Eclecticisms

So, I take part in the Dewey's read-a-thon every year, when I can, just to dedicate a day to reading for as long as possible. I see it as a way to concentrate on the books I have sitting around and am not finishing. My aim is not to finish many books as i am quite a slow reader, and it depends on the book. I also get distracted quite easily but today I am taking it more seriously than previously so and actually documenting it. 

This is my current set up:

I have already had gluten free/vegan banana and blueberry pancakes and so am fuelled up so my stand by food is Chilli & Lemon Potato Grills! Delish! Oh and lots of green tea! I will then make some more food and continue, but that is later!

Currently reading The Radleys by Matt Haig as a light intro read and I started this morning with 117 pgs read so far, it is a humorous 'vampire' read.

Other books that I plan on reading today are, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, I am on pg 439 and hope to make some progress on it today. I am also on pg 329 of Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin and hope to finish it today (60 pgs to go)

Trying not to get distracted by the twitter updates, although I am not a twitter user but seeing the community of 'read-a-thonners' is comforting.

Questions:

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?

England, UK - typically dull, rainy day today, perfect for staying indoors and not feeling guilty!

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?

All are enjoyable, 'The Mists of Avalon' is engrossing so I wanted to finish 'Wildwood' first and maybe even finish 'The Radleys' as it is easy going, then finish up engrossed in 'The Mists'

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?

I already started the Chilli & Lemon Potato Grills and they are more-ish...that is after I wrestled with the packaging, it wasn't easy to open.

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!

I have been working this summer as a field assistant in Scotland catching bats for a PhD research study. Basically I love bats!

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to? I participated as an anonymous and did not record my progress etc so this time I am recording it all, even if it all is more distracting and making me read less....

Mini challenge Hour 13

Best Books (so far)

Best Book of Your Reading Year

The Diversity Of Life - Edward O Wilson

Best Romance Book of Your Reading Year

South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami

Best YA Book of Your Reading Year

Don't generally read YA but The Radley's - Matt Haig

Best Non-Fiction Book of Your Reading Year

Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology - David Abram

Best Sci-Fi Book of Your Reading Year

Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Best Fantasy Book of Your Reading Year

The Mists Of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley

Best Fiction Book of Your Reading Year

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Best Author of Your Reading Year

Jose Saramago

Best Cover of Your Reading Year

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees - Roger Deakin

Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity through projects which support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, as well as inspired Native activists in rural indigenous communities.

In 1960 J. Patrick Lannan, Sr., entrepreneur and financier, established Lannan Foundation. A self-educated scholar and liberal thinker, he believed strongly in the social importance of charitable programs and in the cultural importance of innovative and controversial forms of visual and literary art. During his lifetime, Mr. Lannan assembled an extensive collection of contemporary and modern American and European art. Included in his collection were important early works by emerging artists who went on to develop international reputations.

Mr. Lannan died in 1983 at the age of 78. In 1986 Lannan Foundation received a substantial endowment from his estate. Under the leadership of Patrick Lannan, the foundation continued its expansion of the collection and instituted national programs for grant making in contemporary visual and literary arts.

The Lannan Literary Awards and Fellowships were established in 1989 to honor both established and emerging writers whose work is of exceptional quality.  Over the last 20 years, Lannan Foundation, through its Awards and Fellowships program, has awarded 173 writers and poets more than $13 million. The awards recognize writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature.  The fellowships recognize writers of distinctive literary merit who demonstrate potential for continued outstanding work. (copied from Lannan website - http://www.lannan.org/)

Link to Goodreads Lannan Non-Fiction list

Non-Fiction Awards 1989+ in Alphabetical order

* own

(example of their non-ficiton work)

David Abram - Becoming Animal* 

Paula Gum Allen - The Sacred Hoop:

Thomas Berry - The Dream of the Earth

Wendell Berry - 

Charles Bowden - Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

David G Campbell - A Land of Ghosts

Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Mike Davis - Planet of Slums

Wade Davis - 

Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

David James Duncan - My Story as told by the Water: 

Barbara Ehrenreich - Bright Sided: 

Tim Flannery - A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World's Extincy Animals

Thomas Frank - The Conquest of Cool: 

Chris Hedges -

Christopher Hitchens - Mortality

Edward Hoagland - 

Adam Hochschild - To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914-1918 

