Final Tally Reading List 2012
So I hit my goal and surpassed it. I got to 110, down to the wire. When I got close, I pushed myself to get it and almost didn't succeed. I finished 109 before heading out to gatherings last night, and then Mike helped me reach 110 with a short (and nonfiction) audiobook. I'm amazing that I managed to read this much in a year. It's as if each month, each milestone this year is accompanied by book titles. "When did I read that book? Oh yes, I was doing this and the time, so that would be that month." I've done that a few times already. And now that it's the new year, I already have one book under my belt, again thanks to Mike. I'm not aiming for 100 again; I've reverted to the original goal of 50. There are some thick books that I purposefully avoided so I could reach the reading goal, and now I can get to them without worry (especially because I don't have class anymore).
So, without further ado, here is the final list of 2012.
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
72. Jim Henson - It's Not Easy Being Green
73. Toni Morrison - Home
74. D. H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl
75. Susan Orlean - My Kind of Place
76. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
77. Matthew S. Moore - Chalk & Fire
78. D'Arcy Fallon - Hot Monkey Love
79. Carlton Mellick III - Red World
80. John Lithgow - Drama: An Actor's Education
81. Geraldine Brooks - March
82. Wendy Pini - ElfQuest: Hidden Years
October:
83. Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth
84. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
85. Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses
86. Antoine de Saint Exupery - The Little Prince
87. Matthew Dicks - Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend
88. Seth Grahame-Smith - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
89. Anne Rice - Interview with the Vampire
November:
90. Seth Grahame-Smith - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
91. Katheryn Erskine - Mockingbird
92. Jack Zipes - Don't Bet on the Prince
December:
93. Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
94. Sharon Creech - Walk Two Moons
This was another Pittsburgh Arts and Lecture Series author. I'd never read the book before and already had it on my To Read shelf. When I learned that Creech was coming to Pittsburgh and I could get the book signed, I decided to read it before the event. I enjoyed the parallel plotlines, and how the characters were mostly believable and authentic. Sometimes, I find myself saying "Huzzah huzzah" instead of just "cool" or "awesome" or "huzzah" by itself. I managed to get this one personalized and bought signed copies of Love that Dog, Hate that Cat, and The Great Unexpected.
95. Jo McDougall - Dirt
This is an Autumn House Press poetry collection. The book is about a woman's family, and the loss of her daughter to cancer, I think. True to AHP's style, it incorporates nature with family and living arrangements.
96. Frank Gaspar - Late Rapturous
Another AHP poetry book. I had some trouble with this one and honestly don't remember much about it. Lots of religious references, though.
97. Sharon Creech - Love That Dog
This one is fascinating. It's written in a series of poems from the perspective of a little boy. The poems are entries in the boy's composition notebook at school, so he talks directly to the teacher because the teacher has to read each entry. He talks about how poetry is for girls and he doesn't want to write any, and how he doesn't like poetry and doesn't know what to talk about. As the lessons progress, he learns that poetry doesn't have to rhyme or follow a set structure, and he learns to appreciate it. The family dog is a recurring theme.
98. Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
Sometime after finishing this, Mom called and asked if she should read it. I just laughed. I didn't actually read it. I listened to the 60-hour audiobook. Even then I shifted between 1.5x narration speed and 2x. This is the one book that I'd endorse reading the abridged version, especially for people who aren't lit nerds. I tackled the unabridged and really could've done without 3 hours of information about Waterloo and resulting politics. I liked the story and the characters. Sometimes it seemed unnecessary to learn about a bishop or a grandfather, but it helped to view the overall world. I don't think I've read any other story with such a fully developed setting and characters before. I'm glad I'm finally able to cross it off my list.
99. Sharon Creech - Hate That Cat
This is the sequel to Love That Dog wherein the English teacher follows the students into the next grade and assigns the same poetry section and notebook. The kid whose poems we're reading talks about how he hates cats and why, and so the teacher brings in her kittens. Eventually he gets one and loves it, and it escapes one day and the crotchety old cat that the kid hates brings it back a few days later and is nice to the boy. It's a cute story. We also learn that the boy's mother is deaf, which is interesting to read through his perspective.
100. Mark Haddon - Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
This was interesting. I don't like how it was made obvious that the kid had autism/Asperger's Syndrome in the very beginning of the story, but it was an interesting roller coaster of events of trying to figure out who killed the neighbor's dog, learning the truth about the main character's mother, watching the family system dissolve and then attempt to heal... Everything results from that dog, and after a while you expect that the story would continue. Kinda fond of all the Doctor Who references in it, too, because it's set in contemporary England.
