BBD 2009: New Content and Old Favorites :)

The end of the year is upon us, and thank dog it is finally here. I think many of us are ready to write off 2008 and go get drunk on New Year's Eve :) okay, maybe that's just me, but all the same, someone pass the gin.

In preparation for 2009, BBD has gone public again and fresh blood will be pouring in (eww, gross visual) just in time for some new group activities. Rob, who has been hunting down obscure authors for months, will be leading us in a monthly discussion of world literature--we're kicking off January with Spanish and Latin American authors, and pairing it with Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar as our group read. Encyclopedia Brittanica offers world literature widgets for this blog, so those will be on the sidebar should anybody want to explore more world authors than what we have posted.

We're also planning to implement some other new, fun activities in addition to our old favorites! Including this weblog, which will be used in tandem with the BBD Shelfari site to keep everyone in the loop and to explore the blog format for book reviews and other nifty things.

Happy holidays everyone!

Suze

Literary Question of the Month - December

I volunteered for this month's literary question, and to give people something to chew on, I asked what books you would recommend to your children (or grandchildren or nieces/nephews or cousins or godchildren or whatever young people you have in your life) to read at least once in their lifetime. This question was met with a bit of controversy, as many of our members were literarily rebellious in their youth (imagine that!). However, taking the situation as a hypothetical, and not as an invitation to bully our youngsters into reading anything they don't want to read, here are some of the recommendations that our members came up with:


The Bible: the Bible was overwhelmingly on the list, for many reasons--not only is a great majority of Western culture firmly entrenched in Christianity, but there are great morals and life lessons to learn from the Bible, even if you are not a Christian.

Greek Mythology: Also highly influential in Western culture.

Grimm's Fairy Tales (and other fairy tales): Ditto the influence. Also fun to read!

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Shakespeare (Tinky voted for the entire works of Shakespeare, but even just hitting a few would be fine, I think ;)

In Search of Time (Proust) (probably for when they are a bit older, eh?!)

The Stuff of Thought (Stephen Pinker)


What about you--what books would you look back on as having been invaluable to your literary life, and recommend to a young person (should they attempt to beat it out of you)?

Follow the whole convo by clicking the post title OR click here to check it out.