31 October

In honour of this month containing thirty-one days, I accordingly bought thirty-one books at our library's annual book sale. I have written out lists of books here before, but it occurs to me now that this might be terribly boring. But I'm too excited about having got them to refrain from listing anyway. If you are Terribly Bored, then I give you permission to skip this entry. But then you wouldn't know what I'd got, would you? And it is wonderful! Just look:

1. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe (all hardback unless specified)
2. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
3. Selected Prose and Poetry, Kipling
4. The Outline of History, H. G. Wells (four volumes)
5. My Antonia, Willa Cather (paperback)
6. O Pioneers!, Willa Cather (paperback)
7. Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats
8. Selected Poems, Essays, and Letters, Shelley
9. Wordsworth's Poetical Works
10. Selected Poetry, W.B. Yeats (paperback)
11. Barchester Towers, Trollope
12. Barchester Towers, Trollope (yes, I bought two. I now own three copies of this book!)
13. Popular Quotations for All Uses
14. The Monticello Cook Book
15. The Large Catechism, Martin Luther
16. Letters of Henry Adams, 1838-1891
17. Victorian & Later English Poets
18. English Romantic Poets
19. Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections with a Bibliography
20. Lives of Poets, Samuel Johnson (two volumes; including Dryden, Milton, Blackmore, &c.)
21. A Treasury of the World's Greatest Diaries (including Sir Walter Scott, Davy Crockett, Queen Victoria, Anne Frank, and Henry James)
22. Letter of J.R.R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by Humphrey Carpenter
23. Children's Book of Knowledge (twenty volume set)
24. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
25. The History of Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
26. Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding (paperback)
27. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
28. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
29. Richard Feverel, George Meredith
30. Selected Works of Alexander Pope
31. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

Isn't that great?! I was so excited to bring them all home! I just have to find a space for them now. I don't think they'll all fit in my current shelving system. *sigh* What a problem to have!

I wish I could tell you that I did the same thing with reading; that I read thirty-one books this month, but I didn't. I did get a fair number read though, mostly from my dystopian list. I won't list them all here--that would be list overload, I think! Here are the ones which struck me as worth reading again, or recommending to someone else:
-Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling. This is a good boy-book, and I enjoyed it very much.
-So Much More, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin. I read this at R & C's. I had already heard much of the material before, but it was good to hear again why God gave us fathers and what we are to do with them.
-Getting Serious About Getting Married, Debbie Maken. My favourite book this month, by far. Not celibate? = Get Married!
-Stories of the Old Dominion, John Esten Cooke. Yes! I finally finished reading it! I learned a lot from this book: I learned that I am ignorant, and I wish I weren't.

I ended up reading quite a bit more this month than the last few months combined, but it was mostly library reading, which I've decided to call 'Russian Roulette Reading'. The term has the advantage of alliteration. Feel free to use it whenever you can work it into conversation. Where was I? Oh, yes... You just never know what you're going to get. And I have to say, I am a tad bit disappointed in today's dystopian authors. I've read some 20-odd books and I can only recommend five of the authors. Two of those with reservations. Definitely disappointing. And Dystopia isn't the only genre suffering from lack of creative thinking and good writing. All I can think is, we'd better get started writing. We have some work to do.