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Saturday, January 5, 2008

Reading Wrap-Up 2007

I thought it was high time I wrapped up the reading lists for 2007 and moved on.

This past year was the first year in many that I made a deliberate choice to read! I am somewhat stunned at the difference it made! Levi and I read many chapter books together. I will cherish those memories for a lifetime. Some of my books were humorous, some informative, some stretched my literary skills.

The Spring Reading Challenge was the first time I had made a specific list of books to read within a specific frame of time. It felt so good to get most of those books read and move forward with the Summer Reading Challenge. I again enjoyed the deliberate reading and decided to make my Autumn Intentional Reading List, even though Seasonal Soundings was no longer hosting a challenge. I finished all of the books on my list, other than The Closing of the American Mind and Much Ado About Nothing, and added one or two additional selections.

The Final List of Books Read in 2007:

A Year With C.S. Lewis
A Pioneer Sampler by Barbara Greenwood
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson
Belles on Their Toes by Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
Maggie Rose: Her Birthday Christmas by Ruth Sawyer
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Beecher Preachers by Jean Fritz
Babe the Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain
Homer Price by Robert McCloskey
The Family Pilgrim's Progress by Jean Watson/John Bunyan
A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levison
The Moffats by Eleanor Estes
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Down the Garden Path by Beverly Nichols
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan/Helen L. Taylor
Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss
Honey for a Woman's Heart by Gladys Hunt
Ben and Me by Robert Lawson
I Dared to Call Him Father by Bilquis Sheikh
The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright
How to Photograph Your Baby by Nick Kelsh
Marva Collins' Way by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
The Art of Civilized Conversation by Margaret Shepherd
The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Cricket in Time Square by George Selden
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
She's Gonna Blow! by Julie Ann Barnhill
Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It by Robert Fulghum
The Little French Girl by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon

(I've attempted to link each book to my book review where available.)

Whew! Seventeen of the books listed above were stories that I read aloud to Levi. It is incredible having that shared landscape in our imaginations.

In the next few days I'll be posting my book lists for 2008, and soon I will get around to finishing my favorite books list which I have not forgotten but has been shoved down the priority list recently.

2 comments:

Renee said...

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! What an accomplishment! I'm just striving to read 1 book a month (not including books with the children)! Can't wait to see your booklist for the year. Maybe I'll read a few!

Heidi said...

Thank you. It felt so great to start reading and thinking again.

I'm really excited at the books I've picked out for this next year. I know I won't be able to read them all, but it helps me so much to have a visual list of what I hope to strive for!