Season’s greetings and best wishes for peace and joy in 2012 to all!

These are the 15 nonfiction titles that Monitor book reviewers found to be the most outstanding of 2011.

via 15 best nonfiction books of 2011: CSMonitor picks – “Day of Honey,” by Annia Ciezadlo – CSMonitor.com.

I just finally have to say this. I HATE it when a web site, such as Christian Science Monitor, puts each item of a list on a separate page and I have to click repeatedly to see all the items. I realize that this probably is a function of advertising, since more clicks means a higher advertising rate, but this just drives me nuts. You have now been warned what will happen if you click on this link.

Anyway, since I finally got my degree this past summer, I’m now ready to undertake a reading challenge. I’ve signed up for What’s in a Name 5, hosted by BethFishReads. Here’s her description of the challenge:

Here’s How It Works

Between January 1 and December 31, 2012, read one book in each of the following categories:

1. A book with a topographical feature (land formation) in the title: Black Hills, Purgatory Ridge, Emily of Deep Valley
2. A book with something you’d see in the sky in the title: Moon Called, Seeing Stars, Cloud Atlas
3. A book with a creepy crawly in the title: Little Bee, Spider Bones, The Witches of Worm
4. A book with a type of house in the title: The Glass Castle, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Ape House
5. A book with something you’d carry in your pocket, purse, or backpack in the title: Sarah’s Key, The Scarlet Letter, Devlin Diary
6. A book with a something you’d find on a calendar in the title: Day of the Jackal, Elegy for April, Freaky Friday, Year of Magical Thinking

The book titles are just suggestions, you can read whatever book you want to fit the category.

Other Things to Know

• Books may be any form (audio, print, e-book).
• Books may overlap other challenges.
• Books may not overlap categories; you need a different book for each category.
• Creativity for matching the categories is not only allowed but encouraged.
• You do not have to make a list of books before hand.
• You do not have to read through the categories in any particular order.

I decided on this challenge because, as  I looked at the categories, I realized that I already had at least one book for almost every category on my TBR list.

Although the directions say that making up a list of books before hand is not necessary, I went ahead and did it anyway because it was so much fun to realize that I’ll actually have time to read these books now. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Topographical feature

• In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien
• Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
• The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman
• Empire Falls by Richard Russo
• The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• By the Lake by John McGahern
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
• Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine by Ann Hood
• Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay
• Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook
• The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

Something in the sky

• The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Creepy crawly

• Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters
• The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Robert Cormier
• The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King
• A Maggot by John Fowles

Type of house

• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
• Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Asylum by Patrick McGrath
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• The Keep by Jennifer Egan

Something you’d carry in your pocket

• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
• Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally

Something on a calendar

• In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming
• Blue Nights by Joan Didion
• October 1964 by David Halberstam
• Solstice by Joyce Carol Oates
• Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

There are a few titles on this list that I’ve already read, but I’ve left them on in case other people are looking for books to fit a particular category. And some of the books that I have read before could stand a rereading.

I’m pretty well set in all the categories except “something you’d carry in a pocket, purse, or backpack,” so if you have any title suggestions for that one, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks to BethFishReads for hosting this challenge.

Please check out my newest undertaking and let me know what you think.

I started life as a classics major, so seeing these photos celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press, warmed my heart. These little green-covered (Greek) and red-covered (Latin) gems present the original text on the left page, with a translation on the right page. This series has introduced generations of readers to the big thinkers and writers of ancient Western civilization.

Picador is marking the tenth anniversary of Barbara Ehrenreich’s modern classic “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” in which she chronicled her attempts to make a life on minimum wage in three states, with a special anniversary edition. The new edition includes an excellent afterword by Ehrenreich (reprinted in part at TomDispatch), in which she takes stock of the past ten years and revisits some of the workers she met while reporting her book.

This piece reminded me of an incident when my library book group read Nickel and Dimed a year or two after it came out. One of the employers that Ehrenreich studied was Wal-Mart. A woman had recently joined the group; the discussion of this book was her second or third time with us. At the end of the discussion she announced angrily that she had worked at Wal-Mart after retiring and liked her job there.

She never came back to the group. Apparently she was unable to distinguish between someone who took the job as supplementary income and something to do after retirement, and someone who, like an uneducated single mother, had no other work options.

It always saddens me to see reading close rather than open someone’s mind.

Read this short article to see how the working situation has deteriorated rather than improved for the nation’s working poor.

It appears to be all over for the Borders bookselling chain. The company will be liquidated — meaning sold off in pieces — and almost 11,000 employees will lose their jobs. The chain’s 400 remaining stores will close their doors by the end of September.

Say what you like, it’s a sad day for book lovers when any bookstore closes. And here’s another piece from NPR explaining ramifications of the demise of Borders.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, someone created the hashtag #ThankUBorders asking people to post their memories of and tributes to Borders. Mine was that at my local Borders I met many people through book groups who are now my best friends.

So yes, I will miss my local Borders. How about you?

NPR offers a follow-up to the recent controversy over the current state of YA (young adult) literature.

Related Posts:

• Darkness Too Visible
• YA Fiction Is Too Dark: Some Responses
• Are Teen Novels Dark and Depraved–Or Saving Lives?

Here’s something to keep your group busy over the long holiday weekend.

So here’s another list. As before, there is no special meaning to the order in which books are listed, and all of these are books that I would rate either 4 or 5.

• Plainsong, Kent Haruf
• Empire Falls, Richard Russo
• I Know This Much Is True, Wally Lamb
• The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, Elyn Saks
• The Drowning People, Richard Mason
• Still Alice, Lisa Genova
• Lucky: A Memoir, Alice Sebold