"Crafts" – #12. Press 75 flowers.
"Active"
#37. Bring home a stone from each walk you take and make a pile in the yard
#38. Stretch and dance for 75 minutes, uninterrupted
#39. Get a 75-minute massage
#40. Collect 75 items to put on an altar on your 75th birthday
#41. Take 75 naps
"Miscellaneous" –
#55. Spend $75 at the store, no more, no less
#56. Eat 75 blueberries for breakfast
#57. Count 75 sheep before going to sleep
This morning I did #56: I had 75 blueberries for breakfast. Seventy-five, I am discovering, is a big number. Plenty enough blueberries for breakfast.
I have also completed #37, "Make a list of your 75 favorite books." At first I was appalled that I wanted to put some unknown books, like Alan Powers' Living with Books, for instance, on the list. Then I realized that I wasn't making a list of "best books I've ever read" but favorite books. Then I was free. The only criterion was that my heart leapt with delight when I saw it on the bookshelf, which is certainly what happens with Living with Books, which is about the architecture in our homes to accommodate our book habits.
Here's the list. I had to cull some titles to pare it down to 75. Maybe you'll see some old friends on the list. Maybe you'll remind me of some I had forgotten. It was fun. Thanks to my sister Laura for putting this item on my list of 75 things to do before my 75th birthday.
75 Favorite Books
1. Abbey, Edward – Desert Solitaire
2. Abrams, David – The Spell of the Sensuous
3. Bartram, William – Travels
4. Beowulf
5. de Berniere, Louis – Corelli's Mandolin
6. Berry, Thomas – The Dream of the Earth
7. de Botton, Alain – The Architecture of Happiness
8. Boyle, T. Coraghessan – World's End
9. _________________ – Drop City
10. Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
11. Byatt, A. S. – Possession
12. Camus, Albert – l'Étranger
13. Carey, John – Eyewitness to History
14. Chadwick, Douglas – The Fate of the Elephant
15. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
16. Chomsky, Noam – Transformational Grammar
17. Coetzee, J. M. – Disgrace
18. Cox, Lynn – Swimming to Antarctica
19. Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations
20. Dillard, Annie – Teaching a Stone to Talk
21. Doerr, Anthony – All the Light We Cannot See
22. Durrell, Gerard – My Family and Other Animals
23. Eliot, George – Middlemarch
24. ___________ – Adam Bede
25. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola – Women Who Run with the Wolves
26. Eugenides, Jeffrey – Middlesex
27. Fadiman, Anne – The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
28. _____________ – Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
29. Faulkner, William – Absalom! Absalom!
30. ______________ – Short stories: "The Bear" and "Spotted Horses"
31. ______________ – The Sound and the Fury
32. Fernandez-Arresto, Felipe – Near a Thousand Tables
33. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
34. Fisher, M. F. K. – The Art of Eating
35. Graham, Katherine – Personal History
36. Hesse, Herman – The Glass Bead Game
37. Hopkins, Gerard Manley – Poems
38. Ishiguro, Kazuo – Never Let Me Go
39. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi – The Leopard
41. Leeson, Ted – The Habit of Rivers
42. LeGuin, Ursula – The Earthsea Trilogy
43. Lewis, C. S. – The Narnian Chronicles
44. __________ – Till We Have Faces
45. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude
46. McGregor, Neil – A History of the World in 100 Objects
47. McPhee, John – Encounters with the Archdruid
48. ____________ – The Control of Nature
49. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
50. Nabokov, Vladimir – Lolita
51. ________________ – Pnin
52. ________________ – The Gift
53. ________________ – Speak Memory
54. Naslund, Senna Jeter – Ahab's Wife
55. Norton Anthology of English Literature
56. Norton Book of Nature Writing
57. Patchett, Ann – Bel Canto
58. ___________ – The Patron Saint of Liars
59. ___________ – The Magician's Assistant
60. Paulsen, Gary – Riverdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod
61. Pinker, Stephen – The Language Instinct
62. Powers, Alan – Living with Books
63. Rawicz, Slavomir – The Long Walk
64. Rushdie, Salman – Midnight's Children
65. Saramago, Jose – Blindness
66. Schiff, Stacy – Vera
67. Specht, Robert – Tisha
68. Spenser, Edmund – The Faerie Queene
69. Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
70. Tillyard, E. M. W. – The Elizabethan World Picture
71. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
72. Undset, Sigrid – Kristin Lavransdatter
73. Virgil – The Aeneid
74. Williams, Joseph M. – Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace
75. Wolff, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
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