Freeman House - 

Lewis Hyde - Trickster makes this world: Mischief, Myth and Art 

Elizabeth Kolbert - Field Notes From a Catastrophe; Man, Nature & Climate Change

Jonathan Kozol - Amazing Grace:

Barry Lopez - Arctic Dreams*

Charles C. Mann - Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species

Ruben Martinez - 

Bill McKibben - The End of Nature

Gary Paul Nabhan - Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes & Cultural Diversity

Richard K Nelson - The Island Within

David Quammen - The Song of the Dodo*

Chet Raymo - The Path: A One Mile Walk Through The Universe

Carl Safina - The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

Scott Russell Sanders - A Private History of Awe

Jeremy Scahill - 

Jonathan Schell - Fate of the Earth

Rebecca Solnit - A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Luis Alberto Urrea - By the Lake of Sleeping Children

Lawrence Weschler - Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: 

Terry Tempest Williams - Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Howard Zinn - The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

These 30 questions are part of the 30 day book challenge but I would not keep up doing it on a daily basis so I have chosen to do it all at once. I think questions like these should be answered annually depending on how many books you read per year as some answers are bound to change with more books you read and as tastes change you re-evaluate books read in the past.

1. Favourite book
2. Least favourite.
3. Book that makes you laugh out loud
4. Book that makes you cry
5. Book you wish you could live in
6. Favourite young adult book
7. Book that you can quote/recite
8. Book that scares you
9. Book that makes you sick
10. Book that changed your life
11. Book from your favourite author
12. Book that is most like your life
13. Book whose main character is most like you
14. Book whose main character you want to marry
15. First “chapter book” you can remember reading as a child
16. Longest book you’ve read
17. Shortest book you’ve read
18. Book you’re most embarrassed to say you like
19. Book that turned you on
20. Book you’ve read the most number of times
21. Favourite picture book from childhood
22. Book you plan to read next
23. Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)
24. Book that contains your favorite scene
25. Favourite book you read in school
26. Favourite nonfiction book
27. Favourite fiction book
28. Last book you read
29. Book you’re currently reading
30. Favourite Coffee Table Book

* Best book you read last year

* A book that you’ve read more than 3 times

* Your favorite series

* Favorite book of your favorite series

* A book that makes you happy

* A book that makes you sad

* Most underrated book

* Most overrated book

* A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving

* Favorite classic book

* A book you hated

* A book you used to love but don’t anymore

* Your favorite writer

* Favorite book of your favorite writer

* Favorite male character

* Favorite female character

* Favorite quote from your favorite book

* A book that disappointed you

* Favorite book turned into a movie

* Favorite romance book

* Favorite book from your childhood

* Favorite book you own

* A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t

* A book that you wish more people would’ve read

* A character who you can relate to the most

* A book that changed your opinion about something

* The most surprising plot twist or ending

* Favorite title

* A book everyone hated but you like

* Your favorite book of all time

I love the look and sound of the 5 sets of Penguin Great Ideas. 

Series One

All books in this series have a red spine and their covers use only black and red.

01. On the Shortness of Life - Seneca
02. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
03. Confessions of a Sinner - Augustine
04. The Inner Life - Thomas à Kempis
05. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli
06. On Friendship - Michel de Montaigne
07. A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift
08. The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
09. The Christians and the Fall of Rome - Edward Gibbon
10. Common Sense - Thomas Paine
11. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
12. On the Pleasure of Hating - William Hazlitt
13. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
14. On the Suffering of the World - Arthur Schopenhauer
15. On Art and Life - John Ruskin
16. On Natural Selection - Charles Darwin
17. Why I Am So Wise - Friedrich Nietzsche
18. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
19. Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
20. Why I Write - George Orwell

Series Two

All books in this series have a cyan spine and their covers use only black and cyan.

21. The First Ten Books - Confucius
22. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
23. The Symposium - Plato
24. Sensation and Sex - Lucretius
25. An Attack on the Enemy of Freedom - Cicero
26. The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job
27. Travels in the Land of Kubliai Khan - Marco Polo
28. The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan
29. How to Achieve True Greatness - Baldesar Castiglione
30. Of Empire - Francis Bacon
31. Of Man - Thomas Hobbes
32. Urne-Burial - Sir Thomas Browne
33. Miracles and Idolatry - Voltaire
34. On Suicide - David Hume
35. On the Nature of War - Carl von Clausewitz
36. Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard
37. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau
38. Conspicuous Consumption - Thorstein Veblen
39. The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
40. Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt

Series Three

All books in this series feature green as the spot colour.

41. In Consolation to his Wife - Plutarch
42. Some Anatomies of Melancholy - Robert Burton
43. Human Happiness - Blaise Pascal
44. The Invisible Hand - Adam Smith
45. The Evils of Revolution - Edmund Burke
46. Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson
47. The Sickness Unto Death - Søren Kierkegaard
48. The Lamp of Memory - John Ruskin
49. Man Alone with Himself - Friedrich Nietzsche
50. A Confession - Leo Tolstoy
51. Useful Work versus Useless Toil - William Morris
52. The Significance of the Frontier in American History - Frederick Jackson Turner
53. Days of Reading - Marcel Proust
54. An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe - Leon Trotsky
55. The Future of an Illusion - Sigmund Freud
56. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin
57. Books v. Cigarettes - George Orwell
58. The Fastidious Assassins - Albert Camus
59. Concerning Violence - Frantz Fanon
60. The Spectacle of the Scaffold - Michel Foucault

Series Four

All books in this series feature purple as the spot colour.

61. Tao Te Ching - Lao-Tzu
62. Writings from the Zen Masters - Various
63. Utopia - Thomas More
64. On Solitude - Michel de Montaigne
65. On Power - William Shakespeare
66. Of the Abuse of Words - John Locke
67. Consolation in the Face of Death - Samuel Johnson
68. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? - Immanuel Kant
69. The Executioner - Joseph de Maistre
70. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas de Quincey
71. The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion - Arthur Schopenhauer
72. The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln
73. Revolution and War - Karl Marx
74. The Grand Inquisitor - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
75. On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings - William James
76. An Apology for Idlers - Robert Louis Stevenson
77. Of the Dawn of Freedom - W. E. B. Du Bois
78. Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid - Virginia Woolf
79. Decline of the English Murder - George Orwell
80. Why Look at Animals? - John Berger

Series Five

All books in this series feature orange as the spot colour.

81. The Tao of Nature - Chuang Tzu
82. Of Human Freedom - Epictetus
83. On Conspiracies - Niccolò Machiavelli
84. Meditations - René Descartes
85. Dialogue Between Fashion and Death - Giacomo Leopardi
86. On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
87. Hosts of Living Forms - Charles Darwin
88. Night Walks - Charles Dickens
89. Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Charles Mackay
90. The State as a Work of Art - Jacob Burckhardt
91. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists - George Eliot
92. The Painter of Modern Life - Charles Baudelaire
93. The 'Wolfman' - Sigmund Freud
94. The Jewish State - Theodor Herzl
95. Nationalism - Rabindranath Tagore
96. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
97. We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End - Winston Churchill
98. The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise - Jorge Luis Borges
99. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad - George Orwell
100. An Image of Africa - Chinua Achebe

lists copied from wikipedia

Some of my favourite covers and books I'm excited to check out

Being a China Mieville Fan I will take note when he suggests books to read, these 50 books of fiction are what China feels every socialist should read. 

More information on the selection can be found at: http://theweeklyansible.tumblr.com/post/20777236577/50-sci-fi-fantasy-works-every-socialist-should-read

Bold = read

Underlined = own / tbr

1. Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
2. Edward Bellamy - Looking Backward
3. Alexander Bogdanov - The Red Star: A Utopia
4. Emma Bull & Steven Brust - Freedom & Necessity
5. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
6. Katherine Burdekin (asa Murray Constantine) - Swastika Night
7. Octavia Butler - Survivor
8. Julio Cortazar - House Taken Over
9. Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
10. Thomas Disch - The Priest
11. Gordon Eklund - All Times Possible
12. Max Ernst - Une Semaine de Bonte
13. Claude Farrere - Useless Hands
14. Anatole France - The White Stone
15. Jane Gaskell - Strange Evil
16. Mary Gentle - Rats and Gargoyles
17. Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
18. Lisa Goldstein - The Dream Years
19. Stefan Grabinski - The Dark Domain
20. George Griffith - The Angel of Revolution
21. Imil Habibi - The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
22. M. John Harrison - Virconium Nights
23. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
24. Jack London - Iron Heel
25. Ken MacLeod - The Star Fraction
26. Gregory Maguire - Wicked
27. J. Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) - Gay Hunter
28. Michael Moorcock - Hawkmoon
29. William Morris - News From Nowhere
30. Toni Morrison - Beloved
31. Mervyn Peake - The Gormenghast Novels
32. Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
33. Philip Pullman - Northern Lights
34. Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
35. Mack Teynolds - Lagrange Five
36. Keith Roberts - Pavane
37. Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars Trilogy
38. Mary Shelley - Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
39. Lucius Shepard - Life During Wartime
40. Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream
41. Eugene Sue - The Wandering Jew
42. Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter
43. Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
44. Alexei Tolstoy - Aelita
45. Ian Watson - Slow Birds
46. H. G. Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau
47. E. L. White - Lukundoo
48. Oscar Wilde - The Happy Prince and Other Stories
49. Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
50. Yevgeny Zamyatin - We

