Library

New Year's Resolution 2012: DON'T BUY ANY NEW BOOKS.

It took two hesitant weeks from the inception of this idea in my brain to the first time I said it out loud to someone else; that's how much I love to buy books, and how skeptical I was of my ability to quit the habit. I don't believe that buying books is bad; quite the opposite. But I buy books (often several at once) and then get distracted and forget to go back and read them. I have rearranged a bookshelf in my apartment to hold all the books I have bought over the years and never read, and my hope is that I can use this year to get through a fair number of them.

I'm currently reading:
How to be a Writer, by Barbara Baig
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, by Jenni Ferrari-Adler
Closing the Food Gap, by Mark Winne

My 2012 Bookshelf:

Classics:
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, by Dante Alighieri
Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto
The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
Candide, by Voltaire

Fiction:
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins (finished January 2012)
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
Stern Men, by Elizabeth Gilbert 
True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver 
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl
The Oil Jar and Other Stories, by Luigi Pirandello
Loveless Love, by Luigi Pirandello  
The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

Poetry:
Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mortal Beauty, God's Grace, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Selected Poems, by Karl Shapiro

Religion and Philosophy:
Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo (finished January 2012)
Jesus for President, by Shane Claiborne
Reclaiming Catholicism, ed. Thomas H. Groome & Marcus J. Daley
In the Presence of Our Lord, by Benedict J. Groeschel
The Ragamuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning
Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, by Brant James Pitre
The Exceptional Seven Percent, by Gregory K. Popcak
The Holy Longing, by Ronald Rolheiser
Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux
Mary and the Christian Life, by Amy Welborn

Food/Travel:
The Physiology of Taste, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
My Life in France, by Julia Child
Roast Figs Sugar Snow, by Diana Henry
Slow Food, by Carlo Petrini
Real Food, by Nina Planck

Nonfiction:
Escaping Into the Open, by Elizabeth Berg
The Americanization of Edward Bok, by Edward Bok
The Librettist of Venice, by Rodney Bolt
Manhattan, when I was Young, by Mary Cantwell
Women Who Kept the Lights, by Mary Louise Clifford
Seaworthy, by Linda Greenlaw
Bees in America, by Tammy Horn
Unplanned, by Abby Johnson
One Day, All Children, by Wendy Kopp
One Boy's Boston, by Samuel Eliot Morison
From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, by Richard Ruland