Reading List 2012
Really? I haven't posted since the last reading list update? Hmm...
Well, this is about a week late and after finishing the second book for October, I figured it was time to update.
January:
1. Charlaine Harris - Dead as a Doornail
2. Dave Eggers - The Wild Things
3. Anne McCaffrey - If Wishes Were Horses
4 Jose Saramago - Death with Interruptions
5. Farley Mowat - Never Cry Wolf
6. Anne Bishop - The Invisible Ring
7. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
8. Stephen R Lawhead - Tuck
9. Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry - Peter and the Starcatchers
February:
10. Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
11. Chuck Palahniuk - Damned
12. Michael Cunningham - The Hours,
13. Lewis Carrol - Through the Looking-Glass
14. Matthew Cody - Powerless
15. Charlaine Harris - Definitely Dead
16. W. B. Yeats - Collected Poems
17. Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
March:
18. Margaret Atwood - Lady Oracle
19. Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat, Pray, Love
20. Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Book
21. Julia Glass - Three Junes
22. T. S. Eliot - Old Possom's Book of Practical Cats
23. Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
24. M.T. Anderson - The Feed
25. Barry Lopez - Of Wolves and Men
April:
26. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
27. Cherie Priest - Boneshaker
28. George R. R. Martin - Game of Thrones
29. Nancy Farmer - The House of the Scorpion
30. John C. Hull - On Sight and Insight
31. Robert Gibb - Sheet Music
May:
32. Mary Crockett Hill - A Theory of Everything
33. Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
34. Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues
35. Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad
36. Judith Vollmer - The Water Books
37. Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife
June:
38. Giovanni Arpino - Scent of a Woman
39. M. T. Anderson - The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1 The Pox Party
40. Robert Busch - The Wolf Almanac
41. Gailmarie Pahmeier - Shake It and It Snows
42. Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
43. Matt Terhune - Bathhouse Betty
44. Gigi Marks - Shelter
45. Joanne Greenberg - Of Such Small Differences
46. Thomas More - Utopia
47. Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
July:
48. Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus
49. Sophocles - Antigone
50. Shirley Ann Grau - Keepers of the House
51. Robert Kurson - Crashing Through
52. Julie Otsuka - The Buddha in the Attic
53. Peter Blair - Farang
54. Charlaine Harris - All Together Dead
55. Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
56. Eric Boyd - Whiskey Sour: Short Stories
August:
57. Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
58. Susan Sontag - In America
59. Yann Martel - Life of Pi
60. Annie Dillard - Teaching a Stone to Talk
61. Israel Centeno - Bamboo City
62. Luis Alberto Urrea - Sonoran Desert Sutras
63. Jan Beatty - Ravage
64. Katherine Ayers - One-eyed Cat
65. Chauna Craig - Eden Way
66. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
67. Samuel Hazo - Song of the Horse
68. Liane Ellison Norman - Roundtrip
69. Thom Dawkins - After Alluvium
September:
70. Clamp - Chobits
71. Eds. Leni C. Wiltsie and Emily R. Cerrone - The Thing With Feathers: An Anthology of Writing from Words Without Walls
Another ILP chapbook. The Words Without Walls is actually a very prominent endeavor for Chatham. The master's students go in to the Allegheny County Jail and teach writing to the inmates, some of which use writing as a form of catharsis and rehabilitation. The point isn't for great literary masterpieces or adherence to techniques and quality writing... the quality lies in the emotions and stories and strength that these people utilized and presented through their poetry.
72. Jim Henson - It's Not Easy Being Green
I got this audiobook because I thought it was a sort of autobiography of Jim Henson's life and works, with different celebrities telling different parts, and characters commenting on events, etc. Instead, it was the characters, John Lithgow, and Whoopie Goldburg reading various quotes from Henson throughout his career. It was interesting, and barely two hours (I think). And there were some songs, like "It's Not Easy Being Green" and "Rainbow Connection."
