Sunday, December 23, 2007

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

3 comments:

Saxon Baird said...

*insert reactionary rant about something or other in lieu of what nots and so forths*

J said...

Yummy pic.

Ben Mines said...

That's impressive. I myself move through a book at a gentlemanly amble (a mere 15 books over the last 6-months against your 26) but tend to pause along the way to absorb the scenery. You're either speed-reading or blissfully unemployed. If the latter, I commend you.

Pale Fire is one of my all-time favourites. I would like to recommend you put everything else by Nabokov on your itinerary, along with Time's Arrow by Martin Amis, any book by Borges, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (itself a six-month expedition) and Invisible Cities by Calvino.