summer challenge: read, read, read, read!

Last summer, when I was working a 40-hour-a-week job (which, from my current Spanish point of view, is starting to seem like a puritanical American sadistic invention, but really, I loved my job), I read somewhere around 100 books in four months.  I didn’t keep a list of all the books, and I tried to mentally erase all of the duds that I lost precious hours of my life on, so I can never be certain if I grossly inflated that figure, but since this is my blog, I can say whatever I want.  I currently work less than 20 hours a week and have read maybe 25 books in 8 months.  Forgivable?  Absolutely not.  I have read some keepers, though:

     ·         Tinkers by Paul Harding (beautiful),

     ·         Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (beautiful),

     ·         On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming (har, har—seriously, I haven’t laughed that hard for a while),

     ·         Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (thoughtful),

     ·         No god but God by Reza Aslan (thoughtful),

     ·         Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller (CREEPY! GRIPPING! AARGH!),

     ·         Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (Atwood=genius),

     ·         The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings (one long, witty, poem-y, autobiographical account about being a POW),

     ·         Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly (quietly breathtaking poems),

     ·         Miles from Nowhere by Barbara Savage (inspiring),

     ·         History of Love by Nicole Krauss (moving and epic, with small, everyday beauties),

     ·         and currently reading: How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan (thought-provoking).

I have very high hopes for this summer.  I have a few hurdles to my goal: I’ll be taking an online class as a prerequisite to my grad program starting this fall, and I’ll be living in an apartment with three other girls, but I think I can juggle homework with reading with hanging out & having beers with roommates and friends.  The only thing I’m really worried about is my system going into shock from my day job, and being like “WHAT? You actually expect me to work for FIVE DAYS IN A ROW? and for a full FOUR HOURS STRAIGHT with no coffee-and-listen-to-everyone-else-gossip-in-another-language break?”

Anyways, I compiled a list in the hopes of avoiding reading mountains of crap in order to find a few gems (reading all of the novels in the A section is an incredibly inefficient way to find out that Margaret Atwood is a genius).  I really don’t expect to read 100 books this summer; if I get through 50, I’ll be incredibly happy.  If I get through 30 but have a real social life, I might even be happier.  Here’s a list of the top 50 for your perusal; if you see any real draggers on this list, give me a holler, and I’ll substitute it for one of many titles that are waiting in the wings.

This list is an aggregation of A) all those books I should have read while in high school, B) those yearly must-read lists and C) the detritus of book names that were recommended to me at some point & that drifted to the bottom of the drawer before I rescued them from perpetual never-got-around-to-dom.  I’m not into those summer-fluff novels that seem to multiply like green bacteria in a petri dish as soon as the sun peeks out, but along with several recent-ish best-sellers, you will see some highly recommended sci-fi/fantasy and YA books, as well as a whole lotta classics that are beating me upside the head with their WEIGHTY SHOULD-HAVE-ALREADY-READ-ness.

Books to Read Sometime in the Near Future:

1.            Annals of a Former World by John McPhee

2.            Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

3.            The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr

4.            The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

5.            The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

6.            Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

7.            The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

8.            Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

9.            Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

10.         Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

11.         A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

12.         Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

13.         The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

14.         Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

15.         The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon

16.         His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

17.         Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

18.         The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

19.         Dune by Frank Herbert

20.         The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

21.         Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee

22.         The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

23.         Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

24.         A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

25.         Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

26.         The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

27.         A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

28.         The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

29.         All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

30.         How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

31.         The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

32.         All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

33.         Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

34.         Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

35.         The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

36.         Middlemarch by George Eliot

37.         The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

38.         The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

39.         A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

40.         Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

41.         The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

42.         The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

43.         I, Claudius by Robert Graves

44.         A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

45.         The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

46.         It by Stephen King

47.         Walden by Henry David Thoreau

48.         Snow by Orhan Pamuk

49.         Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

50.         The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood