Fourth Quarter in Review

From bottom to top, the books I read in the last three months were Bleak House by Charles Dickens, The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Persuasion by Jane Austen, A Hero of Our Time by Mikhael Lermontov, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, The Professor by Charlotte Bronte, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

The books that are turned around so you see the pages instead of the spine are stand-ins for books that I read on an e-reader and don't own a hard copy. This last quarter I relied most heavily on the e-reader, as I had finally read most of the books I already owned but hadn't read yet, and was moving on to books I wanted to read but didn't own.  In the end, I really found that there are a lot of great books that I enjoyed reading, but will probably only reread once or twice in my life. It's not worth it for me to keep a book for years just because I might want to read it again someday, and these classic novels can be found in any library, or for free online since they're in the public domain.

Which brings me to the e-reader. I got an e-reader in June, and it was very handy when traveling and when reading really long books that would be heavy to hold for hours on end. However, because I'm a fast reader and the screen is fairly small, I have to turn the page (technically, refresh the screen) every 30 seconds or so, and this creates a short delay that jars me out of my mental reading zone every. single. time.  Because of this, I found that I read a lot slower using an e-reader than I do using a book, so I still prefer reading a book when possible. That said, I do not regret my e-reader purchase at all.  It's great for the purposes I mentioned above, and it's also more convenient to quickly load a new book onto it than to make a 30 minute round trip drive to the library.

Third Quarter in Review

From top to bottom, my third quarter of 2011 consisted of: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Emma, The Brothers Karamazov, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Little Women, East of Eden, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Return of the Native, Around the World in Eighty Days, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Fathers and Sons, Eugene Onegin, On the Road. 

I'm 75% of the way to my goal! Not quite ready to start walking around with a sign that says, "the end is nigh"...better get through another 10 books first.

Second Quarter in Review

The blog A Peculiar Influence was born out of a New Year's resolution I made to read a classic novel each week of 2011, and this post proves that I'm halfway done! The second quarter consisted of (from bottom to top) All Quiet on the Western Front, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Fahrenheit 451, Hard Times, Last of the Mohicans, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Grapes of Wrath, The Bell Jar, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Sense and Sensibility, Gulliver's Travels and Cranford.  If you're a new reader of this blog and want to catch up, my introductory post is here and the first quarter in review can be found here. I originally decided to start the year by reading all the books on my shelf that I hadn't read yet. Of the 13 books pictured above, I only owned 2 on January 1, 2011; so my "to read" list didn't get much shorter this quarter, but as of now there are only 7 unread novels on my shelf so I should be caught up soon. A couple of the books in the photo (Madame Bovary and Cranford) are actually stunt doubles, Madame Bovary because I sold my copy right after reading it, and Cranford because I don't own a copy so I read it as an epub...which forces me to point out that the dreaded e-reader makes its first appearance this quarter.

First Quarter in Review

We're three months into 2011, and here's the proof! From bottom to top, these are the novels I read and blogged about from January through March: Wuthering Heights, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Silas Marner, Crime and Punishment, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Great Expectations, The Pioneers, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Mrs. Dalloway.

And, for those who are interested, I have acquired these books in three different ways: gift (do I need to explain that one?), thrift (bought it secondhand) or swift (the speed with which I forked over the cash-in person or online-when buying a brand new book).  From bottom to top: gift, thrift, thrift, swift, swift, gift, thrift, thrift, thrift, swift, gift, thrift, thrift. All of those works were already on my shelf when I began this blog on January 1, 2011, except the top two, which I picked up recently.