Systematic Student:
fill in the gaps

I was reading April's blog, Good Books & Good Wine, and she mentioned in a post of hers reading a particular book because of a Fill in the Gaps project. Intrigued, I browsed through her blog to see what it meant. A few days later, I stumbled across this blog, The Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project that talks about the challenge a little more, because it's specifically about this challenge.

I like this idea a lot. There's a lot of books/authors out there that I feel a little bit like a failure at life because I've never read. There are definitely a lot of gaps in my reading repertoire, many books I really want to read (whether I'm interested in the book itself, or merely so I can haughtily say, Why yes, I have read that.) and I like this challenge, because it gives me focus, as well as a time line. And, since I'm putting it on my blog, that's like, commitment.

So, the 'rules' are a little loose, and open to personal interpretation, but I'm going with pretty much what they laid out on the blog — 100 'missing' books read within the next 5 years. Although, since it's almost December now, I'm going to give myself until December of 2015, so I guess I'm snitching an extra 2 days. I'm committing to reading this whole list within the next 5 years. We'll see how that goes!:) If any of you are participating in this, I'd love to see what you are reading/ the progress you are making!

So, thanks April, for being my inspiration.

My list of 100 'missing' books, to remedy the fact that I'm almost a literary failure: (*= books I own)

1. The Return of the King — J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Harriet the Spy — Louise Fitzhugh*
3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — Ken Kesey*
4. White Fang — Jack London*
5. The Illiad — Homer
6. The Divine Comedy — Dante*
7. On the Road — Jack Kerouac
8. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte*
9. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen* (or any Austen minus Pride and Prejudice)
10. Frankenstein — Mary Shelley*
11. The Mists of Avalon — Marion Zimmer Bradley
12. The Handmaid's Tale — Margaret Atwood*
13. The Shining — Stephen King
14. A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess
15. American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
16. Flowers for Algernon — Daniel Keyes
17. Ramona Quimby, Age 8 — Beverly Cleary
18. Blubber — Judy Blume
19. I am the Cheese — Robert Cormier
20. A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway* (Or The Sun Also Rises*)
21. Uncle Tom's Cabin — Harriet Beecher Stowe*
22. Stargirl — Jerry Spinelli
23. Anthem — Ayn Rand
24. After the Rain — Norma Fox Mazer*
25. The Stand — Stephen King
26. Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell
27. Pigs in Heaven — Barbara Kingsolver*
28. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner*
29. King of the Wind — Marguerite Henry*
30. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens* (Or any other Dickens minus A Christmas Carol)
31. Homeland — R.A. Salvatore
32. O. Henry's Stories — O. Henry (at least one collection)*
33. Our Town — Thornton Wilder*
34. Candide — Voltaire*
35. Pygmalion — George Bernard Shaw*
36. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
37. The Screwtape Letters — C.S. Lewis*
38. The Shipping News — Annie Proulx*
39. Wicked — Gregory Maguire
40. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter — Carson McCullers*
41. The Road — Cormac McCarthy
42. Watership Down — Richard Adams
43. The Golden Compass — Phillip Pullman*
44. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle — Hugh Lofting*
45. The Story of Mankind — Hendrik Van Loon*
46. Black Beauty — Anna Sewell
47. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett*
48. Anne of Green Gables — L.M. Montgomery
49. Sabriel — Garth Nix
50. The Princess and the Goblin — George MacDonald
51. In the Forests of the Night — Amelia Atwater Rhodes
52. The Cider House Rules — John Irving*
53. The Winter's Tale — William Shakespeare (substitute possible)
54. Howl's Moving Castle — Diana Wynne Jones
55. Ender's Game — Orson Scott Card
56. The Glass Castle — Jeannette Walls
57. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — Betty Smith
58. A Little Princess — Frances Hodgson Burnett*
59. The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame
60. Middlesex — Jeffry Eugenides
61. The Secret Life of Bees — Sue Monk Kidd*
62. Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden*
63. War of the Worlds — H.G. Wells*
64. Beloved — Toni Morrison
65. Nineteen Minutes — Jodi Picoult (Substitute Picoult book possible)
66. East of Eden — John Steinbeck*
67. The Five People You Met in Heaven — Mitch Albom*
68. The Knife of Never Letting Go — Patrick Ness
69. Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
70. Dealing with Dragons — Patricia C. Wrede
71. Among the Hidden — Margaret Peterson Haddix
72. The Book of Three — Lloyd Alexander
73. The Lightning Thief — Rick Riordan
74. Rebecca — Daphne Du Marier*
75. The Jungle — Upton Sinclair*
76. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
77. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
78. My Name is Asher Lev — Chaim Potok
79. The Thirteenth Tale — Diane Setterfield*
80. Man's Search for Meaning — Victor Frankl
81. Trumpet of the Swan — E.B. White*
82. Twenty Boy Summer — Sarah Ockler*
83. An Abundance of Katherines — John Green
84. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez (or Love in the Time of Cholera)
85. The (Unabridged) Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
86. The Ropemaker — Peter Dickinson*
87. Inkheart — Cornelia Funke
88. The Mysterious Benedict Society — Trenton Lee Stewart
89. Milkweed — Jerry Spinelli
90. Freakonimics — Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner*
91. Mother Night — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.*
92. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain*
93. Oedipus Rex — Sophocles*
94. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostevsky*
95. The Last of the Mohicans — James Fenimore Cooper*
96. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — Alexander Solzhenitsyn*
97. The Perilous Gard — Elizabeth Marie Pope
98. Tam Lin — Pamela Dean
99. 84, Charing Cross Road — Helene Hanff
100. Twelfth Night — William Shakespeare

