Reading, Reading...

I ventured into the new Barnes & Noble the other day hoping to exchange a book I received for Christmas. Interesting bit was, I had not the slightest idea of what book to get in return for it. I started by looking at books by the same author, but there wasn't anything that grabbed my attention that I knew my mom didn't already own. I walked past the cardboard rack holding classics like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and saw they were, as usual, buy two and get the third free, but again I couldn't muster together a worthy trio of them and moved on. Next it was checking out some of the over-sized photography in the coffee table books like Africa from the Air, or Horses, or The Sea, but remembered I'm not in the market for one of those anymore. I peered at the Current Issues rack from a distance, and spent some time looking into what the employee's of the store recommended. Walking away empty handed I went to see if there were any biographies that would be of interest to me, for some reason I've wanted to read Martin Luther's for some time now, but didn't find it and moved on to the Christian/Spirituality section. I looked through the C.S. Lewis collection for a while. I contemplated buying several of his books, then thought an anthology of his would be most practical, but again decided against them all. Finally I came across a table with an intriguing green-covered book titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Feeling successful, I proudly carried the book up to the front counter just to let the manager tell me they won't be allowing me to do any exchanges that day.

That said, my extended time in the book store did motivate me to do more reading. I remember a friend at the beginning of last year setting a goal of reading six books by the end of the year, though I'm pretty sure she surpassed it by quite a bit. I started off hot, and slowed down, well almost stopped towards the end of the year, here's a list of the books I read in full:

1. Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller
2. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
4. The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien
5. The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara
6. The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien (I was in NZ, it was only appropriate)
7. The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert

Sad thing is that was completed when I was still in Alaska in September. Some may consider the LOTR trilogy as one book, but if I'm counting, they're three, those things took forever. This quarter I'm taking an interesting Religious Studies and Womens Studies class, and I actually intend to keep up with the reading for them. We'll see.