Stuff I've Been Reading

In The Believer, Nick Hornby wrote a monthly column entitled "Stuff I've Been Reading." In it, he chronicled his experience as a buyer, reader, and general hoarder of books, listing the books he bought and the books he actually ended up reading each month. Hornby's columns can be found in the September 2003-August 2004 issues of The Believer, published by McSweeney's, or in two collections: The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. The Dirt.

As I am currently unemployed for the summer and am anticipating the necessity of an intellectual project, I'm going to imitate Hornby and begin my very own "Stuff I've Been Reading" column, published here, in a decisively less public forum than in The Believer. I suppose I'll begin with my summer reading list(s). I've got leftovers from 2008 and a nascent one in the back of my notebook for 2009. Here they are, combined:

THE LIST
1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
Dubliners, James Joyce
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, I.B. Singer
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Immoralist, Andre Girde
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Plays Well with Others, Allan Gurganus
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Bruno Schulz
The Tin Drum, Gunther Grass
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
White Teeth and On Beauty, Zadie Smith
The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs

It's easy to see that my list runs heavy on the "Books to Read Before You Die"; as a rising junior English major (and nerd, apparently), it stresses me out that I might not have read every classic piece of literature before graduation. Thus, The List.

To start off my quest, I checked out The Golden Notebook, Plays Well with Others, and The Year of Living Biblically from my trusty Oak Park Public Library this morning. I had the last book of The List recommended to me on Friday night by a friend, after telling her I'd taken a course in "The Bible as Literature" this past semester at school. I wrote my final research paper on Biblical translations and their effect on literalists' view of homosexuality, prompting her suggestion of Jacobs' book. As for the Lessing and Gurganus choices, I read "To Room Nineteen" and "Thirteen Feet of Water in My House" in an English course this Spring and was intrigued by Lessing's style and the topic of the Gurganus novel.

I've got some unpacking to do, and am starting my volunteer job at the Ernest Hemingway Museum this week, but I hope to get a taste of the Bible book and at least one other before the boxes and boxes of books I shipped home from school arrive and distract me. Wish me luck!