The Classics Club, Redux(ish)

In September of 2012, a younger, more optimistic me joined the Classic Club, hoping to motivate myself to read 50 classics over five years (ending September 2017).

It's well past September 2017, and suffice it to say, I did not read 50 classics. I did read 24, though, so rather than calling this a bust, I'm readjusting my goals, and planning to read the remaining 26 over the next five years.

Here's what I've read so far:

1. Emma by Jane Austen
2. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot 
5. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
7. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 
8. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
9. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 
10. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 
11. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 
12. The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway* 
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway* 
15. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk
16. Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
18. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
19. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
20. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
21. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
22. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor
23. The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
24. Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

And here's the list I'll be pulling from for the next five years:

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 
2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
3. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
4. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
5. Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel
6. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin 
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 
8. The Master and the Margarita by Michael Bulgakov 
9. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 
10. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote 
11. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre 
12. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
13. Collected Stories by Anton Chekhov
14. Woman in White by Wilkie Collins 
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 
16. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas 
18. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 
19. Light in August by William Faulkner 
20. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 
21. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
22. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
23. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert 
24. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell 
25. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 
26. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein 
27. Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway 
28. The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
29. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
30. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 
31. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 
32. Dubliners by James Joyce 
33. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence 
34. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 
35. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
36. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
37. Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant 
38. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 
39. Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov 
40. At Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien 
41. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien 
42. Collected Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor
43. 1984 by George Orwell 
44. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker 
45. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe 
46. Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe 
47. Pedro Parama by Juan Rulfo
48. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 
49. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
50. East of Eden by John Steinbeck 
51. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 
52. Robinson Crusoe by Robert Louis Stevenson 
53. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson 
54. Dracula by Bram Stoker 
55. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 
56. The Warden by Anthony Trollope 
57. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 
58. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 
59. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells 
60. Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
61. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton 
62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman 
63. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

#SJBookClub: Retirement Edition

I started the Social Justice Book Club in 2016 after a semi-joking Twitter conversation with fellow non-fiction lovers Shaina and Shannon turned into a chorus of "I'd join that!" type tweets. We read our first book--Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson--in April of that same year, and things took off from there.

After the election in 2016 and inauguration in 2017, there was an even greater clamor to read more, to understand more, to empathize more with the issues at play on both the domestic and international political scenes, especially as those issues related to matters of social, racial, and economic justice. The club grew. We moved to Slack. The ever-incredible Janani joined me as a co-host in 2017. We developed a massive list of potential books to read some day.

But now, roughly two years after it started, it's time to close this chapter. As I wrote recently, 2018 is all about re-allocating my time and energy. And as much as I've loved #SJBookClub (and I think Janani would echo me here), I just haven't had the time or energy to do it justice of late. So it's time to say goodbye.

The archive of the books we've read will continue to live here, and I certainly don't expect to stop reading--or writing about--books centered on themes of social justice any time in the future. I hope you won't either, and I hope you'll continue to share your book recommendations and thoughts moving forward. If there's interest, we can try to share the list of potential books we worked up at some point in the coming weeks.

I can be reached at ofabookworm AT gmail DOT com, on Instagram or Twitter @kerrymchugh, on Litsy @kerry, or here on this blog. (I'm admittedly not particularly active on Twitter of late, and generally bad at answering emails. But I'm trying.)

Going Through the Motions, Getting Back in Gear: Intentions for 2018

sunrise over Cadillac Mountain, October 2017

After a year of fits and starts with this blog, I unofficially took a few months off (you may have noticed my last post was in September, and even then, I was just re-posting piece I'd been writing for Shelf Awareness anyway). In that quiet space, I walked away from most all of my writing projects and the computer and, as made sense for me, the internet (though I still overshare on Instagram, and I'm not even sorry about it). I contemplated giving this space up and calling it quits, weighing the amount of work it is to find the time and energy to write something meaningful against the ever-limited amounts of time and energy I seem to have these days.

But something in me couldn't let go. Because even though I haven't been the best blogger, or the best reviewer, or the most consistent writer of late, a not-so-small part of my heart loves this space I've carved out, the time I find to write about books and running and the things that make me excited.

In a world full of bad news, I want to make an effort to make space for the things I'm passionate about. In a life full of ups and downs--and 2017 brought quite a few downs, both personally and politically speaking--I want to have a space to think through my thoughts, and this is that space.

Book Review: The Followers, by Rebecca Wait

This review originally ran in Shelf Awareness for Readers. Reprinted here with permission.

The Followers starts in the "after": Judith is entering a prison to visit her mother, Stephanie, imprisoned for as-yet unknown reasons. Rebecca Wait (The View on the Way Down) then moves skillfully through time to reveal their life "before." The mother works as a waitress to support herself and her young daughter; Stephanie meets Nathaniel, a charming man who takes an interest in her difficulties. Mother and daughter move in with Nathaniel and his "followers" in order to pursue a new life with a new sense of purpose.

Book Review: The Distraction Addiction, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Every once and a while, a book comes along at exactly the right moment in time. The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul, was just such a book. This one first crossed my radar when Kim posted about it as part of her 100 Days of Books project, and her description immediately leapt out to me:

The Distraction Addiction starts with a good question: “Can we stay connected without diminishing our intelligence, attention spans, and ability to really live?” I like this approach because it addresses both the positive (more connections) and the negative (more distractions) ways that technology impacts our lives. Unlike many books about technology and the mind, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang doesn’t suggest we should get rid of our phones or go off the grid. Instead, he advocates for a more mindful approach where we make deliberate choices about how to engage with our devices and the world. This is one of my favorite books on the subject that I’m due to re-read soon.

Recently: Essays on Feminism, Gender, Race, and Identity

Without realizing it at the time, I've been on a bit of a kick with essay collections lately--especially those related to feminism, gender identity, and race--and particularly the intersection of the three.

Book Review: The Long Run, by Catriona Menzies-Pike

Every once and a while, a book comes along that rings all my bells--and then some. The Long Run is one of those books. Running. Distance running. Trail running, even. Grief. Loss. Meditation. Feminism. History. Feminist history. Memory. Writing. Literature. Books. Here's a book that manages, in the span of a few hundred pages, to talk about dactyls and iambs, trans rights, art history, the Ancients, and distance running without any piece of it feeling out of place. Yes, please, sign me up.