classic – Live & Learn

Thank you Maureen at Magnolia Beginnings for presenting me with The Booker Award. It’s a tall order to list my top 5 books of all time (so I’m giving you 11). And, I’ve excluded “self-help”, “business” and “autobiographies” from this list. Here we go:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (Review @ this link)
The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter (Review @ this link)
Run Rabbit Run by John Updike
Home by Marilynne Robinson (Review @ this link)
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
All the Living by C. E. Morgan (Review @ this link)
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Blindness by Jose Saramago
The Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy (All The Pretty Horses; The Crossing; Cities of the Plain)
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Straight Man by Richard Russo
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

My nominees for The Booker Award are listed below. If you choose to participate, the rules of the award are to: 1) Nominate 5-10 bloggers and let your recipients know. (2) Post The Booker Award picture. (3) Share your top 5 books of all time.

Continue reading “Books, Books, Books” →

I’ve read books. Let’s say hundreds. Maybe more. (That’s not to brag, the point is coming.) Rather than focus on the wonderful books that I’ve read and the vast amounts of information, learning and pleasure that I’ve derived from this pastime, I spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the less than 1% of the books that I haven’t finished. The incomplete. My inability to finish.

Resting firmly on top of this list is Ulysses by James Joyce. That’s the cover on the right. The book, the same hideous cover, has been sitting next to my desk for eight years. It stares me down. It torments me. Here come the low guttural whispers: Quitter. Not capable. Not good enough. Over your head. Farm boy. Loser! Public school project.

I happened to come across a recent article in Publishers Weekly titled “The Top 10 Most Difficult Books” and the festering sore opens wide again.

“…The “Difficult Books” series is devoted to identifying the hardest and most frustrating books ever written, as well as what made them so hard and frustrating…If you can somehow read all 10, you probably ascend to the being immediately above Homo sapiens…”

Here we go. Intelligentsia slapping me around again. You want to hit nerve – – hit me here. Hit me. Neanderthal man immediately surfaces.

Continue reading “Just can’t finish…” →