The Read Good Hits of the Summer

As I was tooling around WordPress today, I caught BookPeople and Book of Words posting their list of Summer reading. Since I’m no longer in school, and haven’t been for some time now, below is my current reading list. It just so happens to be Summertime. There is a very high possibility that some of these titles will end up on my Fall and Winter reading lists. The chances very greatly on what home repairs I decide to do, changes in workload, and other adulthood matters that get in the way of everything.

I’ve just finished Black Water Transit by Carsten Stroud per the request of a good friend of mine, and now have the decision of choosing my next read. There are priorities not mentioned on this list, such as finishing Don Quixote by Cervantes AND Ulysses by James Joyce. I can’t leave an incomplete book lying around forever. It drives me nuts. How people can drop a novel indefinitely is beyond me.

These titles are in no particular order, as I usually make up my mind on the spot:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
3. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
4. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
5. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
6. Diptych Rome-London by Ezra Pound
7. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten
8. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
10. The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
11. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
12. Aesop’s Fables
13. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

I noticed more unread books in my bookcase tonight, which are from shopping sprees long ago. It would be to my amazement, if I could plow through half of the above mentioned during the season. In light of that, I left the rest off the list. They’ll have to wait. For outside observers, I’d imagine the Twain would come as a surprise. Wouldn’t have I already read that by now?

There’s a simple explanation for it, really. In American compulsory education, there’s a limited amount of time dedicated to reading books. Since my earliest recollections in the early 80s, that curriculum has changed to compete with not only a multitude of authors but digital fluff. Iconic works get cut from the courses just as easily as anything else, and who wants to read books anyway? That’s for, like, old people or something.

Anyone else care to share the Summer list?

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