Worthwhile Reading Challenge 2009

DHM is sponsoring a Worthwhile Reading Challenge and I’m taking her up on it because I have several books I’ve started but not finished in the last few years, or have been planning on reading but simply haven’t for one reason or another. I’m also including a few not-too-hard-but-still-worthwhile books in the list because this looks likes it’s going to be a busier-than-usual year for me.

Not listed in any particular order, except for the first one, which I’m reading right now.

1: The Story of French by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow; Christmas gift; interesting reading on a subject that’s completely new to me — the life and times of the French language

2: Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education by James Taylor; recommended by Cindy

3: Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education by David Hicks; ditto

4: The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century by RH Tawney; mentioned by Alan Carlson in Third Ways

5: Liturgy and Personality: The Healing Power of Formal Prayer by Dietrich Von Hildebrand; I think this one was recommended in Chronicles magazine; birthday present

6: Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought by Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences; I’ve started this book two or three times at least and never gotten farther than the first couple of chapters

7: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson; ditto

8: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman; another Cindy recommendation, another started and not finished

9: Parents and Children, book two of Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series — I read the first book, Home Education, last year and learned a lot from it; wish I’d read it fifteen years ago!

10: My Antonia by Willa Cather; Eldest Daughter received this for Christmas but I’ve never read it before

11: Descent into Hell, a Novel by Charles Williams, one of CS Lewis’s cronies

12: All Flesh Is Grass by Gene Logsdon; raising animals on pasture

As you can see — only two of these are novels and that’s because I mostly read novels. This year I read all of Jane Austen and all of Dorothy Sayers (except for the short stories), plus about a dozen Agatha Christies, Lewis’s Space Trilogy, some Wendell Berry, and I don’t remember what else. I lost the notebook with my list early in the year and never started another one, so I can’t even use my booklog to remind me!