Now that the scary ‘100th post’ is out of the way, this seems like a good time to talk about the program of reading I’m undertaking this summer. For my coursework, I’m slogging through what seems to be an unending amount of PDF’s and websites which suck all the joy out of reading. I even have a automatic folder of PDF’s that I’ve collected over the course of the year that refer to things that are Worthy and To Be Read.
To counter-act this, I’m reading a lot of different stuff. Stuff that is out of place from the usual stuff I read. I’ve just finished Confederacy of Dunces, and have a small pile of interesting fiction to follow it up with. Part of that involves doing the Infinite Summer challenge, where I’ll be reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace over the course of the summer.
This all stems from last year, when I realised that I’d pretty much read all of the SF that I was interested in. That’s not to say that I’m no longer interested in SF, it’s just that I read so darn fast that I’m going to have to wait for more books to be written. I was also stymied in conversation when talking about books – I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve got blank looks after making reference to classics of science fiction literature.
(It’s not my fault you’ve not read your Bester)
In an effort to both better myself and have more conversations about books then, I’m now announcing my summer reading list:
- Confederacy of Dunces (completed!)
- Child 44 (lent to me by the lovely and kind Colleen)
- Palimpsest
- Infinte Jest
- Hell’s Cartographers
- Douglas Coupland (no, it’s a book about Douglas Coupland, I’m not being stupid)
- Queen of Candesce
- McSweeney’s 29
As you can see from clicking those links, a lot of those books are still quite SF in nature, so I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to other stuff I could read. I’m not sure that I’m up to reading any Bronte quite yet, but anything more intermediate than straight-up regency would be interesting… (just not Georgette Heyer, okay?)
