A List of Ten

So, in no particular order, here are my ten choices from the 1% Well-Read Challenge. I won't be able to start reading until after early June. Until then, I guess I'll just gather books and wait impatiently.

What I'll be reading:
1. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Ismail Kadare
2. Small Remedies, Shashi Deshpande
3. Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters (and then I get to rent the min-series!)
4. Pereira Declares: A Testimony, Antonio Tabucchi (I may have read this one already. If not, I have it in Italian, and the challenge will be to read it in the original language.)
5. An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
6. The River Between, Ngugi wa Thlong'o
7. Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
8. The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing
9. In Sicily, Elio Vittorini
10. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

Bonus Prizes (if I get this far):
11. Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
12. Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth
13. Metamorphoses, Ovid (this, I admit, intimidates me.)

My choices are pretty haphazard, guided often more by the sound of a title than any knowledge of the author or the book itself. I wanted to be sure of a mix of male and female authors, with some geographic and chronological diversity. I also wanted to include some lighter fare (please!), and avoid violence involving children (since giving birth, I literally cannot get some disturbing images out of my head if I read or hear about them, which can cause the occasional sleepless night. I have decided that I simply don't need some things in my life at this point). Of the original list of 1001, I have read 93 books. There are many more that I would like to add to this list, and if I get through these, I may do that. However, a few of these have defeated me before (well, maybe just Metamorphoses), and the choice to include one book read in the original (non-English) language is not as pretentious as it might first seem. Given my bachelor's major in Italian Language and Literature, one book, in modern Italian at that, should not be as challenging as Sostiene Periera may end up being. If I have read it already, I may substitute Il Leopardo, by Lampedusa.

I've been meaning to get to this list all weekend. Weekend time is at such a premium, however, that here it is, Sunday night, and I'm keeping my hubby up to finish my blog post. We had family over today, which is always lovely, but sends me into a tizzy of cleaning and worrying over the state of our house. With my family, I really should know better. But I do it anyway, and then they get here and offer to help me clear the laundry off the couch and set the table and entertain the urchins. There are times when I think that living elsewhere might be nice, or that my general wanderlust gets the better of my and I just want to pick up and experience a different place. And then we have family over, and I see the faces I've know all my life, different now, and experience the joy, belonging and sweet frustration of family. Now is not the time for elsewhere; it is the time for making the effort to be here.

Happy Mothers' Day.