The Booking Through Thursday for today is one that I submitted:

Do you think any current author is of the same caliber as Dickens, Austen, Bronte, or any of the classic authors? If so, who, and why do you think so? If not, why not? What books from this era might be read 100 years from now?

I don’t have an answer for this one — which is one reason I asked the question. I guess one consideration is what defines a classic: what still speaks to people years later even though language, dress, mannerisms, culture, etc. has changed?

What do you think?

The Booking Through Thursday for today is:

Suggested by JM:

“Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation.

That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading.

Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?

Years ago I had a problem with self-discipline in reading, starting them only to abandon them, so I began to make myself finish any book I started (any book designed to be read through, of course — not something that was primarily reference or a “pick up and dip in” book.)

I think in our “easy entertainment” era, we can lay aside something that doesn’t “grab us” right away and miss a treasure. A lot of older books weren’t written in a style to “grab” the reader right off the bat: they laid a lot of foundation first before getting on to the story.

Also, usually any book I pick up is one I’ve checked on enough to think I am going to like it — even a recommendation from a close friend whose tastes are similar is not enough to make me go get a book without further checking into it. Since I got the book in the first place because I thought there was a good chance I would like it, I’m willing to give it a fair chance.

However, life is too short to read a bad book, and I have so many I want to get to that if a book is really doing nothing for me after a good chance, I would have no problem with laying it aside. I will lay it aside sooner if it is truly bad — morally or in its writing, etc. But if it is just boring, I tend to give it more of a chance. I don’t have an arbitrary number of chapters or pages that I go through before giving up on it, but if there comes a point when I feel I am wasting my time, it’s bye-bye, book.

There have been a few times I’ve given up on a book but tried it later and liked it. A Tale of Two Cities was like that. It took me at least three, maybe four tries before I got interested in it enough to finish, but once I did it became one of my favorite novels.

Here are the answer’s to yesterday’s Literary Meme:

1. The Princess Bride

2. Climbing by Rosalind Goforth

3. In the Arena by Isobel Kuhn

4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

1, 4, and 5 were guessed correctly. 2 and 3 were admittedly a little more obscure, but I have mentioned them on my blog before and I thought a certain segment of my readers might know or guess them.

Thanks for playing! If you do this let me know so I can come guess your answers.

I saw this at Janet’s Across the Page, who saw it at Deb on the Run — and you can trace it back from there if you’d like. I don’t know who originated it. But I thought it looked like fun.

1. Pick 5 of your favorite books.

2. Post the first sentence of each book. (If one sentence seems too short, post two or three!)

3. Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books.

I had to bypass a few favorites because a main character was in the first sentence, or, in a few biographies, the subject was named in the first sentence. And of course, A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorites but has one of the most famous opening lines ever. But here are five.

1. This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

2. The first picture can scarcely be called a memory; rather, let it be just a family legend.

3. “If you go to China, it will be over my dead body. I will never consent,” was my mother’s bitter remark.

4. In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.

5. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

In a couple of cases there is a verse or quote at the heading of the chapter, but I quoted the first line of the actual text of the book. And in one case the first line is part of the introduction, but the introduction to that book is an essential part of it.

You can leave your guesses in the comments, but you might want to try to bypass looking at the comments if you’re trying to guess.

Let me know if you do this as well. And if you want to test your knowledge of more first lines, I found a fun quiz here. I got a 90% even though I hadn’t read all of the books mentioned.

The folks at 5 Minutes For Books host What’s On Your Nightstand? the fourth Tuesday of each month in which we can share about the books we have been reading and/or plan to read. You can learn more about it by clicking the link or the button.

I finished The Missing, the second in the Seasons of Grace series by Beverly Lewis, A Surrendered Heart by Tracie Peterson and Judith Miller, the third in the Broadmoor Legacy series, and Dr. Frau: A Woman Doctor Among the Amish by Grace H. Kaiser, a non-fiction book about this doctor’s experiences among the Amish in the Lancaster, PA area for 28 years beginning in the 1950s. I enjoyed them all and posted a bit more about them here.

I also finished rereading Becoming God’s True Woman edited by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and am working on a review of it for another site. I will probably post a shorter review of it here later. I’d highly recommend it: it was excellent. Reviewed here.

I am currently reading My Heart Remembers by Kim Vogel Sawyer about three siblings separated after going West on an orphan train, and I have just barely started Home to Harmony by Phillip Gulley.

I’m not sure what will come next, but it will probably be something from my Fall Into Reading goals.

I’ve finished three books in the last couple of weeks, but for whatever reason haven’t felt inclined to do full-fledged reviews. But who knows — once I get going these may expand. 🙂 My intention, however, is just to mention a few things about these.

The Missing is the second in the Seasons of Grace series by Beverly Lewis. In the first book, the mother of the Amish Byler family, Lettie,  left without explanation one morning (no plot spoilers there — that was the main plot point of the book.) In this book she is still missing and the reasons are unfolded bit by bit. We see her search and her struggles and her family’s continued coping with the consequences and questions and confusion, particularly her husband and oldest daughter, Grace. The everyday running of the household falls largely to Grace. In the last book she broke her engagement to a young man as reserved and uncommunicative as her father. In this book, the boy who had previously shown interest in her friend is now showing interest in her, and at first she does not return his interest, but finds herself attracted to this Amishman with his unusual ways and chatty nature. Then there is Englisher Heather who has come to the area to seek natural methods for fighting cancer, not wanting to put herself through the torment and side effects of the lost battle her mother fought with the disease. She and Grace meet and form an unexpected but pleasant friendship.

