Lemony Snicket's last Unfortunate Event. I was two weeks late getting to it and the excuse-making is part of the story. Cassidy had to go to the shop, which is near the Tattered Cover, the Monday before the book was released. I was going to get book and car on the same day, but it wasn't ready Friday or Monday and on Tuesday it was snowing, which I didn't expect and wasn't dressed for, so I wasn't in the mood to walk any distance in sandals and short sleeves, even for the book. Then I spent a weekend in dive class instead of reading, and then this read I read The Plot Against America, so yesterday, two whole weeks later, was the day.
And all that unnecessary detail is just the kind of tangential stuff I wanted Lemony Snicket to eschew this time, in order to have space to tie everything up in neat little bows. What I wanted and what I knew to expect, however, were two different things, and thank goodness.
The only Newbery Medal-winning books that I haven't yet read are either very old or about dogs. Today, walking home from a children's Hallowe'en party, I visited the Park Hill branch of the library and borrowed Rifles for Watie and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh. I was pretty sure the eponymous dog doesn't die, unlike that of Old Yeller, and since Dear Mr. Henshaw didn't traumatize me, maybe Shiloh wouldn't either. Shiloh doesn't die and an 11-year-old learns about shades of gray in himself and others.
Between the party house and the library, I enjoyed the beautiful day, 70-degree sun melting Thursday's more-than-piddling snowfall. I met an old dog named Buster and a young one named Marley and admired a front yard snowfort. Between the library and home I walked and read.
Of course I couldn't resist. As soon as I read the pirated list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and learned that Peter Ackroyd edited it, I had to add it to my lifelist. Although I didn't make the comparisons I did five years ago when I assigned myself the first three lists of 100 (Modern Library, Feminista, Radcliffe), I did see that every list I now track (fourteen*) has non-trivial overlap with it.
Database software intimidates me enough that I'm content with an Excel worksheet full of formulas and filtering. When I read a book off one of the lists, I change an initial in as many columns as applicable from a letter to 1. This is how I know I've read 272 of the 1,001, and that 647 titles don't appear on any other list. It is not how I know I'm pathetic, but it would be a leading indicator if I didn't.
*Feminista, Radcliffe, Triangle Publishing, and Modern Library, with 100 titles each, plus the BBC's and Time magazine's opinions; Man Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, and PEN-Faulkner winners, with fewer than 100 each; more than 100 Nobel authors but no title count; more than 100 title that the Library Journal considers the most influential; the book 500 Great Books by Women; and now this one. The 500 Great Books' initial is D, and so, logically (since it weighs as much as a duck), this list's letters are MI.