I have enjoyed a few books by writers who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature which got me thinking I wonder if any others are just as good imo. So my plan is to read at least 1 book by every person who has won the prize since the beginning of the Prize which was 1901. 1901 - 2012, it has apparently been awarded (so far) 105 times to 109 Laureates (a few years have joint winners)

This will be a long term goal!

Looking through the list of writers, many are unfamilar but good old tinternet helped me research their most interesting work for me to select. At least a handful of the writers have multiple works I would be interested in reading, Doris Lessing in particular (She was the oldest Laureate so far, 88 when awarded in 2007!

So far my list is as follows, starting from the most recent winner 2012

* other works interest me

Underlined - already read

(accents on letters of names from another language have not been placed due to my English keyboard and my lack of knowledge to find the ability to place them)

1. Mo Yan - Big Breasts And Wide Hips *
2. Tomas Transtromer - Selected Poems 1954 - 1986 *
3. Mario Vargas Llosa - The War Of The End Of The World *
4. Herta Muller - Travelling On One Leg *
5. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - Wandering Star
6. Doris Lessing - The Cleft *
7. Orhan Pamuk - The Museum Of Innocence *
8. Harold Pinter - None Of Interest ATM
9. Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher
10. John M. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello *
11. Imre Kertesz - Kaddish For An Unborn Child *
12. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul - An Area Of Darkness
13. Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain *
14. Gunter Grass - The Rat *
15. Jose Saramago - Blindness *
16. Dario Fo - Accidental Death Of An Anarchist
17. Wislawa Szymborska - Here
18. Seamus Heaney - Death Of A Naturalist *
19. Kenzaburo Oe - Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness *
20. Toni Morrison - Beloved
21. Derek Walcott - Midsummer *
22. Nadine Gordimer - Jump And Other Short Stories *
23. Octavio Paz - In Light Of India *
24. Camilo Jose Cela - Journey To The Alcarria *
25. Naguib Mahfouz - Voices From The Other World *
26. Joseph Brodsky - To Urania: Poems *
27. Wole Soyinka - The Interpreters
28. Claude Simon
29. Jaroslav Seifert
30. William Golding
31. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera *
32. Elias Canetti
33. Czeslaw Milosz
34. Odysseus Elytis
35. Issac Bashevis Singer
36. Vicente Aleixandre
37. Saul Bellow - More Die Of Heartbreak*
38. Eugenio Montale
39. Eyvind Johnson
40. Harry Martinson
41. Patrick White
42. Heinrich Boll
43. Pablo Neruda
44. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
45. Samuel Beckett
46. Yasunari Kawabata
47. Miguel Angel Asturias
48. Schmuel Yosef Agnon
49. Nelly Sachs
50. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov
51. Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea*
52. Giorgos Seferis
53. John Steinbeck - To A God Unknown *
54. Ivo Andric
55. Saint-John Perse
56. Salvatore Quasimodo
57. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
58. Albert Camus - The Myth Of Sisyphus *
59. Juan Ramon Jimenez
60. Halldor Kijan Laxness
61. Ernest Miller Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories *
62. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill - We Will All Go Down Fighting To The End
63. Francois Mauriac
64. Par Fabian Lagerkvist - The Dwarf
65. Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell - In Praise Of Idleness *
66. William Faulkner - Collected Stories *
67. Thomas Stearns Eliot
68. Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
69. Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf *
70. Gabriela Mistral
71. Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
72. Frans Eemil Sillanpaa
73. Pearl Buck - East Wind, West Wind
74. Roger Martin du Gard
75. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
76. Luigi Pirandello
77. Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
78. John Galsworthy
79. Erik Axel Karlfeldt
80. Sinclair Lewis
81. Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
82. Sigrid Undset - Gunnar's Daughter*
83. Henri Bergson
84. Grazia Deledda
85. George Bernard Shaw - 
86. Wladyslaw Stainslaw Reymont
87. William Butler Yeats - 
88. Jacinto Benavente
89. Anatole France
90. Knut Perdersen Hamsun - Pan
91. Carl Friedrich Georg Spilleler
92. Karl Adolph Gjellerup
93. Henrik Pontoppidan
94. Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam
95. Romain Rolland
96. Rabindranath Tagore
97. Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann
98. Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck
99. Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse
100. Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlof
101. Rudolf Christoph Eucken
102. Rudyard Kipling 
103. Giosue Carducci
104. Henryk Sienkiewicz
105. Frederic Mistral
106. Jose Echegaray y Elizabuirre
107. Bjornstjerne Martinus Bjornson
108. Christian MattiasTheodor Mommsen
109. Sully Prudhomme