Though some parts of the plot are somewhat predictable, the character development is intriguing. I enjoyed the book, as I do all of Beverly’s, and look forward to the final book due out in April.

A Surrendered Heart by Tracie Peterson and Judith Miller is the third in the Broadmoor Legacy series. Each book focused on one of three cousins from the wealthy Broadmoor family. In this book, Amanda has plans to go to college to study to become a doctor and in the meantime is working with a local doctor in her uncle’s “Home for the Friendless.” Her father arranges for her college application to be denied and makes plans for her to marry another wealthy man. Though he had expected her to do so all along, now his finances are in dire straits and he needs her to marry well, not only for the family’s reputation but out of necessity. Will his nefarious scheming catch up with him or will he get away with his wrongdoings? Meanwhile a cholera epidemic breaks out, confining Amanda to the Home for the Friendless under quarantine.

We see the other cousins’ relationships developing as well. I particularly appreciated the struggles shown between party-loving free spirit Sophie and her reserved, serious, minister husband. So many books end with the wedding, but I liked that the authors continued to show the struggles this couple would naturally have. I enjoyed this book as well.

Dr. Frau: A Woman Doctor Among the Amish by Grace H. Kaiser is a non-fiction book about this doctor’s experiences among the Amish in the Lancaster, PA area for 28 years beginning in the 1950s. Grace writes with humor and clarity as we follow along with her delivering babies at homes in blizzards and all kinds of other conditions and handling a variety of other needs. Her picture of Amish life is less idyllic than Beverly Lewis’s but no less appreciative.

I love her phrasing: “The last sticky pan hit the sink at half-past collapse time,” “The room hummed like bees in a June clover field.”

The only thing I didn’t like about this book her father’s response when Grace was tempted to stop pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor: “‘What do you want to do, let some man support you all your life?’ he asked with contempt.” That kind of attitude is a slap in the face to homemakers. Maybe he thought it would goad her on, I don’t know. But we do see glimpses into her family life and good-natured teasing with her husband about his staying in a warm bed when she had to make night calls.

I didn’t realize until I got to the end of this book that she had written another, Detour, about suffering an accident which left her disabled which in turn caused her to retire early. I immediately put it on my wish list!

(These reviews will be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

We’re moving in a couple weeks (the first time since I was 9 years old), and I’ve been going through my library of 3000+ books, choosing the books that I could bear to part with and NOT have to pack to move. Which made me wonder…

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain?

Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This would have described me for most of my life, by the way.)

And–when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) …what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore?  SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

I “weed it” every now and then, but not systematically — just whenever the excess stacked in double rows on shelves starts to bug me…like it is now. We just don’t have room for any more bookcases, and I hate the thought of putting them in the attic where bugs or humidity or temperature extremes might damage them, though I do have a few boxes of children’s books up there that I hope stay in good condition for grandchildren. I love the idea of reading them the same books I read to my kids. But otherwise I’d much rather someone got some use out of them now rather than have them stuffed in the attic for years and then rotting.

When I do give them away, first I consider whether anyone I know would want any of them, then whether my son’s school library could use them. I’ve given some away via blog giveaways, but most of the time my giveaways aren’t books I’m trying to get rid of: they’re books I bought extra copies of because I liked them so much I want others to enjoy them, too. But most go to a charity like Salvation Army.  My mom used to live near a store that would let you trade in used books for store credit, but I don’t know if we have any bookstores that do that here — the only bookstore I am aware of is Barnes and Noble, and I am sure they don’t! I haven’t checked out online book swaps. I just don’t want to mess with listing them and then packaging and sending them, though I might think about that if I have a book for a particular audience that I think might languish away at a charity store.

A related question would be how one decides what books to get rid of. That is a very hard task. Some books are almost like dear friends that I have shared special times with: there’s something wistful or nostalgic about keeping them. Plus if I think I might use it again, it will cost more to buy it later, so it is more economical to keep it. But when “weeding” I try to ask myself these questions:

1. Am I ever realistically going to read this again?

2. Do I honestly think I’ll ever refer to it again?

3. Do I seriously think my children might want it some day?

4. Could someone else get more use out of it than it is getting just sitting here on my shelf?

It’s still not easy to part with them, but that last questions especially helps.

I haven’t done a Booking Through Thursday for a while, but today they used one of my submitted questions:

I was wanting to try a certain author and wished I knew someone who had read her works so I could get a recommendation when it occurred to me that having a “YOU ask the question” Booking Through Thursday might be fun. Each participant could ask a question they’ve wanted to discuss with other readers. Perhaps, like me, you’d like a recommendation of a certain author’s best work, or perhaps you LOVE a certain genre or series but no one else you know does and you’d just like to discuss it with someone. Or perhaps you want to try a new genre and would like recommendations from seasoned readers.

I’ve been wanting to try something written by Agatha Christie, probably either dealing with Miss Marple or Poirot, but I am open to anything else she has written.

Do you like Agatha Christie? What do you like about her? Which of her novels would you recommend and why?

And thank you for your responses!