Last updated March 1, 2003

JANUARY - 2003

The Wind-up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami

Among the Missing by Dan Chaon

SUMMER READING - 2002

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

“the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core- men and women both- all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence.  For me that made for the worst kind of despairs, and finally I couldn’t stand their grinning, hopeful teacher faces.  Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible- time-freed, existential youth forever.  It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth.  And literature, being lasting, is their ticket” (222)

“there is mystery everywhere, even in a vulgar, urine-scented, suburban depot such as this.  You have only to let yourself in on it” (342)

“Some life is only life, and unconjugatable, just as to some questions there are no answers.  Just nothing to say… Things occur to me differently now, just as they might to a character at the end of a good short story.” (369)

“Walter would say that I have become neither the seer nor the thing seen” (339).

 “I am usually (if only momentarily) glad to have a past, even and imputed and remote one.  There is something to that.  It is not a burden, though I’ve always thought of it as one.  I cannot say that we all need a past in full literary fashion, or that one is much useful in the end.  But a small one doesn’t hurt, especially if you’re already in a life of your own choosing” (371).

“I walked out of the condos onto the flat lithesome beach this morning, and took a walk in my swimming trunks and no shirt on.  And I though that one natural effect of life is to cover you in a thin later of… what? A film? A residue or skin of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at?  I’m not sure.  But you are under it, and for a long time, and only rarely do you know it, except that for some unexpected reason or opportunity you come out— for an hour or even for a moment— and you suddenly feel pretty food.  And in that magical instant you realize how long it’s been since you felt just that way.  Have you been ill, you ask.  Is life itself just an illness or a syndrome?  Who knows?  /  Only suddenly, then, you are out of it- that film, that skin of life, as when you were a kid.  And you think: this must’ve been the way it was once in my life, though you didn’t know it then, and don’t really even remember it- a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater.  And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may be just too late” (374-375).

 Sadly, on account of A201

WINTER TERM READING - 2001/2

Ghost Town by Robert Coover

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

SUMMER READING - 2001

The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

Decided to read a book by Saroyan after reading Kerouac's line "snacking on some sweet Saroyan" in an early diary entry.  The Human Comedy didn't impress the hell out of me, but wasn't bad summer reading.  About an immigrant family in CA during WWII.

 

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Read this in preparation for the London program next semester. Good story about about ethnic relationships in modern England.

Nice Work by David Lodge

Lodge always manages to slip some heady material into otherwise fluffy fiction. (ie Kierkegaard in Therapy).  A good summer read.  

 

 

 

SUMMER READING - 2000

Blindness by José Saramago 

... about the fragility of the human condition and our dependency upon artificial social structure and technology.  There are pitifully few Saramago resources on the web in English.  Here's a link to the Nobel site, where you can read his acceptance speech, bio info,  etc.  

 

The Castle by Kafka

I read a good chunk of The Castle on a dreary, rainy day in Scotland this summer.  I spoke to some German tourists that same day, who told me to watch out for sheep shit and that it was excellent weather to read Kafka by. 

 

 

The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster

The same crime story is told three times over, but with drastic differences in perspective, style and narration.  Similar principle to that in Lola Rent, but much more developed. 

 

 

Coriolanus by Shakespeare

One of Shakespeare's lesser known plays that is more dramatic and easier to follow than a lot of his other stuff.  One critic said that the "sight and sound" of a production is often over-looked in criticism, and that is what Coriolanus excells in: spectacle.  Having seen it performed this summer in London with Ralph Finnes, I can agree.  He was injured in a recent performance. 

 

The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff

It difficult to say whether Hoff's books made me feel better or worse about myself (At times I felt like the work combination of Eeyore and Tigger (the two characters he sees as emblematic of the two types of Westerners); at others, hopeful at the possibility of change.), but they certainly made me view the world in a different way.
After writing The Tao of Pooh, Hoff became the public's foremost source on the Eastern philosophy/religion Taoism. These books are refreshingly unpretentious (accessibility was his central goal), and effortlessly easy to read. If only applying these principles to one's own life were so simple. In this way, his books straighforwardly invite the reader to challange the ways of their life. While many of his points are simply made, and occasionally strictly dogmatic, it is difficult to envision a reader who could not take something away from these books.

The Professor and the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

 

 

 

Other summer reads:

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