Hitting a Milestone: Over 750 of the 1001 Children's Books You Must Read...Read!

I've been trying to read all the 1001 Children's Books You Must Read for many years. I've now read all the easy-to-find books and I've found most of the hard-to-find-but-still-occasionally available. I've had to resort to using Internet Archive. Internet Archive allows you to check out a book from its online library for an hour at a time. Reading the book online is not easy. Still it's better than nothing. 

When I read the article (below) about the lawsuit against Internet Archive, I decided I'd better go ahead and read the 1001 Children's Books at Internet Archive while the library was still up and running. I read ten of them last week. I've now read over 750 of the 1001 books.

1001 Children's Books I Read Last Week:

The Otterbury Incident by Cecil Day-Lewis

Stradbroke Dreamtime 

La Mucca Moka 

The Robber Hotzenplotz

Storm by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Giulio Coniglio

Little Spook's Baby Sister

Marcelino Pan y Vino

Rupert the Bear

The Little Red Engine Gets a Name

Reviews for all of these are at Goodreads.

What I'm Reading Now:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants 

by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Naturalist Book Club)

Another Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Everyday by Clemency Burton Hill (Nonfiction)

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (Book Club)

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien (Book Club Read)

The Country of Pointed Firs (Chapter-a-Day)

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis (Narniathon)

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchausen (1001 Children's Books)

Funny Farm: My Unexpected Life with 600 Rescue Animals (Nonfiction)

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley (Fiction)

Internet Archive was created as a library for books that are difficult to find. Books have been digitized and can be checked out, if they are not already checked out, for an hour at a time. The big book publishers around the world do not like this and have brought a lawsuit against Internet Archive. See the story here.

Last week I posted here at Readerbuzz:

Books I've Enjoyed But Have Never Mentioned on My Blog (Or, At Least, Haven't Mentioned Enough)

Wondrous Words: Reciprocity (from Braiding Sweetgrass)

It's March! I've started listening to the March playlist 

from Another Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Everyday.

Here are three I recommend.

Good Thing #1

Sonata for violin and piano no. 5 in F major, op. 24 ('Spring')

by Ludwig van Beethoven

Good Thing #2

Recomposed: Vivaldi Four Seasons 'Spring 3'

by Max Richter

Good Thing #3

Ave generosa

by Hildegard of Bingen

Or listen to the whole Another Year of Wonder: March playlist!

I'm happy you joined us here at the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place to link up and to share what we have been doing during the week. It's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

Some of the things we often talk about at the Sunday Salon:

• What was your week like?
• Read any good books? Tell us about them.
• What other bookish things did you do? 
• What else is going on in your life?

Other places where you may like to link up over the weekend are below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

        

My linkup for Sunday Salon is below.  

Leonard and Hungry Paul; The Lion; and How to Love the World

 

I have been wanting to read Leonard and Hungry Paul for over a year now, and I finally got a copy and read it last week. If you like action in your stories, skip this one, but if you think you might like a gently humorous story about two men in their thirties who still live at home with their parents and are friends, you should look for it.

Has anyone read The Lion by Joseph Kessel? I'd love to hear your thoughts. It's a book from my 1001 Children's Books list, and---wow---what a story. It's an old book, and it's set in Africa, and the narrator is an upper-class elitist typical of his day. Despite these limitations, there is an energy that runs through the characters that is strikingly similar to the energies found in the natural world, and I read the story almost hypnotically to the inevitable conclusion.

Poetry is powerful. But it often focuses on the pain in life and the troubles people face. Want to read something from another point of view? I offer How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope.

How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (Poems) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Lion: A Novel by Joseph Kessel (1001 Children's Books) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Syllabus by Lynda Barry (Writing) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Leonard and Hungry Paul: A Novel (Mood-Boosting) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Annie Lumsden: The Girl from the Sea by David Almond (Children's Book) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Driving Hungry: A Memoir (Foodie) ⭐⭐⭐

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman (Nonfiction Challenge)...42%

Yes, and...Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr (Daily Meditation Reading)...85%

100 Poems to Break Your Heart (National Poetry Month)...Waiting on the return of this book from the library

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Chapter-a-Day Read)...33%

Favorite Folktales from Around the World collected by Jane Yolen (Classics Club Spin)...48%

Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Naturalist Book Club)...7%

I shared my list of favorite bird books, Birds of a Feather Flock Together, last week, and I got lots of wonderful recommendations for bird books I should read next.

For Wondrous Words Wednesday, I spoke about the trials for this American of reading British English: When English is (Really) English.

Good Thing #1: We saw two kinds of huge Swallowtails during our Butterfly Monitoring last week. 

Good Thing #2: Our garden is full of cherry tomatoes and kale and green beans and jalapenos.

Good Thing #3: Last week we spent a day with our g-kids, Annie and Wyatt. Here's a photo of Annie and me making cookies, while, unbeknownst to us, Wyatt is sneaking a bit of dough.

I'm happy you found your way to the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place for us to link up and to share what we have been doing during the week. It's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

Some of the things we often talk about at the Sunday Salon:

• What was your week like?
• Read any good books? Tell us about them.
• What other bookish things did you do? 
• What else is going on in your life?

Other places where you may like to link up over the weekend are below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

My linkup for Sunday Salon is below. 

Best Opening Lines of a Novel

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. 

                                                                                —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities 

                                                                               

"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. 

                                                                                ---E. B. White, Charlotte's Web

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 

                                                                                ---Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. 

                                                                                ---J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. 

                                                                                ---J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. 

                                                                        ---Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 

                                                                                —George Orwell, 1984

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

                                                                                —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Call me Ishmael. 

                                                                                —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. 

                                                                                —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. 

                                                                            —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. 

                                                                                —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

It was a dark and stormy night. 

                                                                                ---Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Once upon a time there was a Little House way out in the country. She was a pretty Little House and she was strong and well built. 

                                                                                ---Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. 

                                                                                —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. 

                                                                                —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday That Artsy Reader Girl assigns a topic and then post her top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join her and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.