The Beginning

My new project.

I started the old 9 to 5 a few weeks ago. My first foray into full-time employment has come with a number of consequences. These include being too tired to cook after work, too tired to go out after work, too tired to go to the gym after work...you get the picture. What I'm not too tired to do, however, is sit. Sit and read. The two go hand in hand.

I'm a big reader. When I was younger, I'd spend hours and hours reading books while my sisters played with their Barbies. In high school, I read every book assigned in English class. No Cliff's Notes for me. In college I was an English major, much to my Mom's chagrin, and I got to read a little bit of everything from Chaucer to Dickens to Austen to Shakespeare to Amy Tan to T.C. Boyle to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Neil LaBute. When I started law school, you're welcome Mom, the fiction fell to the wayside and was replaced by casebooks and outlines. Now that I'm starting my career at a relatively low pressure firm which lets me work normal working hours I have time again to go back to my old favorite pasttime.

Loving to read doesn't mean I'm good at picking out books to read. I read the fun stuff (Twilights, Harry Potters, The Southern Vampire novels). I read the old stuff (Age of Innocence, Persuasion, Les Miserables). Now I'm trying to read the good stuff. So in an attempt to get a well-rounded selection of books that are worth reading, I'm looking to Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time to give it to me.

I decided I'm going to read my way through The Novel 100 because I realize that even though I'm an avid reader many of the classics, both old and new, have eluded me. I tend to read Victorian literature, novels about girls looking to marry and the men who take advantage of them. Lacking in my reading history are the great adventure novels, the novels about war and morality, the novels I just haven't heard of. So this is me remedying these omissions.

I picked this particular list because it seems to be the most well-rounded. Times list of Top 100 Novels only goes back to 1923. The Guardian's list is too British. This list contains most of the books on these lists and other top 100 novels lists I've perused.

I won't go in order and I won't give myself a set time period to accomplish this. Realistically, I know I can't read 100 books in one year, so I'll give myself however long it takes. Here I go. Read along with or read my thoughts or do both. I'll just be here, reading and thinking.