New Life Goal

As if I don't have enough already. So, as usual, I was bored & playing around on Amazon and I came across this wonderful loveliness. So I read through them and it generally seems like a much better list than the one that the College Board put out a long time ago (I think it was like 100 Best Books of All Time, but it was all academic literary baloney). I want the overall book so I can see what some of them are about before reading them, but they seem like a good mix of great literature with a few books to ready for fun and/or the message they include. So, this is my new goal: I want to finish them all before I die...just like the book suggests. I totally understand this is a totally unreachable goal unless I commit myself to reading only the books on here, and I'm not one to be able to read a whole lot of novels in a row...I need to intersperse it with some good history non-fiction. If you're interested, here's the list of books from listology. In the message boards on that site, I came across a link to the most wonderful thing ever: an Excel worksheet where you just type in a little "r" next to the ones you read and it keeps track of percentages and how many you need to read each year assuming average life expectancy...super cool stuff. Here's the link to that page (and the document is reliable & virus-free). 3.2% done, mostly thanks to a fantastic senior year high school English Seminar class and some interesting history classes where I got to read novels and apply it to the history...good stuff there. I've read very few by myself...I have such a hard time picking out good fiction for me to read.

I just picked up The Other Boleyn Girl because I have this personal preference to always read the associated book (as much as possible) before seeing the movie, and I really want to see this movie. So that's next on my reading list in addition to a few books from the Russells' bookshelf that are either on the official list or just look amazing. And I really want to buy and read this book before I begin going through the official list, because it looks funny & if Amazon thinks it's one of the top books of May, I'm not going to argue. And then I'll slowly intersperse reading from my new lifelong goal with some of the books I already had planned for the summer and stuff. What I really need is to renew my MM library card because we'll go broke really fast trying to buy books to keep up with my seemingly voracious reading habits this summer. I really have just been a reading machine so far. I've really gotta finish this 250 year history of York race relations so I can move on to the fun stuff. After a full day of work, I need a break from history (ha, I never thought I'd ever say that) and once we move into the new apartment, we'll have a pool. Good book + summertime + poolside = AMAZING!