"Long, Long, Long"

 When I first retired, I created a Bucket List with most items being travel and visiting places. In August 2019, I added to the list an item to read the 100 books everyone should read. It has been a Long, Long, Long time and I finally decided to check my progress. It is just more data from my multitude of spreadsheets. I may have mentioned that I have a spreadsheet listing my spreadsheets.

So, I started with a list of 100 books that I got off the Internet. Since then, I have added 139 more books to the list of novels I should read. I do have a tendency to read my favorite authors or any other book of interest I find at the library. These books do not get added to the bucket list but I still read them. I use Goodreads, a great website, to keep track of my reading, and of course they have their own lists of best books.

During my first four years of retirement, I read 24 books or just six a year. After creating the list, I have averaged 32 books a year for the last seven years. Five of those seven years I have read 36 or more books. That is 224 books. So I should be done the list...but NO, I have not finished. So I decided to peruse the data and check my progress.

For this post, I am only looking at the original list of 100. Here are the first 25 books...

First, I do not remember where I got my original list. It had some weird things. You will notice that number 9 is repeated three times. That is because the original list listed the whole trilogy His Dark Materials as a single entry, but I read all three books. Also, #14 is the Complete plays of Shakespeare but #98 is Hamlet by Shakespeare. You see the conflict.

So what the hell is the column BJ Rank? I list I keep is always changing for different reasons. If you see a Rank greater than 1000, than I have read  the book and the number is the order. So Great Expectations was the 40th book I read from the list.

If the number is less than 400, I have not read the book yet and the number is when I plan to read it. You can see there are only two, The Bible and the plays of Shakespeare.

If the number is between 400 and 600, it means I read it already but may read it again. If it is in the 900s, it means I have  read it and plan not to read it again.

Synopsis of first 25 (really 27): 17 newly read, 8 previously read, and 2 to still read. 

The second 25...

There are six books I have not read in books 26 to 50. Funny, one of those books is Hamlet by Kenneth Graeme. I assume that is different than Shakespeare.

Synopsis of second 25: 12 newly read, 7 previously read, and 6 to still read. 

The third 25...

There are still ten books I have not read yet in 51 to 75. Note that the first book I read (#1001) was Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I took Ulysses by James Joyce out of the library and made it through only four pages before I took it back and lowered it in my list.

Synopsis of third 25: 9 newly read, 6 previously read, and 10 to still read. 

The last 25...

There are still sixteen books I have not read yet in 76 to 100. I just finished Germinal by Emile Zola (#1082) which was 78 on the original list.

Synopsis of last 25: 7 newly read, 2 previously read, and 16 to still read. 

So I have 34 total yet to read from the original 100. I have read 82 of the 239, or 34% of the list.

About Title

Always one of my favorites, give it a hear Long, Long, Long

"Long, Long, Long" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1968 album The Beatles (also known as "the White Album"). It was written by George Harrison, the group's lead guitarist, while he and his bandmates were attending Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation course in Rishikesh, India, in early 1968. Although Harrison later stated that he was addressing God in the lyrics, it is the first of his compositions that invites interpretation as both a standard love song and a paean to his deity.

According to musicologist Alan Pollack, "Long, Long, Long" is "an off-beat mixture" of contemporary musical styles; he identifies it as "a three-way cross between jazz waltz, folk song, and late sixties psychedelia". The song is in the key of F major, played with a capo on the guitar's third fret, so as to allow for the chord shapes that Harrison admired in "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". The melody appears to fluctuate from the home key, due to its avoidance of perfect cadences, as the dominant, C7 chord resists anchoring on the tonic I chord of F major. In addition, all plagal changes (in this case, B♭ to F major) are fleeting. The composition also makes use of jazz-style ninth chords.