73. Toni Morrison - Home
http://www.coalhillreview.com/?p=19970
74. D. H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl
The more I read of his works, the more I find him dull. This is the story of a girl who had a father who got into debt by various "get rich quick" endeavors. She has a few love affairs, runs off with an Italian actor and the rest of his crew, runs off again to become a nurse and is bullied into an engagement with a doctor, and then the Italian actor whisks her away to Italy for a marriage. Half the book could have been avoided and the story still would have been... decent. I had the narration speed on 2x just to speed up everything and finish the freakin' thing.
75. Susan Orlean - My Kind of Place
I started reading this last fall for my Travel Writing course. I always read creative nonfiction slower than I read fiction, so I was able to get almost half way in this and bullshat my way through the discussion boards. This book isn't so much the narrator's adventures as it is all the places she's been, the details she can gather, and information she can learn from people she meets along the way. There isn't anything about her. Although... if you like that sort of thing, then this book would be good for you. It was still good for me, but... it took so... so... long.
76. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I had to have read this in one of my undergraduate philosophy courses. It's one of those books that I always mark off as read but can't remember anything about. I did that with Moby-Dick for years until I realized that what I read in 10th grade were only excerpts instead of the full story. It was probably the same with this. I enjoyed the story and the characters, and it made me ponder about philosophical implications. I heard a few places that I maybe recognized, but otherwise it was as if the book was new for me.
77. Matthew S. Moore - Chalk & Fire
Nothing much to say about this one. Another ILP poetry chapbook. Unimpressed.
78. D'Arcy Fallon - Hot Monkey Love
I expected more from this one. The cover looked amazing and I met the author, who bought one of my author's chapbooks and was a sweetheart. But... I couldn't figure out if the stories were creative nonfiction or fictional... They were mostly about her and her family. Nothing really stood out.
79. Carlton Mellick III - Red World
Ever since taking ILP, I've encountered this guy's name more and more. He's apparently a big star in obscure fantasy writing... the kind that may offend most people. This was an okay story... I didn't think it was as polished as it could have been, though. It's about... well... It's about the sun going red, which altered the hues in the air and everything appears red, and an older boy who tries to find his younger brother (maybe 7 years old?) and locates him in a brothel, dressed as a little girl and taking on Johns (I think they're called). And... there are hoards of bugs that eat people.... and people walk on stilts through them to get to hotels and tall apartment buildings inside the hoards for safe havens... and some sort of drug made from the bugs that everyone loves... And... yeah.
80. John Lithgow - Drama: An Actor's Education
Oh, this was so nice to listen to. I have the signed memoir at home, but... I couldn't pass up listening to him tell his own story. He presented the prologue at a Drue Heinz Lecture Series event, where I met him and got the memoir. Mike and I loved it then, and he listened to the memoir long before I decided to. It's an interesting story. And holy crap, all the names he drops! From when he was just a kid! And it was interesting hearing him talk about Akron and Pittsburgh, because he basically grew up between Ohio and Connecticut.
81. Geraldine Brooks - March
I tried to finish Little Women first, but... after the father appeared in the story, I realized I could start this as well. I actually finished this before Little Women, too. The author won an award for this and will come to Pittsburgh in the beginning of next year. I get to meet her and get the book signed. The story is about the father from Little Women and his time in the army, as well as his life leading up to the beginning points of the story. There are about three timelines that all converge after a while. There are a few differences, like he's a strict vegetarian (almost fruitarian) despite the girls eating meat in Little Women. Apparently, the author based the main character off Louisa May Alcott's actual father, whom she used as an inspiration for the father in Little Women because the other characters are based off the rest of her family. Brooks made the father real, somehow. She gave him fallacies, mistakes... carnal, emotional, ethical, mental... And by the end of the story, in a scene that was full of mirth in Little Women, the father is experiencing PTSD but not showing it, and it twists the scene so severely that when I finished the book and set it down, I stared off into space and was like, "Wow... way to completely shift that story."