I love coming across an author and enjoying their work so much you want to devour everything they have ever done. I have felt like that in the past and continue to do so to this day.

I have goals to read all their work but in reality as Frank Zappa rightly said 'So many books, so little time'. Reading everything interesting is impossible, so only things that grab me, are useful (not fluff) and won't make me feel in a state of torture will be consumed.

That said here are some authors and their works I have either read or want to read to get close to the completist level. Maybe for some authors I will reach the completist level, either way 'twill be a journey I shall enjoy.

Jose Saramago

• Blindness - read 
• Seeing - read 
• Death With Interuptions - read 
• The Elephant's Journey - own
• The Double - wishlist
• All The Names - wishlist
• The Cave - wishlist
• The Stone Raft - wishlist
• The Gospel According To Jesus Christ - wishlist
• Cain - wishlist
• Baltasar And Blimunda - wishlist
• The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis - wishlist
• The History Of The Siege Of Libson - wishlist

China Mieville

• Perdido Street Station: Bas Lag 1 - read
• The Scar: Bas Lag 2 - read
• Iron Council: Bas Lag 3 - read
• Kraken - read
• Railsea - read
• Un Lun Dun - own
• Embassytown - wishlist
• The City And The City - wishlist
• King Rat - wishlist
• Looking For Jake - wishlist

(many stories in compilations)

Haruki Murakami

• Kafka On The Shore - read
• The Elephant Vanishes - read
• A Wild Sheep Chase - read
• After Dark - read
• South Of The Border, West Of The Sun - read
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - currently reading
• The Wind Up Bird Chronicle - own
• Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World - own
• Norwegian Wood - own
• Dance, Dance, Dance - own
• Hear The Wind Sing - own
• Pinball 1973 - own
• Sputnik Sweetheart - wishlist 
• 1Q84 - wishlist

Aldous Huxley

• Island - read
• Brave New World - read
• Brave New World Revisited - read
• Ape And Essence - wishlist
• The Doors Of Perception & Heaven And Hell - wishlist
• The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the great mystics, E & W - wishlist
• Point Conter Point - wishlist
• The Crows Of Pearblossom - wishlist
• Time Must Have A Stop - wishlist

Hermann Hesse

• Steppenwolf - read
• Siddhartha - read
• The Glass Bead Game - wishlist
• Wandering: Notes and Sketches - wishlist
• Knulp - wishlist
• The Journey To The East - wishlist
• Peter Camenzind - wishlist
• Demian - wishlist
• Narcissus And Goldmund  - wishlist
• Beaneath The Wheel - wishlist
• The Fairy Tales Of Hermann Hesse

I have a love of words beginning with the letter E, here are some of my favourite words:

Eclectic (Eclecticism)

Eccentric

Esoteric

Exponentially

Ethereal

Enigmatic

Eutopia

Earth

Encyclopedia

Ecology

Europe

Energy

Elliptical

Eternal

Ethnic

Ethics

Emotional

Evenly

Expressive

Empyrean

Expand

Endorse

Envelope

Explore

Eye

...I could go on...mesmerized by the E...

I like the sound of the letter E (In many forms) tis whisper like and calming to me even when the definition of the word is the opposite, words are subjective anyway. The letter E is the numerical equivalent of 5 (5 points) which could be another symbol for the 5 powers/ elementals: Earth, Air, Fire, Water & Spirit.