Lost in My Library

September has been a crazy month. In case you missed me completely obsessing over it for the past few months, I moved into college at the beginning of the month! I'm starting my first year at Smith, and so far, I love it. I have a lot less time to read (at least for leisure), but I'm sure that when I get better at balancing things, I'll get more time. I'm really excited about all of my classes - I have America in 1925, Introductory Logic: Valid and Invalid Reasoning, Elementary Modern Hebrew, What I Found in the Archives, and a running class to make sure that I don't spend all of my free time sitting on the couch. I have more homework than I'm used to - especially more reading - but I'm spending so much less time in class that it's been really manageable so far. A few days ago , the temperature dropped about 20 degrees, which means I'm actually experiencing seasons for the first time in my life! I'm very excited. It's already pretty m

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature at The Broke and the Bookish. Th is week's theme : top ten book s on your fall TBR.   I'm not usually a big fan of TBR s. I pretty much n ever stick to them, so I just don't see the point. But since I started college, I've been reading a lot less than before - besi des required reading, I think I've re ad about 100 pages in three weeks. So I think it's probably a good idea for me to prioritize what I wan t to read . I al so have to give a shout-out to the book club that I'll (hopefully ) start participating in th is fall - Austentatio us ! We're r eading a differe nt Jane Austen bo ok every month until January. I didn't participate in August, because I'd al ready reread Pride & Prejudice recently , and I'm thinking I might have to sk ip September's re read of Persuasion, too. But starting next month, it's all books I haven't read yet, a nd I'm really going to t ry and do those!

First things first: I know that there are thousands of people, from book bloggers to literary critics, who have written about this topic before. I wasn't inspired by any particular one of them, but it's a common topic that I happen to have a lot to say about. And because of that, I'm probably just going to be rambling here. There are billions of lists entitled something like "X Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime," with X being any number from 5 to 1,001. (And probably more than that,t those are the really intimidating ones. And most of the books on these lists are "classics," a term that no one can ever quite define beyond the basics of a) lots of people have read it and b) it was probably published a long time ago. Classics has become a genre of its own, uniting books as different as Animal Farm , The Iliad , and Persuasion . So why are these lists so popular? Why do we read classics? I've come up with a few possibilities that I th