What I was reading before The Classics Club

This is just a quick map of my last year, reading-wise:
  • On June 6 2011 I started reading the NET Bible in chronological order, using Bible Study Tools to mark off my progress.  I did this because I am an atheist in a family with some branches deeply into Christianity, and I wanted to be able to (truthfully) say, "why yes, I have in fact read the bible - cover to cover!"  
    - Best OT book: Ecclesiastes. Existential mullings which seems out of place in the OT.  
    - Worst OT: Levicticus. Mean-spirited.
    - Best NT: The Gospels
    - Worst NT: books written by Paul.  IIRC, he showed up and took over Christianity, adding in stuff that didn't seem very Christ-like. 
    - Most boring: Numbers and other books that are basically accounting
    - Most surprised to learn: Who of my family and friends couldn't discuss any part of the bible with me because they've NEVER read ANY of it, yet still identify as Christians. And have belonged to bible study groups!
    - Would I read it again? Yes, most of it, but next time I might try the KJV for the language, and I'd read the NT (gospels only) straight through, rather than chronologically. 
    Finished this on Dec 31st.
  • I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, pub. 1943, sort of a cross between A Little House on the Prairie and Angela's Ashes. I've been fond of poverty literature since I was a kid when Five Little Peppers, A Little Princess (aka Sara Crewe), The Railway Children, and A Girl of the Limberlost were some of my favourite books.  In fact, this sort of reading may have set me up well for my current lifestyle ;-).  Or sapped any material ambition, whatever.
  • The tv promos for the tv series Justified got me to read Elmore Leonard's Pronto, Riding the Rap, and When the Women Come Out to Dance (short stories, includes Fire in the Hole, which Justified is based on).  Very easy reads. I've bought his new one, Raylan, but haven't read it yet.
  • As soon as I finished the bible I started on the Maude's translation of War and Peace, just because I wanted something meaty and "worthy" to start the new year.  I enjoyed the scale and detail: I like to think it's the book version of viewing a Rembrandt, something I'll never get to do, but I can read War and Peace. That said, my interest petered out four chapters after the masterly narrative ended, so I still have eight chapters of Tolstoy's theory of history in the second epilogue to wade through. He's expostulating on why soldiers are willing to go to risk their own lives and murder other men they've never met to fight someone else's battle (but whose?), and if you've read the first fifteen books and the first epilogue, you know Tolstot's conclusion already.  Plus, I don't buy what he's selling (see first bullet point). My Kindle kept dropping from my hands as my eyelids closed and I drifted off to sleep.
  • By the time I'd decided I was finished with W&P, Feb 6th, I'd had the curtain idea, so I wanted the next book to be something that wouldn't embarrass me in years to come.  So I looked at lists of "best books" and decided on The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha in the John Rutherford translation.  I LOVED THIS BOOK!  It's just a delight.  It's not pretentious - there are fart and vomit jokes and plenty of fisticuffs.  Alonso Quijano has rotted his brain from reading too many rubbish books (exactly like my teachers said I would do when I was at college (high school in the US): Mills and Boon, if you must know) and transformed himself into his representative literary hero, Don Quixote.  He grabs a neighbour, Sancho Panza, to be the best squire ever and they embark on not one but two road trips.  The second sally is the better one (and meta to boot).  Finished March 6.
  • After War and Peace and Don Quixote I felt like I was really getting into the classics groove, and when I peeked at The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer, I was interested to see Don Quixote right at the beginning of the novels list, so I was off to a good start. The next one was The Pilgrims Progress, but after reading the Bible last year, I've had my fill of religion for now, so I skipped past that to Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and so that became the first book I read off my list for The Classics Club.

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