Habitual Reader Profiles - Page 1

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	Name: Kim Chernin
	City & State: Point Reyes, California
	Vocation / Avocation: Writer, Pastoral Counselor

Why I'm a Habitual Reader:

Books have always been my primary teachers and guides. I read in order to learn: about the world, life, psychology, philosophy, myself. I read fiction because I love to enter and inhabit worlds, lives and ideas far different from my own. I read because very often books have been my best and sometimes my only friends. I read to become excited and to achieve tranquility. I read because I have, from the time I learned how to read, loved books more than anything.

My List of Ten: Books to Last for a Lifetime

1. War and Peace
Author: Leo Tolstoy
The greatest novel ever written?

2. The Brothers Karamzov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot
Author: Feodor Dostoyevsky
Earlier than Freud, Dostoyevsky discovered and dramatized depth psychology.

3. The Sea, The Sea
Author: Iris Murdoch
One of the best pieces of modern fiction.

4. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Books one reads again and again and again for their exquisite writing and sensibility.

5. The Charter House of Parma
Author: Stendhal
A unique fictional form with highly dramatic episodes and epic characters.

6. To The Lighthouse
Author: Virginia Woolf
A major work of 20th Century modernism.

7. The Search for Things Past
Author: M. Proust
Reflections on memory and time past.

8. The Magic Mountain
Author: Thomas Mann
A book with matchless philosophic depth.

9. Magister Ludi
Author: Hermann Hesse
A unique fictional form, a profound meditation, a deep spiritual study.

10. The Blue Flower
Author: Penelope Fitzgerald
Exquisitely written fictional study of the German poet Novalis.

Have you read any of these titles? Review one now.

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