July to December: books

Welcome to the sequel to a post back in June regarding the books I had read up to the halfway point in the year. Back in June I had cited a statistic from the National Endowment for the Arts report titled "Reading at Risk" (2002) that said 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school. The Guardian actually reported on an Associated Press poll back in August of this year that showed that one in four Americans read no books in the past year and most people typically said that they read four books. http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2153877,00.html


So once again, here is my somewhat self-indulgent compilation of the books I have read in the past six months...doing my part to up our national average...


1. The Trial - Franz Kafka
2. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
3. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
4. the Gospel Singer - Harry Crews
5. the Clown - Heinrich Boll
6. Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
7. Know What I Mean? - Michael Eric Dyson
8. No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
9. Gargoyles - Thomas Bernhard
10. Victoria - Knut Hamsun
11. Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
12. Three Novels by Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnnamable - Samuel Beckett
13. A Hundred Little Hitlers - Elinor Langer
14. Selected Stories - Robert Walser
15. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement
16. Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz
17. Killing the Black Body - Dorothy Roberts
18. Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
19. Zeno's Conscience - Italo Svevo
20. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
21. Sundown Towns - James Loewen
22. Slowness - Milan Kundera
23. Crystal Frontier - Carlos Fuentes
24. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors - Susan Sontag
25. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
26. Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz*
27. Rereading America*


*= still in process, expected to complete by the end of the month


highlights: Selected Stories (Walser). the Clown. Gargoyles. Molloy. Hunger. Crystal Frontier. Pale Fire.
favorite nonfiction: Killing the Black Body
estimated number of pages read in the past 6 months: 8500
total number of books for the year: 43

Subjective

In an attempt to beat out both Saxon and Pitchfork, here's my end of the year selections for Top Ten Albums of 2007 (in chronological order, of course)

Ponytail - Kamehameha
Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters
Love of Diagrams - Mosaic
Electrelane - No Shouts No Calls
Silver Daggers - New High and Ord
Angels of Light - We Are Him
Talib Kweli - Ear Drum
Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
Radiohead - In Rainbows


Honorable Mentions: Grinderman, No Age, the Ponys, Battles, Caribou, and the new Jay Z