Category: Books and Reading
“Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This week I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, through the Hardcore Literature Book Club with Benjamin McEvoy. This will be my first novel of magical realism and my first real foray into Latin American literature. It’s refreshing to have this new literary territory to explore. My initial plan is to simply let the novel do its...
Welcome to 2025, and a new year of reading. Before moving forward into a new year I like to reflect on last year’s books, looking for patterns, appreciating blessings, and choosing my ten favorite reads. As I look back over the books I read in the last twelve months, what stands out more than anything else is that, for me, 2024 is a testament to the value of rereading. Half of the books I read last year were rereads. And among my top ten books of 2024 are...
I am rereading Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and this line jumped out at me today as Thoreau was describing the house he built for his time at Walden Pond: I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long… Ten feet wide by fifteen long. 150 square feet. I got curious about how big that was, so I measured the room I am in right now, my home office/library. It measures twelve feet wide by thirteen feet long, or 156 square feet —...
The 2025 Chapter-a-Day Read-along has been announced at its new home! Be sure to visit ChapteraDayReadalong.com to get all the details about the 2025 American Masterpieces Chapter-a-Day Read-Along. It’s going to be epic!
The Chapter-a-Day Read-Along has a new home! After seven years of hosting the read-along here at One Catholic Life, I’ve decided to give it its own home at ChapteraDayReadAlong.com so that people can find it and follow along more easily, especially considering that the 2025 Chapter-a-Day Read-Along will be announced soon. ChapteraDayReadAlong.com will be the new main hub, and you can always find the latest reading schedules and articles there. I’ve transferred all the past read-along articles from One Catholic Life to this new website, so everything is...
When 2023 began, I did not expect that two books I read would become two of my favorite books of all time. But that is exactly what happened. I also did not expect to read so many books, since my resolution last year was to slow down and savor books more deeply. But sixteen of the books I read were plays by Shakespeare as I began an attempt to read all of his plays in the order in which they were written. I was not as pleased as...
Today marks the end of our year-long reading of nearly all of George Eliot’s novels. By reading a chapter a day, we finished Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Looking back over the past year, I have to admit that this year’s challenge was more difficult for me than past years. Eliot is a more challenging writer than I expected, and some of the chapters were a bit too long for a daily reading. Still, now that I have read...
The 2024 Fantasy Classics Chapter-a-Day Read-along begins in just a couple of days and it’s time to get ready to enter our first fantastical world, the enchanted land of Narnia. I hope you’ve been able to track down a copy of The Chronicles of Narnia either in the single volume edition or as a box set of individual books. Our journey to Narnia begins with The Magician’s Nephew, a prelude to the series that unveils the origins of Narnia and sets the stage for the rest of the...
Welcome to the official sign-up post for a very special 2024 Chapter-a-Day Read-along! This year we we will be reading some of the most beloved modern classics in all of literature: The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and the entire Harry Potter series. All three series are in the top ten of the PBS list of America’s 100 most-loved books, and are adored by readers the world over. And, since 2024 is a leap year, we get an extra day to read! Long-time participants will notice...
The George Eliot Chapter-a-Day Read-along continues this week with a book that some call the greatest novel in the English language, Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life. I have wanted to read Middlemarch for many years, having started it several times, but I was never able to make it very far. A book like Middlemarch is exactly the reason I began the chapter-a-day read-alongs, and I look forward to finally engaging with Eliot’s masterpiece. If you’ve been following this year’s reading schedule, then you know that tomorrow you...
With the new year beginning today it’s time for my annual list of favorite reads from the previous year. As I look back on 2022, I see that I definitely did not stick to my plan to read books from my greatest books list. Nonetheless, I still had a fruitful year of reading. My intention was to begin with a re-read of the Iliad and the Odyssey and then move on to other epics like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, but my reading philosophy began to change in...
It’s been over fourteen months since we first began our journey with D’Artagnan and the rest of his musketeer friends, and today we reach the end of their story. Even though I finished my first reading of the series just three years ago, I still enjoyed reading it again, especially getting to revisit such interesting and noble characters. One of the things I appreciate most about the them is how they stayed true to their friendship even when they were on opposite sides politically. Looking back over my...
