While staying with a friend in DC last week (to attend Obama’s inauguration) I was surrounded by ardent readers who loved talking about good books and suggesting books to read. Also while in DC I spent one morning with a buddy of mine checking out used-book stores. I found a couple good books: Nothing I was seeking out but interesting books nonetheless. And then I started reading . . . for pleasure. It has been a long time since I read a lot of books for pleasure–due to graduate school and all that—and I thought I had been ruined for pleasure reading by years spent reading books from an analytic mindset. But I wasn’t. It all came back to me in a matter of a few days. I have finished one book already and am working on a second one—an anthology of sorts—while contemplating starting a third book. Yippee!
I hope to use this page as a way to track what I have read. Partly for reasons of compilation—I like lists of things—and partly because I might start doing some reviews of books I read. (Although, that probably won’t happen for a while. I want to read books now purely for the pleasure of enjoying a good tale told well.)
NOTE: Wherever possible, I have linked the title to the book’s entry on Amazon.
January 2009
• Lee Stringer - Grand Central Winter: Stories From The Street
February 2009
• Seamus Heaney - Beowulf
[While reading The Poetic Edda I decided to re-read Beowulf. I love the sparse, minimal, ruggedness of the language in the Heaney translation. I forgot how quick a read is Beowulf. I went through the whole story in one sitting.
NOTE: This is one of the few books I own in a hardcover edition.]
• Carolyne Larrington (tr.) – The Poetic Edda
[I took this with me to Iceland thinking it would be appropriate subject matter to read during the long Icelandic nights. But I wound up carrying it all over the country in my day-bag without ever cracking the cover. So, I read it when I returned from my holiday.]
• Jules Verne - Paris in the Twentieth Century
[I picked up this book at the library looking for the Fred Vargas book. It was a quick read; I finished the whole thing one afternoon in three sittings. It is an interesting take on predicting the future with Jules Verne writing this mildly dystopian tale 100 years before the events in it took place. He predicts a number of inventions like elevators, video-telephones and/or the internet, monorail-like elevated trains running throughout the entire city of Paris, oh, and gas-powered automobiles. Verne made all these predictions when he wrote the work in 1863.]
• Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
[One of the books on my list of books to read. A series of short, loosely related episodic tales about things he did and who he did them with. While many of the tales take place in Paris the city of Paris itself is not prominent in his narrative. His stories about Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald are remarkably unflattering in their portrayals.]
• Émile Zola - The Belly of Paris
• Gregor Dallas - Métro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light
[This book presents the history of the city of Paris through disconnected (in both time and place) stories revolving around a dozen different stop on the Paris Métro subway system.]
• Marcel Proust - Remembrance of Things Past
[Yeah, I didn't read this book. All I knew about Proust was this book was his most famous and that it was written after eating a madeleine cookie triggered some memory for Proust. So, I thought it would be a nice short book of episodic reminisces about the life of a writer in Paris. I was SO, SO wrong about that. I requested the book through the library system and went to pick up it today. At the library I received Volume 2 of Remembrance. At slightly over 1100 pages (No, that is not a typo.) the whole book must be somewhere around 2200 or 2300 pages longs. It's going back to the library tomorrow as I realized that what I thought I "knew" about this book is completely different from what it is. My idea about reading a quaint little book full of pithy bon mots regarding the life of a writer in Paris got totally shot down. Thanks, Proust!]
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September 1970 – December 2008
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