Litster

These are some of the books I'll be reading this year.  Last year was a good year for books, especially since the book club started.  Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Welsh's The Marabou Stork Nightmares, Pahlaniuk's Survivor, Kundera's Identity, all of them quite good.

I also read Hesse's Demian and Soseki's Kokoro.

But the list wasn't long enough.  Shameful, even, in its brevity.  I've been infected with a shortened attention span.  Random music, channel surfing, no patience for reading.  I spent the morning updating my Facebook profile, adding things to my favorite music, books, movies and television.  Music and books far outweighed television and movies, though television is a problem, while movies just haven't really interested me as much as music and books.  I then started cleaning my room, ordering my life, really.  Organizing the books left unsorted on the shelf, making an attempt at alphabetizing my CD's.  Everything was going so well.

I'm missing a book, a very important book, and it's essential that I find it.  But I'm afraid of where it might be.  I know I gave it to someone to read, but I don't know if she gave it back to me.  I should never have loaned out the Norton edition of The Sound and the Fury when I had a perfectly untouched and unimportant Vintage copy.  The Norton version, perhaps though seemingly meaningless in its annotations, is the only book I've ever dragged through multiple courses, the only book I've really dedicated to dissecting completely and with purpose.  I think it's been through three classes, all of them taught by very knowledgeable, old professors, the dying breed of old school lit professors.  I've used the book on papers for classes that didn't even cover the novel.  I need to find this book, or I need to get it back (if it is indeed where I think it is).

So, if you're reading this and you have my book, please return it to me.


Anyways, here's the list for 2011 (The first three are in order):
Murakami -- Kafka on the Shore
Bourdain -- Kitchen Confidential
Pynchon -- Gravity's Rainbow
Aeschylus -- Oresteia
Sinclair -- The Jungle
Hesse -- Narcissus and Goldmund
Danielewski -- Only Revolutions (trying it again later this year)
Sinclair -- Oil! (again, trying it again)
Nietzsche -- The Antichrist
Johnson -- Tree of Smoke
Cervantes -- Don Quixote
Faulkner -- Three Famous Short Novels (maybe just The Bear)
Bronte -- Wuthering Heights
Ariosto -- Orlando Furioso
Mann -- The Magic Mountain
Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera
Konecky -- Allegra Maud Goldman
Hurston -- Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ovid -- Metamorphosis
Dostoevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov
Nietzsche -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Mann -- Doctor Faustus
Lee & Schlain -- Acid Dreams
Burgess -- Honey for the Bears
Hesse -- Steppenwolf
Plato -- Republic
Shikibu -- The Tale of Genji
Descartes -- Meditation on First Philosophy


Twenty-eight in all, and a decent mixture.  I'm going to try to branch out to more non-fiction, and I think the philosophy angle is a good place to start (even if it's still just a knot).  I'm reading Murakami right now and have made it about halfway through.  Mentioned in the book are Soseki, The Tale of Genji, Eliot and The Beatles (to name a few).  I'm looking forward to this year and its books.  I just can't slow down.