Photo courtesy of www.bookicious.com
Hello gang!
I’m a woman shackled to consistency, so let me begin by (once again) apologizing for my absence. School, work, and family illness have kept me occupied, but I have a resolution to blog more in 2017.
No, I promise.
In other quick news:
**If you haven’t yet, make sure to pick up a copy of the latest issue of VII, which includes my transcription of Jack and Warnie’s previously-unpublished Pudaita Pie.
**Also, I am happy to announce that I am now the review editor for Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal. I will have purchasing information available for the 2016 edition as soon as possible!
Now on to the books…
I’ve begun the task of creating my TBR pile for 2017. Although this is subject to change (and I’m certain it will), I like draw a basic outline of my reading life. It will have some alterations as I purchase new books next year, although my plan is to drastically reduce what I buy. I will also have required reading for my MFA coursework. I realize that I have an ambitious TBR. I know that I won’t read ALL of these, but it’s a start. Feel free to follow me on Goodreads and watch my progress!
As I have previously mentioned, I am pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. My application to the program featured poetry, but I am working diligently on improving my prose/fiction writing. Thus, my literary diet is dominated by fiction. I have a small sprinkling of nonfiction, mainly in the “Inking” section. I am breaking books down into three categories: Fiction / Nonfiction / Inklings. This sums up my reading habits pretty well. The following are in alphabetical order by author, not reading order. The fiction genres are all mixed, and I plan to do thorough rereads on the starred (**) works. Some of these books are chunky, so I’m cautiously optimistic about this list, but I accept the fact that some books may be bumped to next year since I’m in school. ALSO, there is a strong possibility that I will complete some writing (fingers crossed to have my sample chapters ready for a publisher), so this will absorb some reading time.
Fiction:
Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah
Louisa May Alcott – Little Women
Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy**
Leigh Bardugo – Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom
Wendell Berry – Jayber Crow
Joseph Boyden – Three Day Road
Geraldine Brooks – People of the Book
Jesse Burton – The Miniaturist (read and loved The Muse)
Willa Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Alix Christie – Gutenberg’s Apprentice
Bill Clegg – Did You Ever Have a Family?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
Anne Enright – The Green Road
Louise Erdrich – The Round House
Richard Flanagan – The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
Janet Fitch – White Oleander
Jonathan Safran Foer – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Diana Gabaldon – Voyager (finish)
Kristin Hannah – The Nightingale
Homer – The Iliad**, The Odyssey**
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings
Hannah Kent – Burial Rites
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Colum McCann – TransAtlantic
John Milton – Paradise Lost**
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Erin Morgenstern – The Night Circus (finish)
Kate Morton – The Distant Hours
Sarah Moss – The Tidal Zone, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children
Haruki Murikami – 1Q84 and finish The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (maybe Norwegian Wood and others)
Madeleine L’Engle – A Wrinkle in Time quintet
C.S. Lewis – Ransom Trilogy**, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Ed. David Downing)**, The Chronicles of Narnia**
Mario Vargas Llosa – The Dream of the Celt
Joyce Carol Oates – Blonde
Ruth Ozeki – A Tale for the Time Being
Ann Patchett – Bel Canto
Marisha Pessl – Night Film
J.D. Salinger – The Catcher and the Rye (also maybe Nine Stories)
Brandon Sanderson – The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages, The Way of Kings, Warbreaker
Donna Tartt – The Secret History
J.R.R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings**, Kullervo, Beowulf
Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
Adriana Trigiani – All the Stars in Heaven
Anne Tyler – A Spool of Blue Thread
Virgil – The Aenid**
T.H. White – The Once and Future King
Meg Wolitzer – The Interestings
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
Hanya Yanagihara – A Little Life
Markus Zusak – The Book Thief
Nonfiction
Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton (maybe?)
John Dewey – Art as Experience
Charlotte Gordon – Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
Jill Lepore – The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Inklings
Chris Armstrong – Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in the Forgotten Age with C.S. Lewis
Owen Barfield – Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning
Bradley Birzer – J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth
Marsha Diagle-Williamson – Reflecting the Eternal: Dante’s Divine Comedy in the Novels of C.S. Lewis
Justin Dyer and Micah Watson – C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law
C.S. Lewis – Reread and annotate (again) – Poems, An Experiment in Criticism, Selected Literary Essays, The Discarded Image, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Studies in Words, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Joseph Pearce – Tolkien: Man and Myth, A Literary Life
Jerry Root and Mark Neal – The Surprising Imagination of C.S. Lewis: An Introduction
Stephen Thorson – Joy and Poetic Imagination: Understanding C.S. Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield and its Significance for Lewis’s Conversion and Writings
Tom Shippey – The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
K. Alan Snyder – America Discovers C.S. Lewis: His Profound Impact
Roger White, Judith Wolfe, Brendan Wolfe (Eds) – C.S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society
There it is: my intended list for 2017. Just reading it makes me dizzy, but it also gives me some direction for the next twelve months. If you would like to buddy-read any of these works, email me at thatlewislady@gmail.com.