2 posts tagged “summer reading”

Happy Fall! This is my favorite time of year, for reasons I have never fully addressed; perhaps this can be the subject of another post. No matter, we have more pressing issues at hand. It is time for me to lay my cards on the table: here's what I ended up reading this summer.

As some of you may remember, on May 22 I responded to the Question of the Day by constructing a summer reading list for myself. What you may not know, unless you are unfortunate enough to live with me, is that I adopted, in my trademark reasonless manner, an almost cultish rigidity to this list. Strange, then, that I didn't actually manage to read very much of it. There are a few reasons for this.

First, I foolishly forgot to calculate Harry Potter into my original list. This meant allowing not only a week for the new book, but the week preceding it for re-reading The Half-Blood Prince. This didn't take too much of a bite out of my time as did various other bizarre flights of fancy (I was suddenly and inexorably gripped with a desire to re-read Fight Club, of all things) and a general complete lack of time to read. Here, then, is how my summer reading shamefully came down:

Children of Men - turned out to be ridiculously boring next to the movie, which is fucking brilliant. Took forever to get through.
Slaughterhouse-Five - just as amazing as I remembered; inspired a breif desire to read nothing but Vonnegut, which I suppressed in the interest of sticking to The List
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat - started reading, but found it to be too dry to read in one go. The cases being unrelated, I decided I would read it intermittenly with other reading. Really fascinating, though, I'm still making it through.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Back Talk
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - I've been stuck on this for over month, just broke page 200. I can only speculate at the reasons for this giving me so much trouble, but I suspect it has to do with the effect that The Man Who/Back Talk/The Bible had on my momentum
The Bible - Slow going. Extremely slow going.

Books: Show us your summer reading list.
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.

Following is a list of books I'm planning on reading. I may or may not get to them all this summer, but this is what I have on tap, anyway:

• PD James, Children of Men - currently reading
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces - currently out of the Albany Public Library. Clock ticking, will probably end up just buying it.
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
• Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
• Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union
• Alex Richards, Back Talk
• Julie Powell, Julie and Julia
• Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
• Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy
• Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

As always, the Bible is on my reading list, and falling fast. I just have to sit down and do that one of these days.