I ain't doing this isht for nothing.

[raybear]

I'm sitting here listening to monks sing. Not live, but on vinyl. DYA brought home some records that are favorites of her father, and I'm burning them onto CDs for him as a belated father's day gift. The process requires me to pay more attention than usual. How quickly I got spoiled. I remember when I'd spend entire evenings in front of the stereo, making mixtapes, selecting the individual tracks from the piles of CDs, listening to songs in their entirety, sometimes changing my mind and rewinding and re-recording. Now I click and drag and hit a button and leave the room. No blood, sweat, or tears in that.

So grocerygetter, who's my compadre in the low-residency creative writing grad school experience (though not the same school) posted her reading list for the semester and it made me feel inadequate. She had over 40 books. I have a mere 11 that I'm required to read, but I have ambitions for way more. Not including the research books I'll need for my senior seminar on "writing gender".

But just to put it out there, here's my current "to be read" list, in quasi-order of importance. I've already completed the first 2. I'll probably be writing a lot about the books I'm reading in this journal, so consider this a preview of coming attractions of sorts.

1. Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson
2. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
3. Big Bad Love by Larry Brown
4. Portrait of an Aritst as a Young Man by James Joyce
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan
6. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
7. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (this is required for one of my online discussion conferences, believe it or not.)
8. All Souls by Javier Marias
9. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
10. Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
11. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
12. Perfume by Patrick Suskind
13. The Safety of Objects by A.M. Homes
14. I Remember by Joe Brainard
15. Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
16. I Spit On Your Graves by Boris Vian
17. The Diary of a Rapist by Evan S. Connell
18. I Am Not Jackson Pollock by John Haskell
19. Middlemarch by George Eliot
20. Don Quixote by Cervantes (new translation by Edith Grossman)
21. two different translations of Homer's Iliad (Christopher Logue and Stanley Lombardo)

Ok, the last three are the most ambitious. I will probably select one of them to read over the course of the semester, in the midst of reading everything else.

Jump in at any point.

There are several others I've recently picked up or ordered, but I'm trying to be a little realistic. I'll save them for post-graduation. And oh yeah, to answer Angelina's question, this is my LAST semester of grad school. Time to dig in.

Comments

[vfc.livejournal.com]

Hey, would you hate me if I flaked on our plans for tomorrow? I didn't get half the stuff done today that I needed to and I'm kinda cranky. I'm feeling some the need for an "alone" night. (I'm still down for the 9th though.)

[raybear.livejournal.com]

no, that's cool, i can certainly understand those needs.

but YES on the 9th. i'll e-mail you with some crafty ideas i have. should we rope gloeden in as well?

[raybear.livejournal.com]

I too have always preferred the Odyssey (the hero's journey! what's not to love with all those obstacles!), but the Iliad is more apropos for my work-in-progress, which has lots of themes related to war and societal effects of war and I even named a character Hector. Plus, since learning more about the art of translation, I've been exploring more those aspects as well -- the language and poetics and all that good stuff.

I'm sure I'll be posting when I start reading Joyce! I've had the book on my shelf for years, but haven't gotten around to it.

[chicagocowboi.livejournal.com]

I have a copy of "The Things They Carried" if you would like to borrow it.

[raybear.livejournal.com]

thanks, but not only have i already bought it, i already read it! i'm trying to maintain the momentum from the residency and get started on my semester before i get tired and lazy.