The Anticipation!

It didn't last long! My first book from the list arrived in the mail today - The Assistant by Bernard Malamud.

"Frank Alpine is a troubled, somewhat desperate, handsome Italo-American from the West Coast-a man with a difficult past and a strong urge to be somebody. He works long hours in the grocery store of a struggling Jewish family in a declining Brooklyn neighborhood. And he is falling in love with his employer's attractive daughter, whose own hungers have not been satisfied by another man"

I'm excited to start reading the first stepping stone on my road to literary enlightenment ;)

Thirty by Thirty

I've always been a reader. I started when I was two with the encouragement of my mother. By the time my baby brother was around I was reading to him too. Of course back then my biggest literary challenge were the Little Miss & Little Mr. Books...but hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

My mother would often take us to the public library in town - which quickly became my favorite place to be. Not only did they have rows and rows of books to challenge my mind, tickle my funny bone and distract me from the real world, but they had toys to keep my brothers occupied :)

Each week my mom would let us pick out our stack of books and it was always a challenge for me to only grab the 10 she allowed. Once I became a teenager, I loved the library even more. I could get lost for hours reading the binding of books or grabbing a good novel and curling up in the bean bag chair. Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club eventually gave way to RL Stine and Christopher Peik...which led to VC Andrews & Stephen King.

I took my love of reading so seriously that I scored myself a job at said library when I was 14 years old. I continued to work there and peruse the aisles until I went away to college.

This is where my tale takes a tragic turn...somewhere between 19 and 26, I gave up on reading. I didn't think it was cool anymore, now it was more of an afterthought, something I had to do for class, something the "uncool" boring people did. Computer games and reality tv tempted to fill the void.

As crazy as it may sound, the Twilight series brought me back to the written word. I have not been able to stop reading since I picked up Twilight as a joke. Everyone was talking Team Edward and Team Jacob and I just HAD to know what was going on. It reignited the spark inside of me that has now turned in to a full blown fire.

Anyways...all that just to say that I've decided to take it one step further. I've decided to set a goal for myself and that goal is to read my way through Time Magazines Top 100 Novels of All Time. I purchased the first couple of books via Ebay and anxiously await their arrival. In the meantime I'm reading "Geisha, A Life"

I'll be sure to post the titles of the first couple of books as they come trickling in.

Have any suggestions as to what else I should be reading? I'd love to hear them!