Tuesday, February 06, 2007

books lately

The only bookstore in Julian, CA
April, 2006

here a list of
the books that I have read since April 2005

1. Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
2. Paul Auster – Timbuktu
3. Paul Auster – The Brooklyn Follies
4. Paul Auster – Leviathan
5. Paul Auster – Oracle Night
6. Colson Whitehead – The Intuitionist
7. Colson Whitehead – The Colossus of New York
8. Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights
9. John McNulty – This Place on Third Avenue
10. John Hardwood – The Ghost Writer
11. Yukio Mishima – Spring Snow
12. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer
13. Kobo Abe – Kangaroo Notebook
14. Julian Barnes – The Lemon Table
15. Julian Barnes – Flaubert’s Parrot
16. Julian Barnes – Arthur & George
17. Haruki Murakami – A Wild Sheep Chase
18. Haruki Murakami – After the Quake: Stories
19. Alice Munro – Runaway
20. Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
21. Douglas Adams –Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul
22. Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner
23. José Saramago – El Hombre Duplicado (read in Spanish)
24. José Saramago – Blindness (in English)
25. Angeles Mastretta – Arráncame la Vida (Spanish)
26. José Agustín – ¿Quién soy, dónde estoy, qué me dieron? (Spanish)
27. John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces
28. Jasper Fforde – The Eyre Affair
29. Jasper Fforde – Lost in a Good Book
30. Nick Hornby – A Long Way Down
31. James Joyce – Dubliners
32. Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
33. Lafcadio Hearn – Some Chinese Ghosts
34. Erik Larson – The Devil in the White City
35. Arthur Machen – The White People and other Stories: The best weird stories of Arthur Machen
36. David Sedaris – Me Talk Pretty One Day
37. David Sedaris – Holidays on Ice
38. Mark Haddon – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
39. Chuck Palahniuk – Lullaby
40. James Frey – A Million Little Pieces
41. T. S. Elliot – The Waste Land and other Poems
42. Herman Hesse – The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse

maybe I am forgetting some
I can’t shake that feeling of my head
that I am missing some

The list comes to 41 or 42 books in about 2 years
makes an average of 1.7(something) books per month

I have another list of ½ read books, the not finished ones
mostly because I didn’t find them engaging enough
or I know the require a frame of mind or deep concentration
that hasn’t suit my mood around that particular time

but the list above… all finished from the 1st to last page

some have been magical, some not as immense
some are hard and slow to read
some wonderful and hard still…
some surprisingly fast and inspiring
all of them always enriching
and a couple of them, truly life changing

from time to time
one regrets the wasted time in life
but I could never regret
a single second I have spent
behind the pages of a book

& endless thanks to all my friends
& all those titles above
I know through them
Some have been dear gifts
Some soulful recommendations