I've been bogged down with mommybrain. That should not come as a shock. But all of these years in Mommyland have not afforded me very much time for my own personal growth and education. I have always been a self taught type of individual but even the self-taught need to have the time to teach themselves.
The busyness of motherhood often culminates at the end of the day with the desire to do nothing but veg in front of some inane t.v. show and I admit I succumb to exactly that on far too many occasions. It has started to eat at my brain and I can feel it. I love to read and I love to write. It is my outlet. I have not given in to this outlet near enough in the past 10+ years and I am not about to say that I regret putting that part of myself aside for awhile. I think for the most part I used my time wisely but I know there has been a significant amount of time that could have been put to better use.
And with that begins my summer reading program. Which essentially does not end at the beginning of Fall but will rather extend as long as it needs to for me to make my way through my vast list of Great Books. I want to rejoin the Great Conversation. I have missed it. I do enjoy an easy read. There is nothing wrong with a junk food novel - as I like to call them. But a steady diet of junk food only leads to deterioration. Better to save the junk food for a treat and exist on a steady diet of the good stuff. So I give up the majority of my wasteful nightly t.v. time and trade it for deeper thinking. Tasting, chewing and digesting the great books.
What began all of this? What possessed me to want to toss my remote and pack my James Patterson novels into a box? The answer is I simply read an old favorite. Pride and Prejudice. The richness of the language with whole and complete sentences. Complex characters! Meat! It was like a welcome meal of meat and potatoes and I remembered what I was missing. So I begin with the Great Novels. Or rather a select few of the great novels. I will move on to biography, history, philosophy and poetry. It will be a journey but one I truly look forward to. I've already begun with Pride and Prejudice. I will post my list here if anyone wants to take on my challenge and read from it as well. It's big, but I've got the rest of my life to complete it.
* denotes books I have read in the past but plan to re-read.
The Novels
Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
Don Quixote- Miguel de Cervantes*
Pilgrim's Progress- Paul Bunyan*
Gulliver's Travels- Jonathan Swift*
Oliver Twist- Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
Uncle Tom's Cabin- Harriet Beecher Stowe*
Madame Bovary- Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy*
Les Miserables- Victor Hugo*
The Portrait of a Lady- Henry James
Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth- Edith Wharton
The Trial- Franz Kafka
The Stranger- Albert Camus
1984- George Orwell*
One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
If on a winter's night a traveler- Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon- Toni Morrison
White Noise- Don Delillo
Possession- A.S. Byatt
The Biographies
The Confessions- Augustine
The Book of Margery Kempe- Margery Kempe
The Life of St. Teresa of Avila- Herself
Meditations- Rene Descartes
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration- Mary Rowlandson
Confessions- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin- Himself
Walden- Henry David Thoreau*
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass- Himself
Up From Slavery- Booker T. Washington*
Ecce Homo- Friedrich Nietzsche
Mein Kampf- Adolf Hitler
The Story of My Experiments with Truth- Gandhi
Surprised by Joy- C.S. Lewis
Malcom X- Himself
Born Again- Charles Colson
All Rivers Run to the Sea- Elie Wiesel
The Histories
The Histories- Herodotus
The Peloponnesian War- Thucydides
The Republic-Plato*
Lives- Plutarch
The City of God- Augustine
The Prince- Machiavelli
Utopia- Sir Thomas More
The True End of Civil Government-John Locke
The History of England- David Hume*
Common Sense- Thomas Paine
A Vindication of the Rights of Women- Mary Wollstonecraft
The Communist Manifesto- Karl Marx
The Souls of Black Folk- W.E.B. Du Bois
Queen Victoria- Lytton Strachey
The Road to Wigan Pier- George Orwell
The Great Crash- John Kenneth Galbraith
The Longest Day- Cornelius Ryan
The Feminine Mystique- Betty Friedan*
A Distant Mirror- Barbara Tuchman
All the President's Men- Woodward and Bernstein
Battle Cry of Freedom- James McPherson
A Midwife's Tale- Laurel Ulrich
The Dramas
Agamemnon- Aeschylus*
Oedipus the King- Sophocles*
Medea- Euripides
Poetics- Aristotle*
Dr. Faustus- Christopher Marlowe*
Richard III- Shakepeare*
A Midsummer Night's Dream- Shakespeare*
Hamlet- Shakespeare*
Tartuffe- Moliere
She Stoops to Conquer- Oliver Goldsmith
A Doll's House- Henrik Ibsen*
The Importance of Being Earnest- Oscar Wilde
The Cherry Orchard- Anton Chekhov*
Saint Joan- George Bernard Shaw
Our Town- Thornton Wilder*
Long Day's Journey Into Night- Eugene O'Neill*
A Streetcar named Desire- Tennessee Williams*
Death of a Salesman- Arthur Miller*
Waiting for Godot- Samuel Beckett
A Man for All Seasons- Robert Bolt
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead- Tom Stoppard*
Equus-Peter Shaffer
The Poems
The Epic of Gilgamesh*
The Iliad- Homer*
The Odyssey- Homer*
Greek Lyricists
Beowulf*
Inferno- Dante
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*
The Canterbury Tales- Chaucer*
Sonnets- Shakespeare*
Poems- John Donne
Psalms-The Bible*
Paradise Lost- Milton
Songs of Innocence and Experience- William Blake
Poems- Wordsworth*
Poems- Keats
Poems- Longfellow*
Poems- Tennyson*
Leaves of Grass- Whitman*
Poems- Dickinson*
Poems- Hopkins
Poems- Yeats
Poems- Frost*
Poems- Ezra Pound
Poems- T.S. Eliot*
Poems- Langston Hughes
Poems- Larkin
Poems- Ginsberg*
Poems- Plath*
Poems- Jane Kenyon
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