I have the delightful feeling of too many good choices for reading ideas in the next few months.

First, I have Pat Skarda’s reading list for her first year seminar, Groves of Academe. Oddly, I’d read about a third of the "recommended reading" list, but only one or two books on the required reading list. I thought the syllabus was online, but sadly, I can’t seem to find it. I’ll add books as I read them.

UPDATE:  THE GROVES OF ACADEME  READING LIST

From the hard copy Pat distributed:

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
The Horizontal Man, by Helen Eustis
Publish and Perish, by James Hynes
The Crazed, by Ha Jin
Changing Places, by David Lodge
The Groves of Academe, by Mary McCarthy
The Student Body, by John McNally
Overnight Float, by Clare Munnings (aka Jill Ker Conway, former President of Smith College, and Elizabeth Kennan, former President of Mount Holyoke)
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath (I’m probably going to skip this one)
The Human Stain, by Philip Roth
Straight Man, by Richard Russo
The Small Room, by May Sarton (haven’t read this book, but she’s great)
Ivy Days, by Susan Allen Toth — I read that some time back, maybe even before I went to Smith
The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer.

That’s just the required reading list. I’m out of energy to add the entire recommended reading list.  I’ll leave it only at the three I’ve already read and can recommend: Gaudy Night (my absolute favorite Dorothy Sayers mystery), Moo (which is very funny!), and both The Road from Coorain and True North, by Jill Ker Conway.

END OF THE UPDATE

Second, the Georgia Center for the Book published a list of the 25 books it recommends for all Georgians in 2005.

Personally, I think 25 is an awfully large number of books to recommend in one year. Most people just don’t read that much, and  I’d like to get recommendations from more sources than that. At my current rate, that’s almost 3 months of reading, just from the Georgia Center for the Book. I might read a lot of books on their list, but I’m unwilling to commit to a full quarter of Georgia-oriented books. 

There is a book on both lists, Wit, which I’m not going to read having seen the play so many times when Jill was in it last year. But I recommend it highly — you may want to try the film version, with the incomprable Emma Thompson as Dr. Vivian Bearing.

Then, this morning, listening to public radio on my drive in to work, a really fun reading list came up. Celeblibrarian Nancy Pearl recommends a cool list of 11 children’s fantasy books for those of us waiting impatiently for the next Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince , due out July 16.

The only bad thing about Pearl’s list is that I’ve already read Five Children and It, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Sabriel. But from Pearl’s comments on NPR, Whales on Stilts, Half Magic, and Gregor the Overlander sound wonderful and I can’t wait to read them.