Some Books Are Best Read Piecemeal

I have been reading George Carlin's Last Words.  It has been a slow journey.  I have always enjoyed his work even as I have considered some of it problematic.  Also, sharing the NYC Irish Catholic background, I can understand him without agreeing with him.  I know something of the experiences, good and bad, that shaped him, for better and worse.  But for all his brilliance and wit, he was an embittered and angry man ... and that makes reading his story a slow and sad experience.  I tend to read just a chapter at a time and then move on to other things ... the mundane, the ordinary, the gentle, the satisfying routines of everyday life serve as an antidote to the overwhelming bleakness of Last Words.  It is a book well worth reading as much for what it reveals about my ethnicity and my church as for what it reveals about George Carlin.  Of course, what it reveals is heavily skewed toward negativity.  But, it is sometimes a salutary experience to examine the failures of an institution, the darkness within a tribal group.  I had much the same feeling when reading Angela's Ashes.  It doesn't do to romanticize one's heritage.  It stops all growth and development and evolution, all forward motion, when one is so busy glorifying the past that one forgets to analyze it.

At this rate, I'll probably finish the book sometime in the summer.  But along the way, there will be plenty of thought and reflection.  And isn't that precisely what a good book does: provoke thought and reflection?

25 Books That Shaped America

When this book by Thomas C Foster first came out in hardcover, I was intrigued ... after all I did my graduate studies in Early American literature. But I waited for it to come out in paperback before purchasing a copy. Not surprisingly I have read [and studied] most of these books though I'll admit I am a bit weak on the mid-20th Century to date selections.



1. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. YES
2. The Last of the Mohicans. James Fenimore Cooper. YES
3. The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne. YES
4. Walden. Henry David Thoreau. YES
5. Moby Dick. Herman Melville. YES
6. Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman. YES
7. Little Women. Louisa May Alcott. YES
8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain. YES
9. A Boy's Will and North of Boston. Robert Frost. YES
10. My Antonia. Willa Cather. YES
11. The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald. YES
12. The Sun Also Rises. Ernest Hemingway. YES
13. The Weary Blues. Langston Hughes. NOT THIS ONE BUT I'VE READ HIS WORK
14. The Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett NO
15. USA. John Dos Passos. YES
16. The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck. YES
17. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston. NO
18. Go Down, Moses. William Faulkner YES
19. The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow. NO
20. On the Road. Jack Kerouac. YES
21. The Cat in the Hat. Dr. Seuss. YES
22. To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee. YES.
23. The Crying of Lot 49. Thomas Pynchon. NO
24. Song of Solomon. Toni Morrison. NO
25. Love Medicine. Louise Erdrich. NO

I think my preference for 18th & 19th & early 20th century literature shows ... as we come closer and closer to the present, I seem to have overlooked more and more of these authors ... indeed, until picking up this little volume, I'd never even heard of Hurston and Erdrich. In any case, I have read 18 of the books purported to have shaped America. My curiosity has been piqued enough to go out and buy a few more to read this summer.

Summer Reading , Anyone?

I am not entirely sure where Rachel, of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, got this particular very eclectic mix of classics and current popular fiction ... but I'll be adding a few titles of my own at the end of my post that I think are worth investigating over the summer.

Look at the list of (100) books below. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in. (Movies don’t count.)

1.The Da Vinci Code(Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire(Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)34 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (WallyLamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

It would seem that I have read 46 of the books on the list, some of them way back in the mists of time when I was still doing assigned reading during high school summers. I wish to read another nine from this list, six of which I already own. And, of course, I own Joyce's Ulysses which I have started to read numerous times sometimes lasting twenty whole pages before abandoning it, impatient with the whole stream of conciousness nonsense.

Now for my own list of books: I'll be adding to those nine another nine for my own summer reading:
1. Animal Farm [George Orwell] read so long ago that I haven't any real memory of it
2. Neverwhere [Neil Gaiman] started last summer but abandoned as work resumed.
3. Good Omens [Neil Gaiman] another unfinished book
4. Till We Have Faces [C.S. Lewis] another re-read, only vaguely remembered from decades ago 5. God Emperor of Dune [Frank Herbert] the installment I am up to in my re-reading of this series
6. The Mermaid Chair [Sue Monk Kidd] recommended by my mother
7. Blessed Are the Cheesemakers [Sarah-Kate Lynch] also recommended by my mother
8. Man and His Symbols [Carl Jung]
9. Memories, Dreams and Reflections [Carl Jung]