Category: literature

Today’s the 6th anniversary of Virtual Memories! Congratulate me!

I’ve had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope you readers have gotten something good out of it. I’m always glad to find that there are people reading my stuff. At my day job, I was kinda shocked the first time I was at a conference and someone mentioned a joke I’d put in my From the Editor page. I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea of that audience, and I’m thrilled that there’s some sort of readership for this site, too.

As a treat (to myself), I’ve gone back to the second post I wrote (the first one was just a test item). You’ll find it hard to believe, but it was about whether I’d get around to reading the huge stack of books under my hall table! Some things never change!

So let’s go back to the list and see what I finally got around to reading from those days since 2003:

READ

• Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan
• Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
• Master Class – Paul West
• Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn
• The Coast of Utopia – Tom Stoppard
• I: Voyage (Stoppard)
  
• II: Shipwreck (Stoppard)
• III: Salvage (Stoppard)
• The Rush for Second Place – William Gaddis
• Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons – Glenn Dakin
• Little, Big – John Crowley

UNREAD

• Rembrandt’s Eyes – Simon Schama
• Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archeology of the Minoan Myth – Joseph Alexander McGillivray
• The Spooky Art – Norman Mailer
• The Art of Happiness – The Dalai Lama
• Mendelssohn is on the Roof – Jiri Weil
• The Rainbow – DH Lawrence
• Sons & Lovers – DH Lawrence
• Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun – Paul West
• Graham Greene Omnibus
• The Heart of the Matter (Greene)
  
• Stamboul Train (Greene)
• The Burnt-Out Case (Greene)
• The Third Man (Greene)
• The Quiet American (Greene)
• Loser Takes All (Greene)
• The Power and the Glory (Greene)
• Possession – A.S. Byatt
• All Stories Are True – John Edgar Wideman
• Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
• Nova – Samuel R. Delany
• The Encyclopedia of the Dead – Danilo Kis
• Philip Roth & the Jews – Alan Cooper
• Gothic – Richard Davenport-Hines
• Underworld – Don DeLillo
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

Looking over that “unread” list, I don’t have a ton of regrets. I’d most like to get around to reading D.H. Lawrence, maybe the Schama book, and Byatt’s Possession. Of the ones I did read, I rank Little, Big at #1, then Gould’s Book of Fish, then all the rest.

I’m going to try to read those Stoppard plays again sometime, since I just didn’t follow them well enough. I was probably just reading for volume, which is never a good idea.

Thanks for coming by. And please leave comments, if the spirit moves you.