So I read a lot more in 2007 than I have in the past couple of years. Part of this is because I haven't been in school for the calendar year, so I didn't have much requried reading to throw me off. It is also partly because I was more anti-social this year than I have been in awhile. But, as always, I still didn't read enough.
Reading is the ultimate alone-but-still-connected activity. The reader has an intimate and symbiotic relationship with the author. The author has decided the language, the characters, the context, the setting, but only the reader can assign sounds and images and the mental details and judgements which the author left out. In a sense, the author creates a vague set of directions, but it is up to the reader to observe, as she is on the journey and each individual experience will be different and unique. Without the reader, the author wouldn't exist (at least his book contract wouldn't) and without the author, the reader wouldn't get access to such a godly feelings of omniscience that fiction can bring.
A novel may have certain philosophies, the author may assign her characters certain traits and a few clues to the visual appearance of the characters and locations, but it is the reader who takes these fragments and forms them into a cohesive, living world inside their mind. The author may preliminarily set the time frame in which the story begins and ends, but the reader has the last say over the elasticity of the conclusion. If they don't like the book, the reader can smash the cover on the author's world hundreds of pages before the author envisioned his creation's story would end. And even when the book ends, the characters and stories can continue far beyond bounds created by the physicality of a cardboard book cover: I constantly hear Holden Caulfield's caustic cynicism as I journey through the everyday world; Kilgore Trout has been creating fantastical observations and plots in my head, even since Vonnegut has died; Sam Spade has been informing me of how he would react in certain sticky situations.
I'm setting a goal to read 45 books next year, which I can do as long as I manage my time well. I want to include more histories and biographies than I did this year, but fiction is closest to my heart, so I'll see how it goes. I didn't make any goals about reading in 2007, but after compiling the list of what I read (there may be a few I'm not remember just right now), I figured I'd set a number goal for 2008, the ideal is to beat it, but I'll at least meet the mark. I won't be including books assigned by the classes I'll be taking at school.
A novel may have certain philosophies, the author may assign her characters certain traits and a few clues to the visual appearance of the characters and locations, but it is the reader who takes these fragments and forms them into a cohesive, living world inside their mind. The author may preliminarily set the time frame in which the story begins and ends, but the reader has the last say over the elasticity of the conclusion. If they don't like the book, the reader can smash the cover on the author's world hundreds of pages before the author envisioned his creation's story would end. And even when the book ends, the characters and stories can continue far beyond bounds created by the physicality of a cardboard book cover: I constantly hear Holden Caulfield's caustic cynicism as I journey through the everyday world; Kilgore Trout has been creating fantastical observations and plots in my head, even since Vonnegut has died; Sam Spade has been informing me of how he would react in certain sticky situations.
I'm setting a goal to read 45 books next year, which I can do as long as I manage my time well. I want to include more histories and biographies than I did this year, but fiction is closest to my heart, so I'll see how it goes. I didn't make any goals about reading in 2007, but after compiling the list of what I read (there may be a few I'm not remember just right now), I figured I'd set a number goal for 2008, the ideal is to beat it, but I'll at least meet the mark. I won't be including books assigned by the classes I'll be taking at school.
On the list are a few books I started this year but didn't finish (I usually am reading at least 3 or 4 at a time, sometimes books will escape me and lose them in the shuffle) are Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner, Jay Anthony Lukas' account of class and turn-of-the-20th Century Western United States, Big Trouble, and David McCullogh's John Adams. Also on the list is: David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Gregory Prince and Robert Wright, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Strong Opinions, a collection of letters, reviews and such by Vladimir Nabokov, In The Arena by Richard M. Nixon, Jonathan Franzen's Strong Motion and Steinbeck's East of Eden, which I started to fall in love with a couple of years back, but was derailed by school a hundred pages into it. Any suggestions for the 2008 list?Here's the 2007 list of what I read:
Immortality - Milan Kundera
Refuge - Terry Tempest Williams
A Kind of Flying - Ron Carlson
Practical Demon Keeping - Christopher Moore
A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore
The Stupidist Angel - Christopher Moore
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
The Twenty-Seventh City - Jonathan Franzen
The Tie That Binds - Kent Haruf
No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Without Remorse - Tom Clancy
Coronado - Dennis Lehane
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
The March - E.L. Doctorow
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith
Letting Loose The Hounds - Brady Udall
Laughter In The Dark - Vladimir Nabokov
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin - Gordon Wood
Into The Wild - Jon Krakauer
2 comments:
I read The Road just before Fall semester started, and loved it. Probably one of my favorite books ever... I think Viggo Mortensen is signed on for the movie...
I saw No Country yesterday. I don't know why, but it put me in a really good mood. Despite what some say, I absolutely loved the ending. It was perfect, I thought. It has definitely moved into my top 5 in 2007. I still need to see Once, however--it's in my queue.
Yeah, I totally owned you on the number of books read this past year, but I think because I was in jail for most of that I'll have to assign myself a pretty liberal handicap. Still, I'll be a braggart whenever I can somehow justify it.
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