82. Wendy Pini - ElfQuest: Hidden Years
Another ElfQuest! The new Final Quest is being posted online on a site that has ALL the other comics uploaded as well. That's where I read this; all the individual comics instead of from one book, which I will eventually own. This one is about the tribe splitting in order to prepare for war because the main villainess has returned, shattered their castle, and the magical shards are in the hands of a cruel, power-hungry human king. The chief sends off his daughter with half the tribe in order to preserve "The Way," which is both a philosophy and a mode of living that promotes living in the "now" and protecting family and their way of life. The whole story is about the young chieftess earning her title as chief, figuring out how to lead her tribe and listen to her elders, figuring out how to protect her tribe, falling in love, and maturing and learning life lessons.
October:
83. Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth
Oh, the wonderful, wonderful finds on Barnes and Noble discount carts. I tried doing comparitive mythology while in Ireland for my folklore class, but didn't know what it was at the time. I started realizing that many stories were the same (like Hercules and Cuchulain), but I wanted to see if I could follow the similar strands in stories and detect an original, core thought that may have been the start of the stories. Regretfully, that isn't possible. A few years later I learned about Campbell's work, and I have Hero With A Thousand Faces on my To Read shelf, courtesy of my boyfriend's parents. But this one I found with Damon a few years ago and finally got to it. The tangent in it were... a little annoying, but fascinating. It's written as an interview, and the two talk about God and the implications of religion, similar stories, why we rely on those stories, what is the philosophy behind them, etc. It was my before-bed reading that I eventually turned into daily reading when I got close to 100 pages to go and wanted to read Lovecraft in October.
84. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
This took a while to read because it was on my Android Kindle and it seemed to take forever just to move 1% forward. Plus, I only read it while in bed in the morning or during downtime at work. It was nice. Pretty much what I expected. I'm glad to be finished with it, though, just because of how long it took.
Well, this is about a week late and after finishing the second book for October, I figured it was time to update.
January:
1. Charlaine Harris - Dead as a Doornail
2. Dave Eggers - The Wild Things
3. Anne McCaffrey - If Wishes Were Horses
4 Jose Saramago - Death with Interruptions
5. Farley Mowat - Never Cry Wolf
6. Anne Bishop - The Invisible Ring
7. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
8. Stephen R Lawhead - Tuck
9. Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry - Peter and the Starcatchers
February:
10. Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
11. Chuck Palahniuk - Damned
12. Michael Cunningham - The Hours,
13. Lewis Carrol - Through the Looking-Glass
14. Matthew Cody - Powerless
15. Charlaine Harris - Definitely Dead
16. W. B. Yeats - Collected Poems
17. Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
March:
18. Margaret Atwood - Lady Oracle
19. Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat, Pray, Love
20. Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Book
21. Julia Glass - Three Junes
22. T. S. Eliot - Old Possom's Book of Practical Cats
23. Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
24. M.T. Anderson - The Feed
25. Barry Lopez - Of Wolves and Men
April:
26. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
27. Cherie Priest - Boneshaker
28. George R. R. Martin - Game of Thrones
29. Nancy Farmer - The House of the Scorpion
30. John C. Hull - On Sight and Insight
31. Robert Gibb - Sheet Music
May:
32. Mary Crockett Hill - A Theory of Everything
33. Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
34. Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues
35. Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad
36. Judith Vollmer - The Water Books
37. Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife
June:
38. Giovanni Arpino - Scent of a Woman
39. M. T. Anderson - The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1 The Pox Party
40. Robert Busch - The Wolf Almanac
41. Gailmarie Pahmeier - Shake It and It Snows
42. Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
