The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion

Sara <3, I now have that book TBRd. :P

Awesome! It's really cute. I've only read it like 6 times... ;)

Yeaah. That's not much. ;)

Just found another book and reference. I'm reading Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel by Bethany Maines. Two characters have a conversation about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass (You could read either or for this, I would think)

Just finished The Diamond in the Window, the first of the Hall Family Chronicles by Jane Langton. It's a YA book. There are numerous mentions of Louisa May Alcott and Little Women, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson and his works, especially Emerson's Essays and Poems, and Henry David Thoreau and his Walden, or Life in the Woods

I have a couple of references that I found while I was reading books for other tasks:

Doctor Who: Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner
Mentions on page 45 & 48:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

AND

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Mentions on page 135
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

For those of you still looking for books for this task, I just finished The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis by Tara Austen Weaver. This is a nonfiction foodie-type book (my library has it in the Biographies?) by a woman raised as a vegetarian who, when she decides for health reason to start eating meat, investigates why we make such a production of meat--in many senses of the word. In the course of the book she mentions a lot of food related books, a few of which I'll list:

Entertaining by Martha Stewart
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
Temple Grandin (no specific titles mentioned)
The Moosewood Cookbook: Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, New York by Mollie Katzen
What We Eat When We Eat Alone by Deborah Madison
The Meat Club Cookbook: For Gals Who Love Their Meat! by Vanessa Dina
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman
The Raw Food Detox Diet: The Five-Step Plan for Vibrant Health and Maximum Weight Loss by Natalia Rose

There are some others, but you get the drift of what is in the book. I enjoyed it.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, narrated by a high school literature teacher mentions:

Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
The Great Gatsby
Leo Tolstoy
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Graham Greene
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Brothers Karamazov
Jean-Paul Sartre
Albert Camus
Robert Frost
Robertson Davies
Jane Austen
Margaret Atwood
Günter Grass
Alice Munro
George Orwell

Cranford references:
The Pickwick Papers
Samuel Johnson
William Shakespeare
George Herbert
George Gordon Byron
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Maria Edgeworth

A character in The Midwich Cuckoos compares their present dilemma to the plots of H.G. Wells

Oh. My. Gods. by Tara Lynn Childs references Animal Farm by George Orwell and Plato's The Republic. Also mentions Kafka and Aristotle.

Donna Jo wrote: "For those of you still looking for books for this task, I just finished..."

Donna Jo, thanks so much for listing this book! Have you picked your second book for this task? I recently read Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes and loved it!

Mrs.soule wrote: "Donna Jo wrote: "For those of you still looking for books for this task, I just finished..."

Donna Jo, thanks so much for listing this book! Have you picked your second book for this task? I rece..."
Mrs. Soule, I read The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis for the first book and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals for the second.
But Food Matters sounds good to add to my TBR. Read Oh.My.Gods. for a different task, but thought it would work for this.

I've come across a few book references in the paranormal genre if anyone prefers those. Sleeping with the Fishes mentioned a couple coffee table books: Alaska the Last Frontier, The Black Sea: A History. It also mentioned Mermaid Wife, but I'm pretty sure it was specifically referring to the fairy tale, not the Harlequin romance - then again, it didn't specify. :-)
Also Undead and Unwed mentioned Shakespeare as an author, James Herriot, The Canterbury Tales, Inferno, and Gone With the Wind.

To be helpful to anyone still looking for a pair of books for this task:

The Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (Hardcover, 463 pages)
Refers to
Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell (Mass Market Paperback, 224 pages)
The Fallen Curtain by Ruth Rendell (Paperback, 208 pages)
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (paper, 300 pages)
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cáo Xuěqín (Paperback, 352 pages)


Sherlock Holmes: The American Years edited by Michael Kurland. (Hardcover, 368 pages)
Refers to
(in “My Silk Umbrella” by Darryl Brock): Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain (Paperback, 720 pages)
(in “The Old Senator” by Steve Hockensmith): Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
(in “The Curse of Edwin Booth” by Carole Bugge): Hamlet and Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
(in “The English Senor” by Marta Randall): Utopia by Thomas More


The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson (Hardcover, 352 pages)
Refers to
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Paperback, 336 pages)


Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell (Mass Market Paperback, 224 pages)
Refers to:
Precious Bane by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb
The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Sonnets from the Portuguese: A Celebration of Love by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Another one:

Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson (Hardcover, 336 pages)
Refers to:
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Witch Hunt by Ian Rankin
Othello by William Shakespeare
In Morocco by Edith Wharton
The Spy: The Story of a Superfluous Man by Maxim Gorky
Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens