Top Ten Books I’m Excited to Read in 2012

Thanks to the blog The Broke and the Bookish, the top ten books I’m excited about tackling in 2012 are as follows:

1. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo.  I have made the attempt years ago to read this but got bogged down with my desire to learn more about the 1789 French Revolution, no more excuses for 2012, I want to read this book.

2. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy.  I have heard nothing but good things and why not read it?

3. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  I have yet to read a book by Dostoevsky that I don’t like.

4. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens.  In February we celebrate his birth, I’m celebrating by reading two of his books in February, this is one.

5. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.  This is the other.

6. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.  I love big books, especially books about plotting revenge.

7. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas.  Saw a poor version of the movie years and years ago, I think it is safely out of my mind that I can now enjoy the novel.

8. Cousin Bette, Honore de Balzac.  Plots to screw over a family, I’m in.

9. The Aeneid, Virgil.  Read before, but not the Fagles translation.

10. The History of Madness, Michel Foucault.  I love Foucault’s writing and madness has always interested me.

Shakespeare Reading Challenge January 2012

And here we go!

First up: Henry IV, Part I.

Fresh Start

Everyone always makes goals that are abandoned by the first few weeks of the new year, well, this year I plan on beating my odds by keeping my 2012 goals simple:

1. Finish every book that I start.

2. Complete the three books that I have been dragging with me for a bulk of 2011 within the first month of January 2012 (McGee’s Tristan Chord: Wagner & Philosophy, The Bible (King James Version), and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish).

3. Read Six Shakespeare plays (including finishing The Histories).

4. Play more games of Chess at www.chess.com

5. Post in my blog at least twice a week.

6. Exercise at least three times a week at a minimum of twenty minutes.

7. Be kinder.

It really should not be that difficult, I love to read, I love to write, and I would like to drop some extra pounds I have added during 2011. The being kinder, well, the world could use kinder people in it, and my wife and daughter would enjoy a less cantankerous husband and father.

Struggle

For nine years of my schooling (kindergarten through eighth grade) my mother enrolled me in a private non-denominational Protestant Christian school. It was interesting, and I say that looking back from the perspective of the Atheist that I am today.

The most interesting thing I find upon my recollection is that the powers that be never actually had us read the Bible – oh we read parts and highlights, but not the entire thing consecutively, rather again, only a, “Best of,” or “Greatest Hits,” highlights.

So, a text completely fundamental to the foundation of the Western Canon was glossed over. Luckily the highlights presented at the school were enough to help me identify literary allusions when I got to the public high school and went into Honors English and AP English, and in college it also helped.

But still, even with the highlights in mind I always wanted to tackle the Bible from cover to cover, and even when I went into college, majored in Philosophy (with a concentration in Philosophy of Religion), I still never fully sat down to read the Bible.

No big deal right, just sit down and read it, you can practically get a Bible for free if you know where to go or who to ask. Only I, being of a more serious and scholarly nature, needed a less religious Bible. I know right, is that possible? I think it is, after all, the Bible is a very loaded book. For some it is a religious manual on how to be a good person and unlock immortality, for others it is just a book of fiction, for others a book of history. The Bible I wanted would be one that had been edited and had a commentary from a scholarly institution with a strong reputation, so I focused on Oxford University Press. I also have a knack for Antiquity and wanted to follow in Harold Bloom’s recommendation and get a King James version.

Luckily for me Oxford World Classics had such a Bible for purchase, edited by strong scholars with commentary to help fill in the historical perspectives, a beautiful Renaissance painting on the cover (Michelangelo’s Jeremiah), the King James version, and as a bonus, it has the Apocrypha.

So I had the Bible I wanted to read and started to read like crazy through the first five books of Moses (it did get tedious with Leviticus) but I was set to power through, and then the history started to overwhelm me, the books of Moses gave way to the historical dryness of recitation of familial genealogy and I found myself bored. Gone was the creation story, the fall of humans and the first murder, instead it was replaced with this King fought that guy and built this thing and the Jews, they wandered and fought and blah, blah, blah.

So I find myself today struggling to get to the Prophets, I figure after the history the great books of the Prophets should be good, I mean all that fire and brimstone prophecy about the coming Messiah for the Jews ought to be worth reading. I just have to get there and remember that this book is a seminal block on which greater authors have written some of the finest works of literature that will stand the test of time. I just have to get through the history one king and lineage at a time. Sigh.

Return to Form

2011 is wrapping up and it cannot be over soon enough, a lot of stress, a job change, and barely scraping by has its highlights if I ever sit down to write a novel, but as for living and keeping stress down, 2011 was a tumultuous and irritating year and I am glad to see it go.

One thing I really missed in 2011 was writing about reading – that is, reading something of quality that was worth writing about. I have to admit that I think I stopped reading books more than I finished reading books in 2011, however in my defense, I chose a lot of crap to read, not that reading should ever be considered a waste of time, it is just that I feel pulled into two different reading categories; for example, the fun and somewhat mindless reading (more genre fiction such as science fiction and fantasy) and serious scholarship reading (such as reading the great Philosophers, tackling books that make up the foundation of the Western Canon).

I have gotten into heated arguments over this notion in the past and one thing that I have realized is that this is simply my opinion, others have thier opinions and it is okay, we can all get along. I love Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but I love it for what it means to me, which is fun good reading that for me is a, “one and done.” That is, I don’t plan on returning to Middle Earth again or traverse the far reaches of space with the Starship Troopers. I liked reading the books, but for me, they were entertainment, they didn’t make me want to better myself.

Books of the Western Canon symbolize something for me; Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost is heart wrenching, his desire to seek revenge and to complicate God’s latest creation – well it speaks to me, to mankind, to the essence of raw emotion. I enjoy re-reading passages of Milton’s greatest work because in doing so I learn a little more about me. The same goes for the multiple re-readings of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and any of the nineteenth century masters. They have given me something more than myself, they have captured a small piece of the human condition and shown me a part of myself that I might refuse to acknowledge under certain restrictions (be it societal, religious, or other).

So as 2012 approaches I decided that I wanted to continue with my post college reading list of the great Western Canon, I want to tackle every Shakespearean play, I want to consume Dickens, relish with Austen’s protagonists, learn from the debates held within Plato’s dialogues, and weep with Nietzsche.

I think in the past I have made reading blogs too much of a, “me versus them” defense of reading only the best literature produced. I think that is wrong, people can read whatever they damn well please, who am I to finger wag? I’m just a person who likes to read and to write about what a book means to him.