
  19. Desmond Morris- The Naked Ape 
  20. James D. Watson - The Double Helix 
  21. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
  22. Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes:
  23. A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe 
  24. E. O. Wilson- On Human Nature
  25. James Lovelock -  Gaia 
  26. Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
  27. James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science
  28. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
  29. Walter Alvarez  - T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Lara
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Statistics

*updated monthly

 

2018 total number of books read so far: 38

 

Number read for school: 19
Number read for pleasure: 20

 

Number of non-fiction: 10
Number of fiction: 29
Number of plays: 19
Number of poetry collections: 1

Number of graphic novels/comics: 0

 

Number of new authors: 31
Number of known authors: 5

 

Number of books with male authors: 25
Number of books with female authors: 14

 

Nationality of authors:
American - 22

Bohemian/Czech - 1

British - 2 

Canadian - 2

German - 2

Greek - 1

Italian - 1

Nigerian - 1

Norwegian - 1

Russian - 1

South African - 1

Swedish - 1

Swiss - 1 

 

Number of books not originally in English: 8
Number of books not in English: 0

 

Time period published:
-Ancient: 1
-Medieval: 0
-1500-1700: 0
-18th century: 0
-19th century: 5
-1900 to 1950: 6
-1951 to 1980: 8
-1981 to 1999: 6
-21st century: 13
(-2018: 1)

 

 

Average rating:

Longest book: 
Shortest book: 
 

Most read author:

 

 

Edited by Lara
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Read Last Year (2017):

-Moshiah by Andrew Craven 

-Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks

-God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut

-Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

-All My Sons by Arthur Miller

-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

-Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

-Trifles by Susan Glaspell

-The Dramatic Imagination by Robert Edmund Jones

-God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

-Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

-Hamlet by William Shakespeare (re-read)

-Arcadia by Lauren Groff

-Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

-Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage

-Machinal by Sophie Treadwell

-Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

-Choir Boy by Tarell Alvin McCraney

-The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht

-Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

-Theft by Finding by David Sedaris

-The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

-Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard

-Three Crows Yelling: Poems by Bill Noble, William Keener, and Michael Day

-True West by Sam Shepard

-Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2 by J.K. Rowling and Jack Thorne

-Buried Child by Sam Shepard

-The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich

-Antigone by Sophocles

-The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

-Wonder by R.J. Palacio

 

Edited by Lara
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you everyone! 

 

Today I finished my first two reads of 2018. Dear Ijawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and a collection of poetry titled An Attic of Ideals by Karen Swenson. Dear Ijawele, while not particularly groundbreaking, was perfect for what it was - honest, to the point, and clearly communicated. It is a short book, 60ish pages long, taken from a letter Adichie wrote to a friend who asked her how to raise her daughter feminist. Adichie writes about feminism without being moralizing, a quality I appreciate in any social discourse. An Attic of Ideals is a book I came across by chance. Of its many poems there were both hits and misses, but the hits were of excellent quality. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So it seems this has been a good start to the year for me. Since I last updated, I finished both Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Both were great. 

 

I've started reading Jane Eyre for the readathon, but I had less time last weekend than I hoped and I didn't get that far. I think I'll pick that one back up during the next readathon and finish it. It's my first book by a Bronte sister :) 

 

Currently, I'm reading Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff. God save us. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...