43. Matt Terhune - Bathhouse Betty
44. Gigi Marks - Shelter
45. Joanne Greenberg - Of Such Small Differences
46. Thomas More - Utopia
47. Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
July:
48. Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus
49. Sophocles - Antigone
50. Shirley Ann Grau - Keepers of the House
51. Robert Kurson - Crashing Through
52. Julie Otsuka - The Buddha in the Attic
53. Peter Blair - Farang
54. Charlaine Harris - All Together Dead
55. Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
56. Eric Boyd - Whiskey Sour: Short Stories
August:
57. Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
58. Susan Sontag - In America
59. Yann Martel - Life of Pi
60. Annie Dillard - Teaching a Stone to Talk
61. Israel Centeno - Bamboo City
62. Luis Alberto Urrea - Sonoran Desert Sutras
63. Jan Beatty - Ravage
64. Katherine Ayers - One-eyed Cat
65. Chauna Craig - Eden Way
66. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
67. Samuel Hazo - Song of the Horse
68. Liane Ellison Norman - Roundtrip
69. Thom Dawkins - After Alluvium
September:
70. Clamp - Chobits
71. Eds. Leni C. Wiltsie and Emily R. Cerrone - The Thing With Feathers: An Anthology of Writing from Words Without Walls
Another ILP chapbook. The Words Without Walls is actually a very prominent endeavor for Chatham. The master's students go in to the Allegheny County Jail and teach writing to the inmates, some of which use writing as a form of catharsis and rehabilitation. The point isn't for great literary masterpieces or adherence to techniques and quality writing... the quality lies in the emotions and stories and strength that these people utilized and presented through their poetry.
72. Jim Henson - It's Not Easy Being Green
I got this audiobook because I thought it was a sort of autobiography of Jim Henson's life and works, with different celebrities telling different parts, and characters commenting on events, etc. Instead, it was the characters, John Lithgow, and Whoopie Goldburg reading various quotes from Henson throughout his career. It was interesting, and barely two hours (I think). And there were some songs, like "It's Not Easy Being Green" and "Rainbow Connection."
73. Toni Morrison - Home
http://www.coalhillreview.com/?p=19970
74. D. H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl
The more I read of his works, the more I find him dull. This is the story of a girl who had a father who got into debt by various "get rich quick" endeavors. She has a few love affairs, runs off with an Italian actor and the rest of his crew, runs off again to become a nurse and is bullied into an engagement with a doctor, and then the Italian actor whisks her away to Italy for a marriage. Half the book could have been avoided and the story still would have been... decent. I had the narration speed on 2x just to speed up everything and finish the freakin' thing.
75. Susan Orlean - My Kind of Place
I started reading this last fall for my Travel Writing course. I always read creative nonfiction slower than I read fiction, so I was able to get almost half way in this and bullshat my way through the discussion boards. This book isn't so much the narrator's adventures as it is all the places she's been, the details she can gather, and information she can learn from people she meets along the way. There isn't anything about her. Although... if you like that sort of thing, then this book would be good for you. It was still good for me, but... it took so... so... long.
76. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I had to have read this in one of my undergraduate philosophy courses. It's one of those books that I always mark off as read but can't remember anything about. I did that with Moby-Dick for years until I realized that what I read in 10th grade were only excerpts instead of the full story. It was probably the same with this. I enjoyed the story and the characters, and it made me ponder about philosophical implications. I heard a few places that I maybe recognized, but otherwise it was as if the book was new for me.
77. Matthew S. Moore - Chalk & Fire
Nothing much to say about this one. Another ILP poetry chapbook. Unimpressed.
78. D'Arcy Fallon - Hot Monkey Love
I expected more from this one. The cover looked amazing and I met the author, who bought one of my author's chapbooks and was a sweetheart. But... I couldn't figure out if the stories were creative nonfiction or fictional... They were mostly about her and her family. Nothing really stood out.
