south of the loop

Read Roger linked yesterday to a list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. I agree with him that these lists are “specious as all get out;” it’s hard to place much stock in them. They quickly become competitions, sources of pride or embarrassment, even when we pretend otherwise. And as soon as a”Must Read” or “Best Books” kind of list is published, indignant and politically correct readers everywhere point out its Euro-male-centric flaws. Quietly we mutter about how this book could have been left off but that book is on and and what were they thinking anyway? (See next paragraph for example of such a rant). And yet who among us doesn’t feel satisfied to have read x number on the list? I keep my own list, a spreadsheet, on my computer, which is–I swear–entitled “Books To Read Before I Die.xls.” It used to number several hundred, but then that computer died, and the resurrected list (on a new computer) sits at a measly 70.

So, pretending not to care how many books I’d read, or how many books anybody else had read, of course I went through and counted. Just the process of counting (which I’ve done twice and have been as honest as possible–there are some books I feel certain I’ve read, like Frankenstein and The Color Purple, although I’m not actually 100% positive) was irritating. I mean, no Blood Meridian? C’mon. I just spent three fucking weeks on it. Give me my Cormac McCarthy! And it seems pretty heavy on certain authors: J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo. And yet–Shakespeare is no longer important? And please: Life of Pi? It’s by no means a terrible book, but it has no place on a list like this. Also irritating were the near misses–I read one or two Iris Murdoch books, and one by Vikram Seth, wasn’t impressed with either author, and didn’t look back–and the aborted attempts (The Brothers Karamazov, Mrs. Fucking Dalloway). Nevermind the books that are actually sitting on my bookshelf right now, taunting me.

Disclaimers divulged, annoyances aired: my number is 89. If you really really want to know which ones, click on “Keep Reading” below current socks.

*     *     *

current book: Still reading the title essay in David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which I’m finding quite amusing, and may even persuade me to try some more essays in the book. It’s about a luxury cruise. Stay tuned.

current music: It was a high-volume day in the cube farm. A trip to Reckless Records last night left me three CDs richer and $26 poorer: The Stills’ Without Feathers (thought Logic Will Break Your Heart was pretty good and I thought their set at ACL was pretty great; the new album is solid but not spectacular), Los Super Seven (self-titled) (mostly fun with a few standouts), and Trembling Blue Stars’ Broken By Whispers (lovely in the way the Field Mice et. al. are lovely; that is to say, nothing I haven’t heard before, but still enjoyable). I also listened to a few Stars albums, Sondre Lerche, and Calexico.

current socks: Dark blue with light blue polka dots. My favorites to wear with my Keens.

(The number 89 does not include aborted attempts or near misses. Told you I was honest.) 

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
• Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
• Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
• The Hours – Michael Cunningham
• The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
• Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro [aborted, but plan to pick up again]
• Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
• A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
• Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
• The Lover – Marguerite Duras
• Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
• Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes [I think I have read two books by Julian Barnes. I’m not sure that this was one of them, though.]
• Waterland – Graham Swift
• The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
• The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco [aborted, but plan to pick up again]
• If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
• The World According to Garp – John Irving
• Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec [parts, for a philosophy course]
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
• Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
• The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov [on my bookshelf. taunting me.]
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
• Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
• Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
• The Once and Future King – T.H. White
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
• Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• Cannery Row – John Steinbeck [no, but I read the sequel, Sweet Thursday. doesn’t that count?]
• Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
• Native Son – Richard Wright
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf [aborted. repeatedly.]
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
• The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
• A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
• The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
• Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
• A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
• The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
• The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
• The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
• Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
• The Awakening – Kate Chopin
• The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky [aborted]
• Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
• Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
• Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
• Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
• The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
• The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
• The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
• Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra [parts, and in Spanish, so it doesn’t really count]
• Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Posted 18 October 2006

Filed under: books by admin2

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