10 Books to Read in 2013

[izhilzha]

So in 2011 I made a short, casual list of books I really wanted to get read that year. They got read. So in 2012, I made a list of ten and posted it here. If you check that post, you'll see that I only got 8 read, but that's because I started late in the year

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

Ooh, Merton's great (so is The Name of the Rose, but in a rather different way...)

[izhilzha]

I keep stumbling across Merton quotes that then define my life for the next few months, so I figured it was about time I actually started reading him properly. :)

[izhilzha]

Yeah, these lists tend to be a weird mix of stuff I've been meaning to read for years, new interesting things that I might otherwise forget, and recommendations (I'm reading "The Source" because my husband loved it.)

Grace for the Good Girl is something I discovered recently, and I've been a little nervous about reading, mostly because I don't like devotional books. But (cheating on the list just a bit) I've already read the introduction, and it... well. It has words for things I've never had anyone give me words for. It might be something you would find good.

I've read Perdido Street Station, which I found difficult but brilliantly crafted, and Un Lun Dun, which I ADORED. <3 I'm a sucker for scifi that deals with language, so Embassytown was an easy next choice, although my husband is keen for me to read The Scar.

[rose_in_shadow]

I've attempted to read both The Name of the Rose and Anna Karenina under the guise of "everyone needs to read them" and never could make it through.

[izhilzha]

Yeah, I'm a little worried about Anna, specifically; I've read War and Peace, but I don't like Tolstoy quite as much as Dostoevsky, so. I love me some Umberto Eco, though I expect it to take a couple of months to get through.

[superversive]

I believe you’ll find Valerie Frankel’s book a real treat. I met her at Mythcon while she was still working on it, and got all sorts of tantalizing information straight from the horse’s mouth. (Her ‘heroine’s journey’, by the way, describes the arcs of two major characters in The Eye of the Maker with uncanny accuracy. I was rather absurdly pleased to find that I had stumbled upon the same pattern myself by sheer trial and error.)

[izhilzha]

Yes, I'm very eager to read this one. I fully meant to read it last year, but other books somehow got in before it; I'm going to certainly review it at length here, and perhaps we can discuss!