888

Knocking around the blogging world is the 888 Challenge: Pick 8 books in 8 categories to read in 2008 (Six overlapping books are allowed). I don't even pretend that I am going to read all of these books in 2008, but it was fun to write out the list.

Books to read with the Kids
A Children’s Greek Myths
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
A Children’s Odyssey
A Children’s Illiad
Little House in the Big Woods
All of a Kind Family by Sidney Taylor
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary

Americana
O Pioneers by Willa Cather
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn*
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Moby Dick by Melville
Walden by Thoreau*
Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac Mccarthy*
Cannery Row by Steinbeck

Non-Fiction
Tolstoy by A.N. Wilson
A Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis
The Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin
Walden by Thoreau *
God’s Playground: A History of Poland by Davies
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton*
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn*


Poets
John Donne
Yeats
Ted Hughes
Emily Dickinson
William Carlos Williams
Lord Byron
Seamus Heaney
Pablo Neruda

Short Stories
Chekhov: The Complete Short Novels
Carried Away: A selection by Alice Munro
The Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
Walk in the Light and Twenty Three Tales by Tolstoy
The Complete Shorter Fiction by Virginia Woolf
The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
The Complete Stories by Kafka*
Short Stories by Dorothy L. Sayers

Books that I am Afraid Of Reading
Ulysses by James Joyce
Herodotus: The Histories
To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
Lolita by Nabakov*
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
As I lay Dying by Faulkner
Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin

Religion
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong
How to Read the Bible by James Kugel
Walking on Water: Reflection on Faith and Art by Madeiline L’Engle
Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton
Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile
The Power of Myth by Joseph Cambpell
The World of Tibetan Buddhism by Dalai Lama

European Fiction
Ulysses by James Joyce*
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
The Master and Margartia by Bulgakov
The Mill and the Floss by George Eliot
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Jeeves Omnibus by P.G. Wodehouse
The Complete Stories by Kafka
The Idiot by Dosteovsky