The Spring, Summer and (Hopefully Not) Fall 2008 Reading List – Week 5
My reading time has been falling off the last couple of weeks, and I need to get things back in gear. Drat those NBA Playoffs and their late games! Even with Tivo, it’s a time-commitment. If it weren’t for my audiobook reading, I wouldn’t have much to say at all…
Books completed in week 5
“Duma Key: A Novel” (Stephen King)
Books read or started in week 5
“A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” (Ishmael Beah)
“The Stories of John Cheever” (John Cheever)
“The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” (David Hajdu) (Audiobook)
Since the John Cheever book is actually a collection of (61!) short stories, I thought I would post the ones I’ve read each week, along with a 1-5 rating of the story itself. I know I said I wouldn’t review anything, but this doesn’t count. For John Cheever, a great 20th century writer, 1 = Good and 5 = Face-Meltingly Great1 anyway. So here we go with the six I’ve read in the past week:
Goodbye, My Brother – 3
The Common Day – 2
The Enormous Radio – 4
O City of Broken Dreams – 4
The Hartleys – 3
The Sutton Place Story – 3
The Kindle Go-No Go Assessment: 10
This will probably stay at a ten unless something major happens in the next couple of months. By major, I mean a massive recall of Kindles. Or a suprise revelation that Kindle screens are being manufactured in an Asian sweatshop by Pandas coaxed into labor on the promise of a lifetime supply of eucalyptus.
Needless to say, I’ll probably be getting the Kindle when all is said and done. The only real question now is if I will actually manage to wait until I finish twelve more books. Cast your votes in the comment section. Will I make it?
The (Remaining) Reading List (12 of 16 Remaining)
“A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” (Ishmael Beah)
“Orthodoxy” (Gilbert K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton)
“The Stories of John Cheever” (John Cheever)
“The Shack” (William P. Young)
“Characters and Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing)” (Orson Scott Card)
“The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” (Thomas L. Friedman)
“Peace Like a River” (Leif Enger)
“Writing the Breakout Novel” (Donald Maass)
“Notes From Underground” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
“St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics (Norton Critical Editions)” (Aquinas Thomas)
“On Eloquence” (Denis Donoghue)
“Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life” (Steve Martin)
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- Like Belloc in Raiders of the Lost Ark [↩]
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May 5th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I believe you WON’T make it. Seems to me (if I was to form a compelling argument for my spouse ;>)) that you are actually more efficiently getting through your reading list by using the Kindle! Just in case you were wrapped up in watching the Lakers kick the Jazz and the Celtics crush the Hawks, I was shopping for a 1st communion gift for my triplet nieces and nephew on Amazon and there was a big ad on the front page annoucing the availability of the Kindle…
May 5th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I think you’ll make it, Brandon. Why give up this great opportunity to motivate yourself to read 12 books quickly?
May 5th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Jim, I know they’re back in stock. I see that every day…
And thanks for believing in me… 
Mark, Thanks for the encouragement! And you are exactly right, having the Kindle sitting across the finish line has been a pretty awesome motivator…
May 5th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Why would the pandas be tempted by eucalyptus? Panda eat bamboo; koalas eat eucalyptus.
Or was this ironic post-modernism, and it just went whooshing over my head?
May 6th, 2008 at 5:28 am
Ken, take your pick. I honestly don’t know because all of the posts in this blog are actually ghost-written by a koala that I pay in bamboo…
Oh, and I asked a panda friend of mine if he would eat eucalyptus. He said that he will eat whatever he wants and I’m not the boss of him…
so there you go.