Goal: Read 12 Novels in 2010

Currently Reading: #4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

When I was in the second grade, I went to an event at Logos Bookstore in Oak Park, Illinois, where Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, read and spoke.  Some of my classmates and I got to meet her after the event and ask questions.  I asked her what advice she had for young writers and I remember, to this day, her answer:

"Read.  Read and read and read and read and read.  And write."

I realized that, though I've been writing more than ever, I've fallen down on that reading part, particularly when it comes to novels.  I manage to read lots of short stuff - stories, essays, news - but a lot of times I'll pick up a novel, read the first 100 pages, then put it down and not pick it up again.  So, inspired by a colleague's list of the books she'd read in 2009, I decided at the end of January to read 12 novels this year.

My general plan is to try to knock off a novel every 3 weeks or so, in order to have 11 novels read by sometime in October, then use the last part of the year to read a long work, like Infinite Jest or Underworld. I'm going to keep this front and center here so that my readers (Hi Mom!) can see where I'm at and, hopefully, keep me on track.  Here are my lists:

Read So Far:

1. Wicked by Gregory Maguire (approx. end of February)
2. The Hours by Michael Cunningham (re-read, approx. end of March)
3. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (April 24)

Possibilities for the rest:

• Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever
• At Swim, Two Birds by Flann O'Brien
• At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion (re-read)
• 1984 by George Orwell (re-read)
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• Tinkers by Paul Harding
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
• Gilead by Marilyn Robinson
• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
• Underworld by Don DeLillo
• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (re-read)
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Fruits of the Earth by Andre Gide
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (re-read)
• 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and finally get past the first 50 pages)
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