Harry Schwartz Eats the World

2009’s Reading List

January 4th, 2010

Apparently I read 45 books in 2009, plus a bunch of other minor stuff (short stories, graphic novels, etc.) Here’s the list, more or less chronologically:

• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
• Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
• The Beautiful and Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
• Violence – Slavoj Zizek
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
• Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
• Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon
• Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino
• The Tao Is Silent – Raymond Smullyan
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! – Feynman and Leighton
• Cradle to Cradle – McDonough and Braungart
• The Two Cultures – C.P. Snow
• American Gods – Neil Gaiman
• Illuminations – Walter Benjamin
• The Medea – Euripides
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
• Walden Two – B.F. Skinner
• The Worldly Philosophers – Robert Heilbroner
• The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
• The Fall – Albert Camus
• White Noise – Don DeLillo
• From Bauhaus to Our House – Tom Wolfe
• Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare – Bertrand Russell
• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• The Quest for Mind – Howard Gardner
• Slowness – Milan Kundera
• The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
• Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke
• Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• The American – Henry James
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
• In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan
• The Upanishads (Easwaran translation)
• Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
• King Solomon’s Ring – Konrad Lorenz
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
• No Logo – Naomi Klein
• Black Hole – Charles Burns
• Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
• Seven Nights – Jorge Luis Borges

The Good:

OK, Julia, I’ll admit – it didn’t immediately grab me, but overall Eyeless in Gaza was pretty excellent. No Point Counterpoint, mind you, which I still think is fundamentally the best book ever written by a human… but very good.

Borges was an incredibly imaginative storyteller; his Collected Fictions is a great compendium, especially the stuff in Labyrinths and Ficciones. Seven Nights is a collection of lectures. Borges talks about whatever delightful thing happen to enter his mind: The Divine Comedy, Kabbalah, the Thousand and One Nights, and so on.

Cloud Atlas and the various works of Italo Calvino both featured lovely writing and good explorations of narrative structure.

The Count of Monte Cristo was a nice documentary about Batman.

A Confederacy of Dunces and Foucault’s Pendulum are both classics that completely lived up to my expectations of them.

The Bad:

The Bell Jar. The Bell Jar, The Bell Jar, The Bell Jar. Much like The Old Man and the Sea, it’s one of those books that I wanted not to read, but to have read. Wasn’t worth it. The cover of my edition pictures a wilted rose, and the back-cover summary contains the words “…the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity…” In hindsight these were serious warning signs.

The “Eh:”

Oscar Wao was fine, but for me it didn’t quite live up to the hype. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got.

I’d probably have liked The Unbearable Lightness of Being better if I’d read it as an impressionable youth. Now it just exemplifies The Deep.

2010’s List

I’ve got some good stuff in the queue for this year. I just started Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which is terrific so far. I want to pick up Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives again; I don’t know how I ever stopped reading it, frankly. I got some Dan Dennett for Christmas. I’ve also got my eye on Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which I’m told is incredible. Plus about a million other things.

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