Friday, December 30, 2011

Ted's Birthday


Happy Birthday, Dad! Thank you for your help this year by reviewing books on my blog. I apologize for not getting these out sooner.
In honor of Dad's birthday I'd like to post the reviews he sent me in November.

"Well, another month has come and gone, almost another year as well. So something a little different this month. I'm sure most of you know of and have probably seen "The Bucket List". Well, as I was getting ready to retire, I bought a book called "1,000 Places to see in Your Life". I read through it and marked all of the ones I've already seen. Of the 1,000 I had seen an amazing 78 of them. Doing a little math, I calculated that at the current rate (78 in 69 years) I was going to have to hurry up or live another 800+ years. I have concluded neither would I live that long nor would I see all 1000! I've even slowed down, only adding two in the last three years.
The other day, I received a booklet that had a list of 15 celebrates (actors, news reporters, politicians, etc.) and each had selected six books that they'd read that they considered the best books ever written. That made 110 ---some listed 7 books. Oh boy, I thought, let me see how many of these I have read. I check them off. There were 43 that I had read. I won't list them all, but on the list were Winston Churchill's War Memories, Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, War and Peace, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Moby Dick, House of Seven Gables, The Poems of Elizabeth Barret Browning, The Poems of Emily Dickenson, The Poems of Robert Frost, The Plays of William Shakespeare, The Grapes of Wrath, Gone with the Wind, Quo Vadis, The Short Stories of Edgar Allen Poe-------you get the idea.
Missing were some that to me should have been obvious: The Bible ( Maybe none of them have read the whole thing), Don Quixote, Doctor Zhavago, 10 Days That Shook the World, Fathers and Sons, none of modern American Fiction ( Stephen King, Louis Lamour,again a list too long to write in a blog.)
I'll be reading some from their list in the near future....How about you? What books have you read that you would put on the list of greatest books ever written?
Make a New Year's resolution to read at least 1 book a month. Try to read a wide variety, it will help you grow as a person. Happy Holidays, Ted

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