One in the can...

Well, I finished Catch 22!  And I'm glad I did -- it turned out to be a much better (and different) book than I anticipated.  When I began to read it, I thought it was basically just going to be a funny book.  I also found it incredibly confusing, keeping track of Major this and General that and who the heck is ex-PFC Wintergreen again?  However, as I continued to read and got deeper into the book, I discovered that this is anything but a superficially funny book.  There are characters who seemed funny at first, whom I came to hate by the end of the book (Milo Minderbender especially).  There are scenes so horrible that they practically made me sick, particularly because they are so shockingly juxtaposed to some of the humorous scenes in the book.

Catch 22 is a book that caught me off guard -- and I think that's exactly what Joseph Heller intended.

Next up: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

Be ready

It's Advent.  Not Christmas yet -- Advent first.  This year, I've not been very good at entering into the spirit of Advent -- the waiting, preparing, anticipating the birth of Christ.  I've been too caught up in the "churchy" things I've had to do, the things I do so that others in my congregation might enter into Advent more fully: a Lessons and Carols service, Sunday morning worship, teaching on spiritual practices that can be helpful in deepening our faith as we "prepare the way of the Lord."

Today, I was reading the passages assigned to today in the Daily Office lectionary, and one of the passages hit me -- Revelation 3:14-22.  Specifically, these verses struck me: "Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.  Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me" (vv. 19-20).  For perhaps the first time this season, I asked myself the question, "Would I be ready... if He came today?"

The answer is simple: nope.  It's so easy for me to get caught up in the daily churchy things I do as part of my job, to the detriment of my own devotion.  So today, I take in the words of our Lord, "Be zealous and repent."  Lord, may I be ready for you.

BBC Book Challenge

I have always loved to read.  In fact, I won my very first trophy when I was still homeschooled -- kindergarden or first grade, maybe -- for reading over 10,000 pages in a certain amount of time.  My parents often read to my brother and me before bed, classics such as "Robert the Rose Horse" and "Goodnight Moon," along with the Bernstein bears and my personal favorite, "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" ("Dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum!").  When I got a little older, my mom still made the effort to read with me.  I remember reading through the Chronicles of Narnia together, Tuck Everlasting, a Wrinkle in Time, the Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.  I also remember that I got so caught up in the Hobbit (while still in elementary school), that I "cheated" and read ahead without her...  I just couldn't wait to find out what happened!

Eventually, of course, I got too old to be read to -- but my love of reading remained.  Literature classes were always my favorite classes, and I relished the opportunity to read fun books as part of class!  I fell in love with Cry, the Beloved Country, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, All Quiet on the Western Front, Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, even The Old Man and the Sea.  And, of course, outside of class I read for fun:  Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories, a lot of Agatha Christie novels, the Babysitters Club books, later Dorothy Sayers, other mysteries, plus reading my favorites over and over and over... (yes, I wore out my copy of The Lord of the Rings).

Now some of you Facebook fiends might remember the BBC Book Challenge that appeared in many people's notes a few weeks ago.  The notes listed 100 books of which the BBC thinks most people will only have read about 6, and it asked people to look through the list and highlight which ones they'd read (discussions appeared other places too: check out this link as an example).  When I first saw the notes, I'd read a little over 40 of the books -- woohoo!

However, I was captivated by this list of books I haven't yet read.  In fact, since the lists were first published, I've read two more of the listed books (The Handmaid's Tale and Brave New World).  So, I've been thinking...  why not just work my way through the rest of the books?  I love fiction -- no non-fiction to deal with here, thankfully -- and I love finding new things to read, so why not go for it?

So I'm going to go for it.  Today, I begin my quest to finish all 100 books on the list.  My next project: Catch 22.  I've started it, but never gotten into it.  So here goes nothing!

In case you're curious, here's the complete list -- the ones I've not read are in black, the ones I've read are in grey:

1. Pride and Prejudice
2. The Lord of the Rings
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee  
6. The Bible -
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurie
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaet Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno – Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables — Victor Hugo