101. Richard Jackson - Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems
Good lord, Petarchan poems... Every single one was about love or the loss of love and angst and adoration and on and on... I felt like I was in high school and reading a collection by a group of students who didn't know of anything else to write about. It took a while to get through this AHP collection.
102. Ruth Schwartz - Miraculum
Another AHP collection. Again, don't really remember what it was about. I wasn't too impressed by it.
103. Edward Zellem - Zarbul Masalha: 151 Afghan Dari Proverbs
This one has a story. In my job, we're given tasks by this huge client. One day, I'm assigned to write a Wikipedia entry about Edward Zellem, who worked in the military over in Afghanistan. He collected proverbs while he was there and started using them in everyday conversations. The Afghan people loved this because he was trying to understand them and speak to them in ways that showed respect and comprehension of their culture. Proverbs are apparently a way to bridge cultural gaps. With the help of a middle school over there, Zellem created this book, the proceeds of which go to developing co-ed schools. The book itself is interesting because it has each proverb first in Dari (one of the main languages over there), then the pronunciation, then the direct translation, and then the meaning. Many of them match English proverbs, and there were a few that didn't have correct English proverb correspondences. So after the Wikipedia article stayed up for so long, we received a bunch of thank yous from the client and the author. Then the author sent me a signed copy of the book and it's illustrated version for children. Awesome work perks.
104. Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
This one was offered by Audible to its members for free. It was the company's Christmas gift to us. I looked through my Sherlock Holmes collection and discovered that it wasn't included, so I downloaded it. It's about 45 minutes and discusses a diamond that was discovered in a stolen goose that someone had taken for dinner. Alan Cummings read it, which was cool.
105. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Right. This thing. A few observations: 1) Tolstoy is basically a male version of Jane Austen. 2) Tolstoy may be a genius for his window into the Russian aristocracy and life back then, but he's incredibly dull. 3) Anna Karenina is a paranoid woman and needed to calm down. That said... the book was decent. I can't wait to watch the movie, though, because it looks so much more fantastic and sensual and sexual than the book could ever hope to be, but still remain faithful to the story. The audiobook was 33 hours and I listened to it on 2x speed again. I learned that my reading speed matches 2x narration speed for audiobooks, which is half of the reason why I started using it more often. Granted, that also depends on the performance pace.
106. Graham Greene - The End of the Affair
I got this from Audible because Colin Firth reads it. I was amazed by the craft of the story. Each line is great. As a writer, I could hear how much time and effort went into them, and it made me want to write. The story itself is about an affair that had long since ended, and the husband only now suspects something and asks a friend (a former lover of his wife's) to help investigate. In the process, the man and the wife fall in love again, but the wife is sick. The end of the affair, then, is dragged out and still doesn't really end until both men are able to move on.
107. Charles Frazier - Cold Mountain
Holy crap, this book. I started this book back in October when I was going through that Civil War reading theme. But for whatever reason, I couldn't stick with it. I've been slowly working through it ever since and had to put it down so I could get through other books first. The writing is great and the story is great, I just didn't expect all those details. I also didn't expect that I wouldn't care as much about Inman's journey versus Ada's story. In fact, I wasn't too interested in the story until Ruby arrived. Don't get me wrong, I liked it and understand why it won its award. I just didn't expect it to take as long as it did.
108. Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem
For whatever reason, I thought this was a series of fiction stories. Instead, it's a series of nonfiction essays that are very similar to My Kind of Place. Place plays a big role in the essays. California is a presence in all of them instead of just the setting. And the fact that it's written in the late 60s didn't alter how I perceived them, because most of the stories were universal and timeless. Most. There was one about Alcatraz and how no one knows what to do with it and how only a few people live there. It's amazing to listen to the essay and know that there was a Native American occupation there, and now it's a tourist attraction/historical landmark/park. Anyway, I listened to this one because the title is tossed around in nearly every writing circle, so I figured it was about time I learned about it. Also, it was narrated by Diane Keaton.
109. Émile Zola - Thérèse Raquin
Another Audible signature performance, this time with Kate Winslet. It's about a girl who's adopted by her aunt and then married to her sickly cousin. She then falls in love with the cousin's friend, a painter, and the two of them kill the cousin. Then their love dies with him, and after two years they're married to each other and can't stand each other. Their guilt drives them mad. It was all DRAMA and... yeah. Plus, lots of expository writing. I'm more amazed at how stories like this could be so popular when it's so full of "telling." I just can't get into a story like that...
110. Sam Harris - Free Will
Mike suggested listening to this because it's only an hour and 15 minutes. Sam Harris is one of the more well-known atheists out there. Mike listens to him, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens all the time. This one was a discussion about whether we actually have free will. He talked about how the brain will know something before our consciousness does, about how all of our choices are based off preconditioned environmental factors instead of our own decisions. We make decisions based off what we've already experienced. We can't really change ourselves permanently unless we're already preconditioned to be able to change. And how the illusion of free will has moral implications because it affects our notion of sin, because people who commit evil are just really unlucky because of what they had to experience that molded them into who they are today. And so on and so forth. It's one of those books that would have made me read the lines a couple times before continuing. It would've taken days to get through, despite being so slim.
So, without further ado, here is the final list of 2012.
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
72. Jim Henson - It's Not Easy Being Green
73. Toni Morrison - Home
74. D. H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl
75. Susan Orlean - My Kind of Place
76. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
77. Matthew S. Moore - Chalk & Fire
78. D'Arcy Fallon - Hot Monkey Love
79. Carlton Mellick III - Red World
80. John Lithgow - Drama: An Actor's Education
81. Geraldine Brooks - March
82. Wendy Pini - ElfQuest: Hidden Years
October:
83. Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth
84. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
85. Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses
86. Antoine de Saint Exupery - The Little Prince
87. Matthew Dicks - Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend
88. Seth Grahame-Smith - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
89. Anne Rice - Interview with the Vampire
November:
90. Seth Grahame-Smith - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
91. Katheryn Erskine - Mockingbird
92. Jack Zipes - Don't Bet on the Prince
December:
93. Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
94. Sharon Creech - Walk Two Moons
This was another Pittsburgh Arts and Lecture Series author. I'd never read the book before and already had it on my To Read shelf. When I learned that Creech was coming to Pittsburgh and I could get the book signed, I decided to read it before the event. I enjoyed the parallel plotlines, and how the characters were mostly believable and authentic. Sometimes, I find myself saying "Huzzah huzzah" instead of just "cool" or "awesome" or "huzzah" by itself. I managed to get this one personalized and bought signed copies of Love that Dog, Hate that Cat, and The Great Unexpected.
95. Jo McDougall - Dirt
This is an Autumn House Press poetry collection. The book is about a woman's family, and the loss of her daughter to cancer, I think. True to AHP's style, it incorporates nature with family and living arrangements.
96. Frank Gaspar - Late Rapturous
Another AHP poetry book. I had some trouble with this one and honestly don't remember much about it. Lots of religious references, though.
97. Sharon Creech - Love That Dog
This one is fascinating. It's written in a series of poems from the perspective of a little boy. The poems are entries in the boy's composition notebook at school, so he talks directly to the teacher because the teacher has to read each entry. He talks about how poetry is for girls and he doesn't want to write any, and how he doesn't like poetry and doesn't know what to talk about. As the lessons progress, he learns that poetry doesn't have to rhyme or follow a set structure, and he learns to appreciate it. The family dog is a recurring theme.
98. Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
Sometime after finishing this, Mom called and asked if she should read it. I just laughed. I didn't actually read it. I listened to the 60-hour audiobook. Even then I shifted between 1.5x narration speed and 2x. This is the one book that I'd endorse reading the abridged version, especially for people who aren't lit nerds. I tackled the unabridged and really could've done without 3 hours of information about Waterloo and resulting politics. I liked the story and the characters. Sometimes it seemed unnecessary to learn about a bishop or a grandfather, but it helped to view the overall world. I don't think I've read any other story with such a fully developed setting and characters before. I'm glad I'm finally able to cross it off my list.
99. Sharon Creech - Hate That Cat
This is the sequel to Love That Dog wherein the English teacher follows the students into the next grade and assigns the same poetry section and notebook. The kid whose poems we're reading talks about how he hates cats and why, and so the teacher brings in her kittens. Eventually he gets one and loves it, and it escapes one day and the crotchety old cat that the kid hates brings it back a few days later and is nice to the boy. It's a cute story. We also learn that the boy's mother is deaf, which is interesting to read through his perspective.
100. Mark Haddon - Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
This was interesting. I don't like how it was made obvious that the kid had autism/Asperger's Syndrome in the very beginning of the story, but it was an interesting roller coaster of events of trying to figure out who killed the neighbor's dog, learning the truth about the main character's mother, watching the family system dissolve and then attempt to heal... Everything results from that dog, and after a while you expect that the story would continue. Kinda fond of all the Doctor Who references in it, too, because it's set in contemporary England.
101. Richard Jackson - Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems
Good lord, Petarchan poems... Every single one was about love or the loss of love and angst and adoration and on and on... I felt like I was in high school and reading a collection by a group of students who didn't know of anything else to write about. It took a while to get through this AHP collection.
102. Ruth Schwartz - Miraculum
Another AHP collection. Again, don't really remember what it was about. I wasn't too impressed by it.
103. Edward Zellem - Zarbul Masalha: 151 Afghan Dari Proverbs
This one has a story. In my job, we're given tasks by this huge client. One day, I'm assigned to write a Wikipedia entry about Edward Zellem, who worked in the military over in Afghanistan. He collected proverbs while he was there and started using them in everyday conversations. The Afghan people loved this because he was trying to understand them and speak to them in ways that showed respect and comprehension of their culture. Proverbs are apparently a way to bridge cultural gaps. With the help of a middle school over there, Zellem created this book, the proceeds of which go to developing co-ed schools. The book itself is interesting because it has each proverb first in Dari (one of the main languages over there), then the pronunciation, then the direct translation, and then the meaning. Many of them match English proverbs, and there were a few that didn't have correct English proverb correspondences. So after the Wikipedia article stayed up for so long, we received a bunch of thank yous from the client and the author. Then the author sent me a signed copy of the book and it's illustrated version for children. Awesome work perks.
104. Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
This one was offered by Audible to its members for free. It was the company's Christmas gift to us. I looked through my Sherlock Holmes collection and discovered that it wasn't included, so I downloaded it. It's about 45 minutes and discusses a diamond that was discovered in a stolen goose that someone had taken for dinner. Alan Cummings read it, which was cool.
105. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Right. This thing. A few observations: 1) Tolstoy is basically a male version of Jane Austen. 2) Tolstoy may be a genius for his window into the Russian aristocracy and life back then, but he's incredibly dull. 3) Anna Karenina is a paranoid woman and needed to calm down. That said... the book was decent. I can't wait to watch the movie, though, because it looks so much more fantastic and sensual and sexual than the book could ever hope to be, but still remain faithful to the story. The audiobook was 33 hours and I listened to it on 2x speed again. I learned that my reading speed matches 2x narration speed for audiobooks, which is half of the reason why I started using it more often. Granted, that also depends on the performance pace.
106. Graham Greene - The End of the Affair
I got this from Audible because Colin Firth reads it. I was amazed by the craft of the story. Each line is great. As a writer, I could hear how much time and effort went into them, and it made me want to write. The story itself is about an affair that had long since ended, and the husband only now suspects something and asks a friend (a former lover of his wife's) to help investigate. In the process, the man and the wife fall in love again, but the wife is sick. The end of the affair, then, is dragged out and still doesn't really end until both men are able to move on.
107. Charles Frazier - Cold Mountain
Holy crap, this book. I started this book back in October when I was going through that Civil War reading theme. But for whatever reason, I couldn't stick with it. I've been slowly working through it ever since and had to put it down so I could get through other books first. The writing is great and the story is great, I just didn't expect all those details. I also didn't expect that I wouldn't care as much about Inman's journey versus Ada's story. In fact, I wasn't too interested in the story until Ruby arrived. Don't get me wrong, I liked it and understand why it won its award. I just didn't expect it to take as long as it did.
108. Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem
For whatever reason, I thought this was a series of fiction stories. Instead, it's a series of nonfiction essays that are very similar to My Kind of Place. Place plays a big role in the essays. California is a presence in all of them instead of just the setting. And the fact that it's written in the late 60s didn't alter how I perceived them, because most of the stories were universal and timeless. Most. There was one about Alcatraz and how no one knows what to do with it and how only a few people live there. It's amazing to listen to the essay and know that there was a Native American occupation there, and now it's a tourist attraction/historical landmark/park. Anyway, I listened to this one because the title is tossed around in nearly every writing circle, so I figured it was about time I learned about it. Also, it was narrated by Diane Keaton.
109. Émile Zola - Thérèse Raquin
Another Audible signature performance, this time with Kate Winslet. It's about a girl who's adopted by her aunt and then married to her sickly cousin. She then falls in love with the cousin's friend, a painter, and the two of them kill the cousin. Then their love dies with him, and after two years they're married to each other and can't stand each other. Their guilt drives them mad. It was all DRAMA and... yeah. Plus, lots of expository writing. I'm more amazed at how stories like this could be so popular when it's so full of "telling." I just can't get into a story like that...
110. Sam Harris - Free Will
Mike suggested listening to this because it's only an hour and 15 minutes. Sam Harris is one of the more well-known atheists out there. Mike listens to him, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens all the time. This one was a discussion about whether we actually have free will. He talked about how the brain will know something before our consciousness does, about how all of our choices are based off preconditioned environmental factors instead of our own decisions. We make decisions based off what we've already experienced. We can't really change ourselves permanently unless we're already preconditioned to be able to change. And how the illusion of free will has moral implications because it affects our notion of sin, because people who commit evil are just really unlucky because of what they had to experience that molded them into who they are today. And so on and so forth. It's one of those books that would have made me read the lines a couple times before continuing. It would've taken days to get through, despite being so slim.