User blog:Special Elf Friend/Happy New Years! (A little early)

The new year is almost here and it's the time people start thinking of their New Year resolutions. Like me, you may not make New Year resolutions, but I just wanted to challenge you(and myself) to read more books in this coming year.

In coming years there is a lot of things you will look back on and wish you hadn't done, but reading good books won't be one of them. Sadly, these days most people don't read much. Most people have never read Les Misérables or only seen the musical. Everyone has seen adaptions of A Christmas Carol but few have read Dicken's book A Tale of Two Cities. (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times) And I know few people have read The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, the sequel to Two Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

This new year I want to challenge you to read at least two books out of the following list. Determine that you will read them and even if you can't understand them easily you will read them till you can. And since you probably are tired of reading this(I'm just tired of not being able to make it inspirational enough :p ) here is the list. Every one of the books in the first list is free for download on Gutenberg or Amazon.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells

The Castaways by Jules Verne

The Mysterious Island* by Jules Verne

Off on a Comet* by Jules Verne

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Sir Nigel* by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The White Company* by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The People of the Mist* by Henry Rider Haggard

King Solomon's Mines by Henry Rider Haggard

She (I hate it but it is a classic...) by Henry Rider Haggard

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Jungle Book(it's not like the movies) by Rudyard Kipling

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

* Not exactly classics but written by authors that have written classics.

Then I just want to mention The Phantom Tollbooth as a wonderful book full of amazing puns and sayings that anybody could read. It's not old enough to be a classic but I'm sure it will be some day.

Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov is a must read also.

If your like mystery books, check out the Father Brown mysteries by G. K. Chesterton. The mysteries and the solutions are very different from most mystery books.

For nonfiction I would recommend: Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb The Middle Ages by Morris Bishop Knight Cross(A biography of Erwin Rommel) by David Fraser The Battle of Britain by James Holland Abandon Ship! By Richard F. Newcombe Dawn's Early Light by Walter Lord Day of Infamy by Walter Lord A Night to Remember by Walter Lord Incredible Victory by Walter Lord 1812: The War Nobody Won by Albert Marrin The Yanks are Coming by Albert Marrin The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan

Or you could read some of the books I plan to read in 2017 Dracula by Bram Stoker Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (maybe I am too ambitious ;) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

(Any other suggestions?)

Don't take too long picking a book though: just read!

Happy New Year and may you read much more this new year!

PS. For all the people who say reading the classics is too hard: "You’ll find that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort." - The Phantom Tollbooth

How many of the classics I listed in the first list have you read? All Some A few One or Two None