to be read

a friend introduced me to this little challenge, where the meat of it is to select a list of 12 books that you had always been meaning to get around to reading, and then to commit to reading them over the next year. the books must be older than 6 months and you can't have already read them. the point is to get to some of those classics that make us all more rounded as people.

and my list, without further ado:

1984, by George Orwell
Journey to the End of Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Hunger, by Knut Hamsun
The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
Independent People, by Halldor Laxness
Blindness, by Jose Saramago
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

the road won the 2007 pulitzer prize and i've read several of his other books, including all the pretty horses. of course i've read other books by hemingway, but the other authors are all new to me.

the friend who introduced me to the reading list challenge asked me yesterday if i thought current efforts to increase reading could be successful. for instance, are there any long term effects of the harry potter mania? will children who didn't usually read then go on to read other books. while i think that there will be some additional exposure to other children's books, i think it might be a few generations before such sparked interest bleeds over into classical literature or into historical nonfiction, genres needed to see a positive change in human society. for all the effort of oprah's book club, for instance, her marginal readership remains far more interested in forms of romance literature that advance a self-destructive society.

before the new year had even begun, i had finished 1984. this book alone should be read in high school, and not for instance wuthering heights. it's depiction of torture and the easy by which the human spirit may be controlled and destroyed is a warning needed for any democracy. now i have moved on to don quixote, whose depiction of self-induced delusions is extremely poignant. you can't help but think of the degree to which we all seek to be don quixote in order to mitigate the dullness of obscurity of our own lives.