This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and Bookish: the bookish bucket list.
1. Complete some oeuvres. Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot come to mind as authors I’m close to “finishing” but haven’t quite. Each of these authors still has two or three (or in the case of Dickens, five or six) novels that I haven’t read yet. I’m a completist, and it gives me satisfaction to read everything an author wrote.
2. Complete some lists. A few I’m working on and would like to someday finish: the Newbery Medal, the Printz Award, the Caldecott, and Fuse #8’s Top 100 Children’s Novels.
3. Organize my bookshelves. When I was younger, I knew where every single one of my books was located, even though there was no organizational pattern. But I don’t have room in my brain for that kind of thing anymore. Just last week I bought a copy of a book I already owned and currently can’t find two books I really want to read that must be on my shelves. I need to organize!
4. Entirely eliminate the YA Shelf of Shame. Okay, that’s probably impossible. But just typing these words, I thought of three more authors who should be on my Shelf. Must. Start. Reading. More.
5. Do more literary travel in England. I have already done a bit–visited Virginia Woolf’s house, Vita Sackville-West’s garden, Jane Austen’s house. But I would also like to visit the countryside where Elizabeth Bennett travels in Pride & Prejudice, the moors around Haworth, and the Lake District.
6. Take a Laura Ingalls Wilder tour. I actually live in the same state as DeSmet (little town on the prairie), and I have driven through and peeked at the (closed) museum. But when you’re talking about a state as gigantic as South Dakota, it doesn’t mean much if you live on one side and the attraction you want to see is on the other. There are many other Little House spots to visit too in Minnesota and Missouri.
7. For that matter, reread the Little House books. Hey, it’s a bookish bucket list item I could actually finish this year!
8. Read War and Peace. I have started many times. And quit many times. Is it really worth it?
9. Meet some of my favorite kidlit and teaching bloggers and Twitter friends in person. Preferably while attending an awesome reading-related conference!
10. See my older son become an honest-to-goodness avid reader. He continues to struggle so much with reading that it’s hard to imagine this will ever happen, but my dream is to see him lost in a book that he’s reading by himself.
the dirigible plum 
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