Well, it's been almost a year since I last posted. I'm afraid this post will be nothing more than a list of books I've read since then. Perhaps, if I'm feeling ambitious later, I will update with a short blurb about each, but I doubt it.

Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Passing by Nella Larsen
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan
A Gesture Life by Chang Rae Lee
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
No-No Boy by John Okada
Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn
Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanak
Roxana by Daniel Defoe
Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
The Interesting Narrative by Olaudah Equiano
The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer
Kartography by Kamila Shamsie
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems by Agha Shahid Ali
An American Brat by Sidhwa Bapsi
The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Mid-Year Update

Well, a lot has happened since the last time I posted. About 2 months ago I had to put my poor little kitty Othello to sleep. I was devastated and I haven't felt much like reading since then. I want to do a quick update on book I've read thus far this year now, with maybe more detailed reviews to come later, but honestly, I doubt it. Classes start in a few weeks and I'll be busy with them.

For Classes (some of these were re-reads):
*The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore - pretty good, kind of tragic.
*Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand - a repeat of a book I believe I already blogged about here.
*Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie - was a partial re-read; I never finished it before. Good, but very dense.
*Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya - third re-read, a pretty good book. Sad, though.
*The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - what a depressing book this is. I'm used to Wilde being funny.
*Kim by Rudyard Kipling - I hate Rudyard Kipling. That's all I really have to say.
*The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - re-read; I don't even know how many times I've read this before.
*Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed - I didn't really care for this because it gets confusing and I had a lot going on while I was reading it. But I can see how it informed my understanding of other texts, like The Intuitionist.
*My Life by Lyn Hejinian - I love this one. It's now one of my favorite books, even though it was at least as confusing as Mumbo Jumbo.
*The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - This was a very solid novel. I enjoyed it, I cared about the characters, I learned things, and it was sufficiently complex for me to explore in a paper. All in all a good experience, but I wouldn't call it love.
*Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy - This book rocked. Levy picked up on so many things that bother me about females in our culture and traced them back to their root causes.
*Only Words by Catherine MacKinnon - I like MacKinnon's ideas, but she certainly can make an interesting subject boring as all get out with her style of writing.
*Literature after Feminism by Rita Felski - I liked this book and I thought Felski had a reasonable approach to texts by and about females, but it was almost like her total reasonableness (is that a word?) rendered her text boring and almost inconsequential. I guess I'm used to my theoretical texts being way out there like Barthes or Derrida. It throws me off balance when someone suggests a completely rational and sensible approach to texts.
*Plus I read a ton of theory (esp. feminism and narrative theory) for classes, but I don't feel like digging out syllabi and listing every single article/excerpt I read.

This Summer (some of these were books on tape I listened to at my boring summer job):
*The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie - better than Midnight's Children, I think. I cared more about what was happening to the characters for reasons that remain mysterious to me.
*Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai - I loved this book. I loved Uma and I loved the description of Arun and the family he stays with.
*Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai - This was pretty good, but I liked Fasting, Feasting much better.
*The Guide by R. K. Narayan - This was okay. Nothing earth-shattering, but not bad for a quick read. I just finished it, and I'd like to think more about it and what Narayan might be saying about Gandhi with his characterization of Raju.
*Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai - I read this before The Guide, but they're very similar books, actually. I liked this one better. It was much funnier, and I'm a sucker for the funny.
*Gig edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, & Sabin Streeter - This book is one of the best books I've read in a while. I love the voices of the people and how they all start to blend together, from the lowest-paid illegal immigrant who works in a chicken factory to the richest movie mogul (Jerry Bruckheimer). I love how most of the people say they love their jobs, even though you know it can't be true. I love how a lot of the people talk about how they do well at their job even though you know you've worked with people like that and they're completely worthless workers. I love the insight the book gives you into professions you didn't even know existed. It's also going on list of favorite books.
*Persuasion by Jane Austen - This has to be one of the worst Jane Austen books I've ever read. All her books are so similar that it gets old, but this one really showed no originality.
*Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence - This was a pretty interesting read, but oh my word how Connie got on my nerves! And the stupid gamekeeper and his stupid dialect. I was ready to scream at them both by the end of the book.
*JPod by Douglas Coupland - This was kind of funny and kind of interesting, but I really got the impression that Coupland was phoning this one in (even more than usual). Microserfs was way better.
*Saturday by Ian McEwan - Gah, this was a boring book. So boring and so annoying. I don't like books about current events, so that kind of bugged me. I was really looking forward to this after reading Atonement, but this one was terrible.
*The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - I was expecting this to suck because a lot of stupid people I've known in my life have loved this book. But it was pretty good. My advisor kept going on about and I thought he must be nuts, but he was right about Roy. This book has stuck with me after reading it, which is more than I can say for a lot of the other stuff I read this year.
*Life of Pi by Yann Martel - Man, is Yann Martel ever an annoying idiot. This book was a pretty horrible waste of time. I liked the parts where Pi was lost at sea with Richard Parker, but the beginning and the end were stupid, contrived, and completely irritating. This would have been a much better story if the beginning and end were lopped off.
*The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh - I'm not quite done with this one, so I can't say for sure how I feel, but so far it seems to be merely okay, nothing earth-shattering. Ghosh won me over at the beginning when he talked about proper Kolkata chai being made without spices. I don't know how many times I've argued with people (familiar and unfamiliar with Indian cuisine alike) that good chai shouldn't taste like a freaking pumpkin pie. I didn't realize until I read this book that it must just be a Kolkata thing.
*Reading Student Writing by Lad Tobin - This book seems okay so far (again, not done with it). It's a bit boring at times because of all the interjections the author makes about himself, but overall I think it's going to help me a lot with my teaching, so that's good.
*What is the What by Dave Eggers - I'm not done with this yet, either, but it's awesome so far. I can't wait to spend more time with it. My love for Dave Eggers is well documented here, I think. I get to see him speak about this book this fall along with its subject, Valentino Achak Deng.

Summary and Goals

So I read 24 books last year. I always have a dream that I'll take on the 50 book challenge, and it's never happened, so I don't want to even set myself up for failure this year. I'm sure I'll read more books this year than last year simply because I'm in school this year and I'll have 3 quarters of coursework, probably including some reading hours for my comps. My only number goal is to increase the number of books I read every year, so I'm sure I'll be fine on that count. As far as content goals, I'm still formulating those. I want to try to read different stuff than what I normally read, so I want to think up some categories in which I would like to read more than one book this year. Some that I know I want to include already are poetry, non-fiction, graphic novel, and science fiction. I'd also like to reduce the number of unread books on my shelves. To that end, here's a list of my unread books (not counting the ones I have bought and will read this quarter for classes):

**The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
**Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
**Notes From the Underground/The Double - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
**How We Are Hungry - Dave Eggers
**War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Bostonians - Henry James
Mao II - Don DeLillo
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods - Umberto Eco
The Castle - Franz Kafka
The First Circle - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Rabbit Redux - John Updike
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Promise - Chaim Potok
The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
Native Son - Richard Wright
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Nana - Emile Zola
Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat
The Information - Martin Amis
The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Moon and Sixpence - W. Somerset Maugham
Women in Love - D. H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence
**Lady Chatterly’s Lover - D. H. Lawrence
Video - Meera Nair
If You Are Afraid of Heights - Raj Kamal Jha
Freedom at Midnight - Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
Stories - Guy de Maupassant
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
**A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
**Kim - Rudyard Kipling
**Seventeen Syllables - Hisaye Yamamoto
**The Calcutta Chromosome - Amitav Ghosh
Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
**We Wish To Inform You . . . - Philip Gourevitch
The Squabble - Nikolai Gogol
**Freedom Song - Amit Chaudhuri
**The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
**Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
**Where the Long Grass Bends - Neela Vaswani
**Malgudi Days - R. K. Narayan
Leave It To Me - Bharati Mukherjee
**Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
**The Russian Debutante’s Handbook - Gary Shteyngart
The Fall - Albert Camus
**Love and Longing in Bombay - Vikram Chandra
Madras on Rainy Days - Samina Ali
Blindness, Etc. - Jose Saramago
Collected Stories - Isaac Bashevis Singer
If You Are Afraid of Heights - Raj Kamal Jha
Video - Meera Nair
**Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe
**The Guide by R.K. Narayan
**Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
**The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
**East, West by Salman Rushdie
**All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
**Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Stars denote books that I'm desperate to read when I have the time. These books don't include the 7 or so boxes of books that are currently at my mother's house because they won't fit in our apartment. Next year for Christmas I plan to buy another bookshelf (I bought a sweet new one this year) and some of those will probably be unearthed at that time. I don't even remember what any of those books are, except for Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott because I was looking for it and it's not here.

Update

Since it's almost the end of the year, I thought I'd try to post a short note about all the books I read but didn't post review of this year. I don't feel like going back and writing long reviews, but I want to have some note about how I felt about them.

