Category / Reading

by Edward Champion

Latest Reading Meme

Continuing the meme (apparently originated by Patricia):

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Shadow of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert
Sula by Toni Morrison
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Also, what titles would you add to this list? (Well, let’s mix it up then!)

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
Great Expectations by Kathy Acker
Gain by Richard Powers
Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner
Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber
Brick Lane by Monica Ali

by Edward Champion

It’s Not Exactly Like We’re Reading Laurell K. Hamilton

Kevin Kinsella offers an anecdote that represents a type of experience I’ve encountered far too many times myself. Except in my case, it’s generally bankers, lawyers, doctors and other “educated” people who belittle my reading selections. San Francisco is a city of snobs, you see. Not that I give a shit either way, but it still always amuses me when these detractors can’t even remember the basic characters from, say, the current beat-up William Faulkner novel I’m rereading or confuse Sherwood Anderson with (I kid you not) Sherwood Schwartz. Which makes me wonder if there’s a novel I don’t know about called Gilligan Amberson’s Magnificent Island.

by Edward Champion

The Sony Passive Reader

The new Sony Reader looks spiffy, but I have my doubts. You see, the Reader here is not paper, meaning that no pages can be flipped, folded over, ripped out of the book or written upon. Not that I’m in the habit of defacing books, but I often buy a copy of something specifically for this purpose.

So kudos to Sony for the electronic print clarity, but I’m suspicious of any product that’s attempting to supplant the reading experience, which, as human interfaces go, has been wholly successful for centuries. To me, reading involves stopping, perhaps writing key passages in a notebook, or rereading a particular paragraph or two, and sometimes skipping around. An academic or a student, for example, couldn’t compile information without this technique. Now that the sensation of flipping between, say, page 6 and page 125 has been lost, I’m wondering if the Sony Reader will cause the retention of information to dwindle. Assuming it succeeds, will the Sony Reader create a new generation of otiose readers?

by Edward Champion

75 Book Challenge

I’ll see your 50 books and raise you twenty-five. Seventy-five books, folks. I’ll be reading 75. Who’s with me?

[UPDATE: Tayari Jones has some very good guidelines about what to read, although I would add the following ideals: a mystery book, a science fiction book, a “chick lit” book, a book written for popular audiences (We don’t have to be literary snobs all the time, do we? Besides it helps to know what everyday people are reading from time to time.), a book that is at least 800 pages, a book that is less than 100 pages, a children’s book, a substantial percentage of books written by women and minorities, a memoir written by or about a truly whacked out individual, a lengthy nonfiction book about a subject I know absolutely nothing about, a microhistory, et al.]