D's Reading Plans for 2013

Hello all! I'm super excited for several reasons. First off, finals are over and it's Christmas Break! Additionally, S and her husband N finally made it home last night. I'm so so so glad they're in town, I simply wish that I could spend more time with them. Whatevs, S is probably tired of me already.

Lastly, I'm excited because it's almost time for a new year. I'm normally not overly sentimental about the calendar, but 2013 will bring many important things for me: I'll get my driver's permit, I'll go on my first airplane to my first destination outside the U.S. on my first mission trip, and I'll get to enter the joy (and by joy I mean utter disaster) that is junior year. More relevant to this blog, however, it'll also be a year of classics: everything that I read will be a literary classic, with exception of sister reads (so you don't have to be bored, never fear) or the unlikely event that I finish everything on the list.

You must be thinking, "now why on Earth would D do this to herself?" Well, it mostly has to do with the fact that I call myself a literature nerd and yet there are so many important books I haven't read. Chick lit and YA mystery thrillers are of course important to read, but the classics aren't dead, either! I really do want to read them, and this gives me the opportunity to do it all at once.

Below you'll find my current list of must-reads for 2013. Feel free to make suggestions, so long as they are considered a part of the major literary canon. Also, not Pride and Prejudice. S and I may not have everything in common, but our unmeasured hatred of that particular book is our greatest bond. I can bear watching a bit (and only a bit, mind you) of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a Youtube series that takes a modern spin on P&P. That's as close as I'll ever get. So yeah, not Pride and Prejudice.

Anyway, here's the list. There are several books on here (like Little Women and The Great Gatsby that I attempted to read when I was younger and they were either too much for me to understand or too boring  at the time. These are in no particular order:

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
3. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
7. 1984 by George Orwell
8. Animal Farm by George Orwell
9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
12. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
13. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
14. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
15. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
16. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
17. Silas Marner by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
18. Middlemarch by George Eliot
19. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Quite an extensive list, I'll say! It would be nice to have an even twenty, though...hmm, could YOU be the one to help me out?

That's all for now! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and whatever else you celebrate, I hope it goes well for you too.
Bye now,
~D