Red Azalea by Anchee Min - was pretty good, but hard to tell where the author ultimately landed on the whole Mao thing. She seemed to be sort of negative about the regime in some parts, but still super-romanticized Madame Mao.
Atonement by Ian McEwan - Such a fabulous book! The ending devastated me, but only a good book could have such an effect. McEwan is a great writer and I hope to read more by him soon. Tried to start Amsterdam tonight, but it wasn't doing it for me.
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God by Etgar Keret - I love this book. I want to start a whole blog dedicated to how much I love this book. I like to immerse myself in novels and I don't usually do too well with short stories (or poetry), but these stories captured me and wouldn't let me go. I'm dying to read The Nimrod Flipout, but that would require a purchase, and I haven't seen it at the used bookstore or Half-Price Books yet.
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand - This was kind of boring and hard to stick with, but it was educational.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - Oh my goodness, I loved this book. Humbert Humbert is such a creepy character, but I found myself loving him because the he told his story with such skill. I read this book in a very short period of time because I just couldn't put it down. It was fabulous.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - This wasn't as great as Lolita, but it was still good. The Zembla parts kind of made me crazy, but it's such a rich book. I love Shade's poem, and there's so much to wonder about after reading this book.
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead - I really enjoyed this book. I might be dumb, and there might a be a word for this kind of book, but I don't know it. It's not quite a dystopia, but it's similar, and I tend to enjoy books like this. It's an interesting concept, and Whitehead is a great writer.
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett - I wanted to kill myself reading this book, and it's only like 100 pages long. Malone drove me nuts and I thought I might drop out of grad school because this was the first book we had to read in my 20th C. Lit class.
The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer - This book also made me want to drop out of grad school. It was so horribly boring and I wanted to kill Norman Mailer. He was so full of himself, and not in a way that I found entertaining or interesting.
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter - This was a pretty good book. I enjoyed it, and there's a lot going on in it, but I guess I don't have a lot to say about it.
The Dream Songs by John Berryman - These poems are utterly inscrutable, and they were extremely difficult for me to read because I'm not good at reading poetry to begin with.
Girls on the Run by John Ashbery - If I hadn't read the Berryman earlier, I would have said that these poems were completely inscrutable. They're most valuable to me for introducing me to the interesting figure of John Darger.
Doubled Flowering by Araki Yasusada - These poems and the story surrounding them were very interesting to me; so much so that I wrote two papers on them.
Lanark by Alasdair Gray - This was a great book, and as soon as I can get my hands on more of Gray's writing, I plan to devour it. Very funny and interesting, and original.
JR by William Gaddis - As hard as this was to read, I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was hilarious and very interesting. I need to read it again to piece more things together, and I definitely want to read more by Gaddis.
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru - This was a pretty decent book. It was a page turner and kind of thought-provoking, but after reading the Nabokov and Gaddis earlier, there's a limit to how impressed I can be by this book.
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill - This play was kind of boring to me. I probably won't be tracking down any more Churchill to read, plus I'm not that into reading plays.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

This book reminded me a lot of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, only not quite as good. I still enjoyed it but Eggers' book seems edgier to me and more well-written. Basically I'm a sucker for any book with descriptions of driving on beautiful California highways. I've never been further west than Chicago, so any book with descriptions of A. California, B. Colorado/mountains, or C. the Pacific Northwest, gets me drunk with desire to visit these places. And somehow this gets lodged in my brain as a positive thing. I guess I'm also a sucker for anything that's 90's nostalgia. I was a teenager in the 90's who wished she was an adult, so books about being an adult in the 90's appeal to my teenage self that's locked away somewhere. So these two elements appealed to me.

The textual manipulation was kind of dumb to me because I don't really get into that kind of stuff. I found myself skipping the free-association pages by the time I was midway through the book. The writing itself wasn't that great either, which kind of bugged me. I know this isn't a super-serious text or anything, but it seems like we have too many books in the world to be publishing anything that's not excellent. I think I'd like to read more by Douglas Coupland, but only as a quick read after something heavier. Coupland is a balm to be used in the same manner as chicklit, and I think that's the bottom line of this review.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

I finally finished this last night - it took me a week to read this book, which is ridiculous, because it's less than 200 pages. It was good, but it wasn't great, and I keep feeling like I wanted to read a different book, but I didn't want to start another one because I was afraid I'd never come back to this one. My new motto: no more half-finished and barely started books on my bookshelves! I made it through JR by William Gaddis, I can make it through anything. Anyway, it wasn't fascinating in a sick sort of way like Lolita was, and it wasn't quite as funny as Pale Fire, but it was still pretty funny. It was mostly just sad and depressing. Pnin wasn't such a bad sort, but he just couldn't catch a break. The most notable thing about this book for me was the narrator. This is the third Nabokov book I've read where he frames the story and gives his narrator an identity. Pnin's narrator in particular was troubling to me, though, because the he seemed to know things that only an omniscient narrator would know. How does he know details of Pnin's life and actions when no one else is around to observe them? Should we believe Pnin when he claims that the narrator is a liar? So it's a problematic book, but not in the same way that Pale Fire is, and it didn't have the emotional effect that Lolita did for me. But overall, it was decent. Nabokov could hardly write something bad, that's for sure.

More Books I Read But Didn't Have Time to Write Reviews For:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Dream Songs by John Berryman
Girls on the Run by John Ashbery
Doubled Flowering by Araki Yasusada
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
JR by William Gaddis
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill


All of these but the first one are for school. I must be forgetting other books from before the quarter started, but I can't think of what they must be. Like, I must have read something besides Lolita between July and September, but who knows what it was.

Edit: Aha! One of the other books I read between July and September was Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee.

Gah

It's been so long since I've posted anything. I still don't have time to post anything, but here's a list of books I need to remember to write reviews about when I get a chance:

Red Azalea by Anchee Min
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God by Etgar Keret
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand