Fall Reading List, 2008
It happens each year, usually a few times. I take on a read type project. It started a few years ago when I had made friends with a pre op transexual, and she was explaining to me the nature of consciousness. I was struggling hard with it, with its inherent boundaries, and the biological limitations of ones perspective. She took the time to put together a head shaking list of books, and really threw me for a loop. So since then, I have sought out friends or strangers to put together interesting ideas of reading lists.
This time it is a simple process, but one that my book dealer and I both liked. I have decided that I would read first novels, and first works from non fiction writers. You see by now I have read a good chunk of work by the likes of Zinn or David McCoullough, and I think it is at a point now where I would like to see their first books. The same goes for novelists like Mike Chabon, or Johnathon Franzen. The early work, might seen the later work.
So, instead of trying to do the research and pick out the books by the people I am interested in, I gave that choice away. Like telling a chef to cook something he thinks I would like, I said to my book dealer, Al Post of Et Al’s Fine Books here in Wausau, that he could pick. I told him to pick ten books to get me started. I rejected some when I got there, as books I had read or authors I had no interest in. He talked me into a few of them, but really, this is his list. Aside from my honorable mention, which just happened to be sitting on the counter waiting for me to arrive.
So this is my list. I think it will take a few weeks of work, but I like to read. And in George Bush’s America reading in and of itself is an act of rebellion.
- The Twenty Seventh City by Johnathon Franzen
- Wolf by Jim Harrison
- A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone
- Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- A Life on the Wildside by Nelson Algren
- The Natural by Robert Malamud
- What I’m Going to Do I Think by L. Woiwode
- Goodbye, Columbus by Phillip Roth
- Run River by Joan Didion
And just for fun I bought
Silencing Political Dissent by Nancy Change
I think we have no greater joy in the world, possibly, then reading. I am so glad that my mother encourage me to be a reader, and I like the act of reading a lot. Given the attack we see librarians being under, I think we can do nothing better than read books.
Citizen Wausau » Blog Archive » Your Voice: Sept 3 said:
[…] Dino’s fall reading list. I think we should all make a fall reading list. I am going to make one. My reading lists are […]
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:30 pm #