Read: 3/100
Need to Read: 97/100

The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon was awarded the very first Newbery Medal in 1922. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to read and own every Newbery Award Winner. Given that this won the first Newbery, I was excited to read it, even though I had heard some less than favorable things about the writing.

Let me first admit that I skimmed a vast majority of this book. I started the book with the full intention of reading everything as normal, but it didn't take long for me to realize that I would never get through the book if I tried to read without skimming.

The one positive thing I can say about this book is that Hendrik van Loon took on an impossibly difficult topic. He tried to fit the entire history of mankind into one book. This must have taken huge amounts of time and research, and I give the man props for that. However, that is about the positive thing I can say about the book.

While reading, it is painfully obvious that van Loon thinks himself to be terribly witty and clever, but he's not. At all. He's dry and dull and tries too hard to be entertaining, instead of just letting the history tell itself.

I was also rather confused at the way he broke up history, and what time periods he gave more weight to. In a book that only has 485 pages to talk about the entire history of mankind from when we were amoebas until the 1920s, there are only a few pages to talk about different parts of history. But why would you spend 4 pages on Ancient Egypt and 13 on chivalry in the Medieval Era?! This feels a bit backwards to me.

Overall, this is not a book I'd recommend. The only reason I read it was so that I could complete the Newbery list, and I admit to feeling a huge sense of accomplishment now that it's done. But man, was it a struggle to get through.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner is a book that's been sitting on my shelf for about 3 years now. It was a text book for one of my Political Science classes in college. This book was used entirely for in class discussion. All of my classes that semester had a large reading load, and this one didn't seem as important to get read as the actual texts and published articles.

I read the first 3 chapters along with the class, before I prioritized (well, probably more like got lazy) and set it on the back burner. But, I enjoyed the book and the information it presented, and I've always planned to go back and read it. So, I added it to my Fill-in-the-Gaps list, and on my list for Adam's TBR Challenge, over at Roof Beam Reader.

I liked this book. A lot. The writing is mostly smooth, and the questions asked and the information presented is readable, entertaining, and interesting. Levitt is a somewhat unorthodox economist, claiming he isn't very good with numbers, and the traditional economic subjects don't interest him too much. He'd much rather decipher why drug dealers still live with their mothers if they are all supposed to be rich, or whether or not your name can really make a difference in your future careers. Dubner is a journalist who interviewed Levitt. They liked working together, and decided to collaborate on a book, detailing some of the studies and analysis they did to answer some of these questions.

I liked that the questions asked were a little unusual, but also relevant and pertinent to life. Economics can be broken down into the study of incentives, and it's interesting to note what they believe to be highly motivating. Incentives aren't always monetary. They can also be social, and moral. These incentives are often connected. Breaking apart or changing these incentives give us an added insight into human behavior, and why people do what they do. I don't know that I agree with everything they theorize about in this book, but I can say that they have done a very thorough job with their research, and it was never dull.

It's not a book for everyone, but then — I don't think much non-fiction is. But, this is a book that will make you think a little differently about the world and ask a new set of questions, even if it only happens while actually reading the book. I'm glad I finally finished this one. It was definitely worth it.

Have any of you read this book, or their blog? What do you think?