books I've read

Anne Hawn's books

Who Moved My Cheese?
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
Scientific Secrets for Self-Control
Just One Damned Thing After Another
The Vanishing
Exercises in Knitting
The Good Dream
The Very Best of Edgar Allan Poe
The Chosen
BT-Kids' Knits
Talking God
The Professor
The Christmas Files
The Finisher
Home Decor for 18-Inch Dolls: Create 10 Room Settings with Furniture and 15 Outfits with Accessories
Dracula and Other Stories
A New Song
Christy
All Quiet on the Western Front
File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents


Anne Hawn Smith's favorite books »

I'm reading 150 Books

2019 Reading Challenge
2019 Reading Challenge 19614 members
<b>Are you ready to set your 2019 reading goal?</b> This is a supportive, fun group of people looking for people just like you. Track your annual reading goal here with us, and we have challenges, group reads, and other fun ways to help keep you on pace. There will never be a specific number of books to read here or pressure to read more than you can commit to. Your goal is five? Great! You think you want to read 200? Very cool! We won't kick you out for not participating regularly, but we'll love it if you do. Join us!

Books we've read

The Help
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The Night Circus
The Golden Compass
11/22/63
The Little Lady Agency
Catch-22
The Good Father
A Discovery of Witches
The Knife of Never Letting Go
Fahrenheit 451
Frankenstein
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
A Christmas Carol
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
The Color Purple
Matched
Cloud Atlas
The Princess Bride
The Catcher in the Rye


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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Ramblings

Another bit of my ramblings on The Catcher in the Rye discussion:

Books are deemed classics for a lot of reason one of which is that they speak to the human condition and give us insight into ourselves and/or mankind in general.

Somewhere around puberty, we learn to think abstractly.  Up until that point, we are limited by what we have experienced ourselves and we think that everyone experiences the same reality.  Somewhere around the 7th grade we begin to read literature that is more abstract and opens our minds up to a different reality.  We read books like Silas Marner , Great Expectations , An American Tragedy, Catcher in the Rye , and my favorite Of Human Bondage .

By reading books such as these, we learn more about the psychological and philosophical world we live in.  We learn to understand what human nature contains and why people and countries act the way they do. Criminal profilers do not like the serial killers they interview, but they interview them to learn about why they do what they do.

We might not like the characters, the language, or the settings of these books and find them boring even, but that isn't why they are studied.  We can change because of a book even if we don't like it.  I think that is why they are classics.

I try to read a lot of classics because I think they improve my understanding of myself and others.  When I come across a book that appears on most classics list and I don't like it and can't see the point, I feel sad.  There are a lot of people out there who are learning wonderful things, and I can't get it.  Lots of times I go on my library website to get the ebook copy of Cliff Notes or something similar to see if I can understand it.  I still struggle with Toni Morrison or Salmon Rushdi, so every few years, I try them again.  If all those people who are smarter and more well read than I am say that something is in this book that makes it a classic, I pretty much believe them, especially if the book has been around a long time.  If Catcher in the Rye has been on the classics list for this long, it has value even if I may not enjoy reading it.

This is a really good discussion and I wish I could quote some of the other posts here, but I can't, but here is a link to the discussions:

The Catcher in the Rye
Overrated Books

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