Holiday Reading List 2012

With a nice long holiday break from school reading and no midterm exam, I am free to read what I want for the next 5 weeks.  I am sharing with you below a few of the books I am hoping to read over the holidays.  The list is probably a little TOO ambitious, but oh well. 

I have put some Canada Reads books on here (The Tiger and Prisoner of Tehran) but not all of them because I don't think I can read non-fiction for 5 straight weeks.

So here are the books I hope to read over the holidays.  Feel free to share your opinions, reviews, etc.  And happy holiday reading!

The Antagonist - Lynn Coady

I am currently reading this book and enjoying it. It was a finalist for the Giller this year.

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

This is the cover of the original 1843 edition (obviously not what I am reading).  I have wanted to read this book every Christmas for a few years and think that this year I might finally do it.

Foundation - Isaac Aminov

I recently found The Hamilton Book Club Meetup Group and this is their book for January.  I am hoping to join this group and would like to participate in January.

Klee Wyck - Emily Carr

 This is the first book I have to read next semester for Can Lit, so I would like to get a head start over the holidays.

Pursuasion - Arlene Dickinson

 I don't read a lot of business books, but I love Arlene Dickinson from Dragon's Den.  She represents everything that I think a good business person should be.

The Tiger - John Vaillant

 This is one of the two Canada Reads 2012 books that I plan to read over the holidays.  This year all of the books are non-fiction.

Prisoner of Tehran - Marina Nemat

This is the second Canada Reads 2012 books that I plan to read over the holidays.








 

The Sense of An Ending - Julian Barnes

This is the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2011. 

Doug's Top 51 Preferred Books Of All Time (...so far!)

Doug, my wonderful and charming fiance (brownie points), reads significantly more than I do.  So I asked him one day when we were on the 5 1/2 hour drive to our cottage if he would let me post a list of his favourite books on my blog.  When he agreed, we started drafting his list right away.  That was 5 months ago.  We forgot to finish it, and when I was going through some papers a few days ago I found the list we started making.  So today he finally finished it for me, and I am now presenting it to you.  The list is in no particular order and it is 51 because Doug has a slight case of OCD when it comes to even numbers (he can't even set his alarm clock to an even number!).

So finally, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...


Doug's Top 51 Preferred Book Of All Time (...so far!)

1. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
3. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
5. All My Sons by Arthur Miller
6. The Adventures of David Simple by Sarah Fielding
7. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
8. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
9. The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck
10. Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
11. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
12. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
13. The Europeans by Henry James
14. The Americans by Henry James
15. All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren
16. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
17. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
18. Animal Farm by George Orwell
19. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
20. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
21. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
22. Silas Marner by George Eliot
23. Persuasion by Jane Austen
24. Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
25. Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
26. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
27. The Odyssey by Homer
28. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
29. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
30. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
31. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
32. Native Son by Richard Wright
33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
34. Deliverance by James Dickey
35. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
36. Poison Wood Bible by Barbare Kingsolver
37. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
38. Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (Series) by Sue Townsend
39. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
40. A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt
41. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
42. Utopia by Thomas More
43. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
44. Still Alice by Lisa Genova
45. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
46. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
47. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
48. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
49. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
50. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
51. Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler

Newsweek's Top 100 Books of All Time (A Printable Version!!!)

Of all the top 100 book lists I have seen, this one is the closest to what I agree with.  Although some people disagree with me, I really think that fiction and non-fiction should be on seperate lists.  Having said that, this list is the best marriage of the two.  I may tweak it in the future to reflect more than just the 10 sources Newsweek used to create it, but for now, here is a printable copy (because it was VERY difficult to find one online when I wanted it).  Enjoy!

Newsweek's Top 100 Books of All Time
1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
7. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
8. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
11. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
12. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
13. Middlemarch by George Eliot
14. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
15. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
19. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
20. Beloved by Toni Morrison
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
23. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
24. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
25. Native Son by Richard Wright
26. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
27. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
28. The Histories by Herodotus
29. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
30. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
31. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
32. Confessions by St. Augustine
33. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
34. The History of the Peloponnecian War by Thucydides
35. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
36. Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
38. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
39. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
40. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
41. Holy Bible
42. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
43. Light in August by William Faulkner
44. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
45. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
46. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
47. Paradise Lost by John Milton
48. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
49. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
50. King Lear by William Shakespeare
51. Othello by William Shakespeare
52. Sonnets by William Shakespeare
53. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
55. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
56. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
57. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
58. One Flew Over the Kuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
60. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
61. Animal Farm by George Orwell
62. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
63. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
64. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
65. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
66. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
67. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
68. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
69. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
71. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
72. All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren
73. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
74. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
75. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
76. Night by Elie Wiesel
77. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
78. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
79. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
80. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
81. The Day of the Locust by Theodore Dreiser
82. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
83. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
84. His Dark Material by Philip Pullman
85. Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather
86. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
87. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James
90. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
91. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
93. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
94. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
95. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
96. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
98. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
99. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
100. The Second World War by Winston Churchill

Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/204478