I hope you all had a good Christmas. Most of our decorations are in boxes, which are hidden behind other boxes somewhere in our storage unit. So we had a sweet, simple Christmas this year.
That's a bay tree for a Christmas tree. And note the wood stacked under the fireplace. Most of that ended up in the last upstairs room that needed flooring. (And don't worry, that's a fake log in the fireplace.)
Normally, I would now post my Fifty Books Challenge list for 2011, but I realized that I had neglected to post a list for 2010. In part because I was more worried about moving and selling the house than blogging, and in part because I wasn't sure I had actually read fifty books. But by including some of the longer, more "word heavy" graphic novels I read, I just made fifty. 2011 will have to wait until the next post. Here's 2010.
Fiction
YA/Juvenile Nonfiction
Memoir
Collections (short stories, essays, etc.)
Drama
Poetry
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Dai Sijie (tran. by Ina Rilke)
- Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village—written by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Robert Bird
- The Literary Enneagram: Characters from the Inside Out—Judith Searle
- The Glass Castle: A Memoir—Jeannette Walls
- 1984—George Orwell
- Shriek: An Afterword—Jeff Vandermeer
- The Patron Saint of Liars—Ann Patchett
- Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth
- The Bible Cure for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue—Don Colbert
- Wide Sargasso Sea—Jean Rhys
- Early Irish Myths and Sagas—trans. by Jeffrey Gantz
- In Country—Bobby Ann Mason
- The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend—written by Marie Heaney, illustrated by P.J. Lynch
- The Color Purple—Alice Walker
- Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat—Gwen Cooper
- Murder in the Cathedral—T.S. Eliot
- The Stranger—Albert Camus
- The Messiah of Stockholm—Cynthia Ozick
- Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels—From Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe—Anthony Arthur
- One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Quiet American—Graham Greene
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—J.K. Rowling (audio book)
- A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
- Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader—Anne Fadiman
- 99 Poems in Translation—selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, and Geoffrey Godbert
- Moll Flanders—Daniel Defoe
- How Reading Changed My Life—Anna Quindlen
- The Reader—Bernhard Schlink (trans. by Carol Brown Janeway)
- The Complete Persepolis (graphic novel)— Marjane Satrapi
- Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood—bell hooks
- Longing: Stories of Racial Healing—Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz
- Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia—Elizabeth Gilbert
- Watchmen (graphic novel)—written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons
- Get Known Before the Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform—Christina Katz
- Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A.—Julia Alvarez
- Coraline (graphic novel)—written by Neil Gaiman, art by P. Craig Russell
- What Ever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? (graphic novel)—Brian Fies
- Wish You Well—David Baldacci
- Mushishi (Vol. 1)—Yuki Urushibara
- Smile (graphic novel)—Raina Telgemeier
- Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire—Ron Elliot (as told by Wayne Dammert)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neale Hurston
- Maus (graphic novel)—Art Spiegelman
- Sarah’s Key—Tatiana de Rosnay
- New Covenant Bound—T. Crunk
- The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel—Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere—ZZ Packer
- American-Born Chinese (graphic novel)—Gene Luen Yang
- The Art of Reading Poetry—Harold Bloom
- Watership Down—Richard Adams
Total:
22 fiction.
22 fiction.
11 non-fiction
7 memoir (though maybe Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? should be here too)
4 juvenile/YA (or 5, since Smile is a YA memoir)
3 collections
2 poetry collections
1 play
Out of those books 6 were graphic novels. (A medium I started exploring in 2010.) And 10 were on that literature list I like.
There were other things I read that were too short/word-light to make the list. I thought a few of these were worth mentioning:
There were other things I read that were too short/word-light to make the list. I thought a few of these were worth mentioning:
- A Day in the Life of Ireland: Photographed by 75 of the World's Leading Photojournalists on One Day, May 17, 1991—Collins Publishers
- Mouse Guard: Fall 1152—David Peterson (graphic novel)
- The Arrival—Shaun Tan (graphic novel/picture book)
It's a thrill to see our book on your list - hope you enjoyed reading it. Thanks for including us in your literary journey.
ReplyDeletePhyllis Unterschuetz
www.StoriesofRacialHealing.com
Phyllis, thank you for commenting. I did enjoy your book! You probably don't remember, but when I was in Kentucky I came to hear you and your husband at the McCracken County Library. I read many good books that year. But your book affected me in ways that I can still feel reverberating inside me, almost two years later.
ReplyDeleteOnly fifty books? pfft, lightweight! :P
ReplyDeleteAinaMoraiwe: Double :P!
ReplyDelete