Mark the Husband joined a book club this month called 12 Books, 12 Months.  It started over at latter day bohemian and sounds like a terrific idea.  In my last blog post, I complained about not having a list of fiction to read and not feeling motivated by my non-fiction.

Well, lo and behold!  I stumbled upon a series this week that perfectly fits the bill.  The Canongate Myth Series is putting classic old myths into the hands of contemporary writers around the world and asking them to have a go at ’em.

The same day I found out about the Myth Series, I discovered that one of my favorite authors has a couple new books out (!joy!).  The author is Connie Willis and the new books pick up on themes started in her novels To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book, which i haven’t read in at least 10 years.  I’m curious to see if I still like these fun little time travel stories as much as I did when I first found them…  so that whole shebang got added to the list.

And to round it out, I saw that Salman Rushdie’s second children’s book is coming out soon.  I heard him talk about these books at the ALA conference this year, in which he created a personal mythology for his sons.  He made the process of storytelling sound beautiful.

Thus, we have 12 books in 12 months:

  1. – Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, 1992
  2. –  Three Men in a Boat, to say nothing of the dog by Jerome K. Jerome, 1889
  3. – To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, 1998
  4. – Black Out by Connie Willis, 2010
  5. – All Clear by Connie Willis, 2010
  6. – A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, 2005
  7. – The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman, 2010
  8. – The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, 2005
  9. – Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith, 2006
  10. – Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong, 2007
  11. – Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, 1990
  12. – Luka and the Fire of Life, 2010