79. Carlton Mellick III - Red World
Ever since taking ILP, I've encountered this guy's name more and more. He's apparently a big star in obscure fantasy writing... the kind that may offend most people. This was an okay story... I didn't think it was as polished as it could have been, though. It's about... well... It's about the sun going red, which altered the hues in the air and everything appears red, and an older boy who tries to find his younger brother (maybe 7 years old?) and locates him in a brothel, dressed as a little girl and taking on Johns (I think they're called). And... there are hoards of bugs that eat people.... and people walk on stilts through them to get to hotels and tall apartment buildings inside the hoards for safe havens... and some sort of drug made from the bugs that everyone loves... And... yeah.
80. John Lithgow - Drama: An Actor's Education
Oh, this was so nice to listen to. I have the signed memoir at home, but... I couldn't pass up listening to him tell his own story. He presented the prologue at a Drue Heinz Lecture Series event, where I met him and got the memoir. Mike and I loved it then, and he listened to the memoir long before I decided to. It's an interesting story. And holy crap, all the names he drops! From when he was just a kid! And it was interesting hearing him talk about Akron and Pittsburgh, because he basically grew up between Ohio and Connecticut.
81. Geraldine Brooks - March
I tried to finish Little Women first, but... after the father appeared in the story, I realized I could start this as well. I actually finished this before Little Women, too. The author won an award for this and will come to Pittsburgh in the beginning of next year. I get to meet her and get the book signed. The story is about the father from Little Women and his time in the army, as well as his life leading up to the beginning points of the story. There are about three timelines that all converge after a while. There are a few differences, like he's a strict vegetarian (almost fruitarian) despite the girls eating meat in Little Women. Apparently, the author based the main character off Louisa May Alcott's actual father, whom she used as an inspiration for the father in Little Women because the other characters are based off the rest of her family. Brooks made the father real, somehow. She gave him fallacies, mistakes... carnal, emotional, ethical, mental... And by the end of the story, in a scene that was full of mirth in Little Women, the father is experiencing PTSD but not showing it, and it twists the scene so severely that when I finished the book and set it down, I stared off into space and was like, "Wow... way to completely shift that story."
82. Wendy Pini - ElfQuest: Hidden Years
Another ElfQuest! The new Final Quest is being posted online on a site that has ALL the other comics uploaded as well. That's where I read this; all the individual comics instead of from one book, which I will eventually own. This one is about the tribe splitting in order to prepare for war because the main villainess has returned, shattered their castle, and the magical shards are in the hands of a cruel, power-hungry human king. The chief sends off his daughter with half the tribe in order to preserve "The Way," which is both a philosophy and a mode of living that promotes living in the "now" and protecting family and their way of life. The whole story is about the young chieftess earning her title as chief, figuring out how to lead her tribe and listen to her elders, figuring out how to protect her tribe, falling in love, and maturing and learning life lessons.
October:
83. Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth
Oh, the wonderful, wonderful finds on Barnes and Noble discount carts. I tried doing comparitive mythology while in Ireland for my folklore class, but didn't know what it was at the time. I started realizing that many stories were the same (like Hercules and Cuchulain), but I wanted to see if I could follow the similar strands in stories and detect an original, core thought that may have been the start of the stories. Regretfully, that isn't possible. A few years later I learned about Campbell's work, and I have Hero With A Thousand Faces on my To Read shelf, courtesy of my boyfriend's parents. But this one I found with Damon a few years ago and finally got to it. The tangent in it were... a little annoying, but fascinating. It's written as an interview, and the two talk about God and the implications of religion, similar stories, why we rely on those stories, what is the philosophy behind them, etc. It was my before-bed reading that I eventually turned into daily reading when I got close to 100 pages to go and wanted to read Lovecraft in October.
84. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
This took a while to read because it was on my Android Kindle and it seemed to take forever just to move 1% forward. Plus, I only read it while in bed in the morning or during downtime at work. It was nice. Pretty much what I expected. I'm glad to be finished with it, though, just because of how long it took.