Since I somehow missed "spring cleaning" all together this year. I've decided to do a major fall cleaning, and in walking around the house to see what I wanted to tackle first I have noticed something about the rooms in my house. There are books everywhere. There are books stacked in my room. There are books, neatly put away in her bookshelf in Sophia's room. There are stacks of recently purchased books in the kitchen . There are books on the shelves in the living room and in the foyer, books on my book shelf (which is quickly filling up, I'm all ready doubled up on some shelves). There is a huge box of very old books in my foyer closet that was given to me that I have yet to go through and find a home for. I'm thinking these will get a new shelf all their own, and then there are books in storage that I've been meaning to get at for years.
I do have quite a few books, but I rarely buy "new" books. I shop at thrift stores, goodwill, yard sales, flea markets, antiques shops, used book stores, library book sales and ebay. I rarely pay more than a dollar for any book. I occasionally shop on amazon.com if I need or want a book that I can't find around here. The only books I regularly buy new are my daughter's books as they are sometimes hard to find used.
So as part of my fall cleaning I am going to do an inventory of all the books in the house, and yes of course make a list. I would eventually like to catalogue edition and date of publication, but that will have to wait for another time. For now, I'm going to list title and author, and since I'm doing all this work anyway I thought I might as well blog about it.
I'm starting with the top shelf today which is mostly classics. I have by no means read all of these books, but I hope to one day. I may find out that several of them are over my head, but I'll give it a try anyway. I'll put an asterisk in front of the titles I've read.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (I've read a lot of Shakespeare but not all)
*Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
*One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
*All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
*As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Sound in the Fury by William Faulkner
Light in August by William Faulkner
*The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
*The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
*Immortal Poems: Edited by Oscar Williams
*King Soloman's Mines by Rider Haggard
*Allan Quatermain by Rider Haggard
*Heidi by Johanna Spyri
*The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
*The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Ambassadors by Henry James
*The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
*The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
*Billy Bud by Herman Melville
*One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*Grand Ole Opry Picture History Book (This one's a bit out of place here, but it's on the top shelf)
*The Impressionists: Steven Adams (art book with lovely pictures!)
*Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
*The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Evangeline and other poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Adam Bede by George Eliot
The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough
Paradise Lost & Paradise Revisited by John Milton
2001 a space odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories by Voltaire
The Divine Comedy Vol. 1 Inferno by Dante
A Collection of Critical Essays by D.H. Lawrence
*The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson
*Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Tolkien Reader by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
The Politics of Experience by R.D. Lang
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
St. Maur and the Man Who Died by D.H. Lawrence
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The American by Henry James
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Hamlet by Shakespeare
As You Like It by Shakespeare
The Odyssey by Homer
So there's the top shelf (55 books). More classics to come later! I love having books around the house. They just make me happy.
Here are a few quotes about books that I think go along with today's blog post...
"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
—
Mark Twain
(Source:
www.goodreads.com)
"Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
—
Mark Twain
(Source:
www.goodreads.com)
"I cannot live without books."
—
Thomas Jefferson
(Source:
www.goodreads.com)
