A Dorky Reading Post and a Challenge (part 1)

Disclaimer: This is a really nerdy post about books and reading. If if that’s not your thing, probably just skip this one.

I’ve written a lot about my love of reading to and with my kids (check out the “books” label in the Topics drop down menu on the right). As my girls get older and books get bigger, both in size and subject matter, I’m enjoying reading many books with them that I never read when I was younger.

I have come to realize that, though I have been an avid reader my whole life, there’s a whole lot of great literature I was never exposed to. I never read a single classic book all through my elementary, middle, and high school years. At the public school that I attended, in our literature classes we had textbooks. So we probably read excerpts from classic literary works, though I don’t really remember which ones (except randomly I recall “The Pearl” from elementary school). I took a Shakespeare class in high school during which we halfheartedly read through a few of the Bard’s plays (“Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest,” I think). In college, my poorly chosen “literature” class (or maybe it was a writing class?) was something having to do with “Women’s Studies,” and the only book I remember reading in that class was Paula Kamen’s “Feminist Fatale.” It was capital-A Awful. I took one European Literature class during a short summer session my senior year, in which I read Camus’ “The Plague,” Goethe’s “Faust,” and Hesse’s “Narcissus and Goldmund.” You guys, Shakespeare aside, these are the only three classic works of literature that I read for a class in my entire school career. Three.

That’s not to say I never read good books on my own in my younger years. I did. “Little Women” and “Little Men.” “Anne of Green Gables” (the entire series). All of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. “Gone With the Wind” was a favorite. I read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” at some point. Probably quite a few more. But nothing in school, and as I see all these amazing books that are popping up in our curriculum now, I’m so excited for the girls to read them.

As an adult, I have at various times made an effort to expand my reading horizons to include more excellent literature, rather than just the mass market suspense novels I blew through like crazy in my twenties. Here and there I have even had some success with this. I have mentioned in previous posts a list from Time Magazine of the best 100 English-language novels from 1923 (when Time Magazine began) to 2005 (when the list was published). I’m not all that sure that the list really includes any kind of true consensus of great literature from the time period it reflects (um, “Slaughterhouse-Five”????). It was compiled by just two Time Magazine writers, after all. But there are a lot of great titles on there, and it gave me a great place to start, so I set a goal at one point to read through those (I had read three of them when I started), and I managed to get through 17 of them. (For fun, check out the list here and see how many you’ve read. I would love to hear about them, as I am weirdly obsessed with this list for some reason. I’ll put mine at the bottom. And for extra fun, here’s another top 100 of all time to check out. I’ve only read 10 of those.)

Unfortunately, my efforts to read through the list books, and a lot of others pretty much fizzled out when homeschooling got more involved, and I started having to work a lot harder to find time to read for pleasure. I also began reading books related to helping me deepen my faith and my understanding of Catholicism, so what time I was finding for reading was mostly spent on titles in that area (I wrote a post about my favorite Catholic books back in 2016, and will do another updated one in the not too distant future).

Frankly, in the past few years I have been pretty bad at setting aside time for myself to read for pleasure.

So, to bring things full circle in my long-winded summary of my life as a reader, as I find that my children are reading great books for school that I have never read, I discover that I want to read them too. I want to get back to trying to read more great, classic literature again. I want to learn to appreciate some beloved authors, whom I’ve just never gotten into.

I want to be a reader again.

So, to that end, I’m starting a fun reading challenge for this year. It’s called the 5X5 Reading Challenge and it’s from the Schole Sisters blog/podcast. You can check it out here.

In a nutshell, you choose five categories of books, to give breadth to your reading (these can be subject matter, author, genre, or anything really), then choose five books for each category, to give depth to your reading. I’ve been having so much fun coming up with my categories and books! (I told you I’m a nerd.)

This post has already gotten too long with my possibly-annoying over-share of my lifetime of reading, so I’m not going to go into detail about all of the books I’ve chosen for my challenge, but big dork that I am, I will compose a post with excessive bookish detail very soon.

Here are the books I’ve read from the TIME list: