What you reading for?
Bill Hicks had a great bit on reading:
I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year, and after the show I went to a Waffle House, I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me, "Tch tch tch tch. Hey, what you readin' for?"
Is that like the weirdest fucking question you've ever heard? Not "what am I reading", but "what am I reading for?"Well, godammit, you stumped me. Why do I read?
Well... hmmm... I guess I read for a lot of reasons, and the main one is so I don't end up a fucking waffle waitress, okay?
Recently, the Ministry has been kicking around a new canon of works that we and our commenters feel should be immortalized. It's a highly idiosyncratic list, ranging from Bukowski to Heidegger, which of course a cafeteria-stylee discussion of the very sort I started blogging to participate in.
In the interest of saving the world from a job at Waffle House, John Hudock of Common Sense and Wonder has called us on our navel-gazing and countered with a more useful meme:
[A] much more interesting question is not what barely remembered books you may have read 30 years ago but what are you reading now. So I am starting my own book meme asking what were the last dozen fiction and non-fiction books you read.
Fair enough, and a great idea. Leaving aside the fact that 30 years ago today I was feeding through an umbilicus, I'll play. Go check out John's list, which is loaded with books I've never even heard of, and I will update this post with my own list after I wrack my brain to come up with the titles of 24 recent reads.
Leave your own list in the posts, and feel free to denigrate others for their taste. That's half the fun!!!
[wik] As promised, my crappy lists.
Fiction
His Dark Materials (3 books), Philip Pullman
Ilium, Dan Simmons
The Confusion, Neal Stephenson
Journey To The West (4 books), Wu Cheng�en
Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
Master and Commander, Patrick O�Brian
Post Captain, Patrick O�Brian
Nonfiction
Gulag, Anne Applebaum
Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, Simon Winchester
Alexander Hamilton, Richard Brookheiser
The Bread Bible, Rose Beranbaum Levy
New Ideas from Dead Economists, Todd Buchholz
A History of Everything, Bill Bryson
The Language Police, Diane Ravitch
Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Morgan
The Best Music Writing 2002, Jonathan Lethem, ed.
America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr (on deck)
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My memory is not working
My memory is not working today, and I can only remember about five back without looking at my bookshelves. From most recent on back,
Nonfiction:
The Pentagons New Map, Thomas Barnett
The Mask of Command, John Keegan
Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose
The Coming Collapse of China, Gordon Chang
The Birth of the Modern, Paul Johnson
Fiction:
Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
The Confusion, Neal Stephenson
Triplanetary, E.E. Doc Smith
Norstrilia, Cordwainer Smith
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
There may have been a couple of forgettable trashy sf novels mixed in there with the ones I listed. But I forget. The book before Kavalier and Klay may have been Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla.
To the best of my
To the best of my recollection, here's my recent reading. Recent, of course, being relative- most of the fiction is from last summer's reading.
Nonfiction:
Dream House of the Arabs, Fouad Ajami (in progress)
The Political Language of Islam, Bernard Lewis
The Language Police, Diane Ravitch
March or Die: A New History of the French Foreign Legion, Tony Geraghty
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges
Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden
Naked in Baghdad, Anne Garrels
Mouthful of Rocks, Chris Jennings
Waging Modern War, Wesley Clark
US Army Special Warfare: Its Origins, Alfred Paddock Jr.
The Mission, Dana Priest
Live From New York, Miller and Shales
Fiction:
Farenheit 451, Bradbury
A Clockwork Orange, Burgess
Neuromancer, Gibson
Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien
Warday, Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka
Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, L Carroll
Collected Poems of Wilfrid Owen
Collected Stories of Arthur C Clarke
Nightmare Therapy, Kevin McCaffrey
I can barely remember the
I can barely remember the last fiction I read. Like Buckethead, I read the King book, and I'm always filling time w/Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries.
As for nonfiction:
Empires of Light, Jill Jonnes
The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes
Cartoon Music, Daniel Goldmark
Genome, Matt Ridley
The Measure of All Things, Ken Alder
Foul Ball!, Jim Bouton
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
That's about as far back as I can remember.
Fiction:
Fiction:
A Wrinkle in Time, L'Engle (yes, I never read it as a child!)
This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff
Adrian Mole: The Lost Years
Cryptonomicon & Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (Confusion in progress)
The Messenger is Hot, Elizabeth Crane (utter drivel, but it was birthday present)
Eragon, by Christopher Paolini
Legends 4, collection of SF/Fantasy short stories (Didn't read all of them, just the Brooks, Gaiman and McCaffrey)
Non-fiction:
The Electric Meme, Wm Aunger
Driven to Distraction, Hallowell, et al
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Aznar Nafisi
Maestro, Bob Woodward
These are all the books since February when I started putting them up on my blog.