12.27.2008

Addition



I'm adding Joseph McElroy's Women and Men to the list because, well, I got a Daedalus Books gift card for Christmas and their store had it for $5.

It seems to fit on the list because:
a) It's 1192 pages long,
b) This mention on the Millions blog compares it to Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis and Wallace who all appear on the list,
c) The cover is as grey and ominous as Underworld's, not to mention the title being similarly ambiguous.

The book's review in the NY Times makes me a little nervous, explaining that information about the characters is "set forth in a viscous, arch, hectoring, information-crammed, unparagraphed series of the longest sentences since William Faulkner's." I read The Bear in college and remember not enjoying the 2 full classes we spent dissecting one of 'tha Faulk's huge sentences. Not seeing paragraph breaks on a page puts the fear of God into me. Women and Men will probably go at the bottom of the pile for now.

Note: I also considered Norman Rush's Mortals (also mentioned in the Millions entry above), but the nicer, cheaper, hardback copy that Daedalus had wasn't 700 pgs. Sorry Norm.

12.26.2008

The Project



I buy books. A lot of books. Used Books. New Books. Big Books. Small Books. Good Books. Bad Books.

I buy big books with the best intentions but rarely pull them back off the shelf when it comes time to choose the next book to read. They sit there, thick-spined, silently judging. Larger books are no better or worse than shorter ones; just heavier and significantly more intimidating.

I've read and enjoyed a few of my huge books: Underworld, Don Quixote, and War and Peace, but my purchasing continues to outpace my reading.

Spending 2009 reading only books I own that are over 700 pages is really a clumsy combination of two of my favorite recent obsessive compulsive columns: Nick Hornby's "Stuff I've Been Reading" from The Believer and Noel Murray's "Popless" on The Onion's AV Club site. The main difference being that they are paid critics with actual insights and I'm only a dude on the interwebs with slight bibliomania and too much free time.


The (Completely Arbitrary) Rules
1 - Books/Volumes/Works must be over 700 pages in length.

2 - I'll still be reading comic collections and graphic novels of any length, 'cause it's not really the same thing.

3 - I've chosen 10 of my favorite authors and should they write any new books this year, I'll read them to cleanse my lit palate. The authors are: Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Chuck Klosterman.

4 - I usually don't quit on books, but slogging through 700+ pages of something I'm hating is different from just sucking it up and finishing On the Road. I'm giving myself 3 quits before I abandon the project.

5 - A few of the books/works/volumes below are either collected novels in one volume or one work spread across multiple volumes. I'll be trying to read those works straight through rather than book by book (as the author presumably intended, apologies to Dos Passos, Updike and O'Brien).

6 - I'll still be reading magazines. Hopefully this project will encourage more magazine reading because I've been falling behind on my New Yorker-ing, Believer-ing, and Stop Smiling-(ehhh...ing).


The Books
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (819p)
The USA Trilogy (The 49th Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) by John Dos Passos (1,144p in 3 volumes)
The Recognitions by William Gaddis (956p)
Ulysses by James Joyce (768p)
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1056p)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (721p)
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (704p)
The Complete Novels (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive) by Flann O'Brien (787p)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (776p)
Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (773p)
The Beatles by Bob Spitz (856p)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (720p)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (853p)
Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) by John Updike (1,516p)
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1,079p including endnotes that are presumably essential reading)
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (729p)

There. A list that includes some of the most notoriously difficult and polarizing books. It's a little fiction heavy but probably accurately represents my normal fiction:non-fiction ratio. I might add Rick Perlstein's Nixonland if I get too bogged down in post-modern fictional insanity and want to read about a real-life crazy person (and if the library has a copy). I also might add David Simon's The Corner if I rewatch The Wire or Homicide at any point.

I'll try and give previews of each book in an attempt to explain why I thought I absolutely needed to own the book and why it's worth toting to a new apartment every two years.

I'll also be updating with my thoughts on the books, info on how the project is changing my book-buying habits, and, I guess, the inevitable back pain from lugging 700+ page books around town.
Widget_logo
Site Meter