Tagged: Hardcore Literature Book Club
“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...
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...
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...
