Introducing the reading project

So it's that time of year when people start making all kinds of ridiculous resolutions.  We’ve never been too big on that but do like to give the coming year some consideration and think about things we might like to accomplish.  Ernie usually likes to “name” the year.  He's had "the year of getting organized" and "the year of fewer material possessions" (less junk.)  I liked his concept and have had "the year of no indiscriminate television watching" which I was somewhat successful at.  The key is we don't say we are absolutely, positively going to do something or other, we just try to give it our best shot.

In contemplating 2011 I thought it might be time to read some of "those" books. We all hear about “the Great Books” the classics, the best novels, the books we should all read... You know, the ones you are always reading about on lists of the greatest books ever, the ones you wouldn't think about picking up except as assigned reading in school, the ones that are hundreds of pages long and probably over your head or really boring or really pretentious or might actually provoke you into thinking about something besides yourself!  

We wondered: Why?  Why should people read these books?  What makes them great? How do they get on those lists? Are they really worth reading?  Can “regular” folks get something out of the experience? 

Over the next twelve months, we will take many of these well-known but possibly little-read books and try to answer those questions.  Don’t expect a rehashing or condensing of the story and don’t look for artistic criticism.  We will simply tell you about our experience, if we think the book is significant, why it is significant and (most importantly) should you invest your time in reading it?  We’ll also look at other opinions about the book in question and hopefully put it into context for both the time it was written and today.

Well, you have to start some place so our jumping off point for compiling a list of books we wanted to read this year was the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century according to the Board at Modern Library and Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels list.  You can take a look at these lists here: http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/ and here: http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/radcliffes-rival-100-best-novels-list/  
You'll notice if you take a look, that in addition to the Modern Library Board’s picks they have included a list of reader’s picks.  Just to be clear we totally ignored this for the purpose of compiling our own list and if you take a quick look at it I'm sure you will see why.  With the exception of To Kill a Mockingbird and possibly 1984 the top ten books on the list showed there was definitely a select demographic repeatedly voting this list in and I'm not sure what they were smoking.

You may expect a post from us once a week at most!  We've got a lot of reading to do!

Next time: We’ll share the list we compiled and talk about how we decided on our must reads.