Reading

Currently:

June 2008
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Richard Braudigan, Willard and His Bowling Trophies
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

May 2008
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

. . .

March 2008
St. Therese of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul
The Rule of St. Benedict in English
Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

February 2008
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
Raymond Brown, Responses to 101 Questions on the Bible

January 2008
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

December 2007
Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can’t Win
Vincent Lam, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

November 2007
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Trans. Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching

October 2007
Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
Ajahn Passano & Ajahn Amaro, Broad View, Boundless Heart

September 2007
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
Francine du Plexis Gray, Simone Weil

August 2007
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
Thornton Wilder, The Woman of Andros
Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

July 2007
Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel
Sharon Olds, The Wellspring
Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From

June 2007
The Cloud of Unknowing
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Radindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience

May 2007
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
Hafiz, The Gift
D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism

Apr 2007
The Life of St. Teresa of Avila
Emilie Griffin, Turning
Plato, The Symposium
Rumi, Selected Poems
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Mar 2007
Virgil, Aeneid
Willa Cather, My Antonia
St. Augustine, Confessions
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Feb 2007
Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Henry James, Eight Tales From the Major Phase
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Jan 2007
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness
Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Recommendations:

Stories & essays

Carver (Raymond), “A Small, Good Thing”
Didion (Joan), “Goodbye to All That”
Didion (Joan), “Why I Write” (excerpts)
García Marquéz (Gabriel), “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”
Hemingway (Ernest), “Hills Like White Elephants”
July (Miranda), “The Shared Patio”
Kafka (Franz), “A Hunger Artist”
Mishima (Yukio), “Patriotism”
O’Connor (Flannery), “A Good Man is Hard To Find”
Salinger (J. D.), “For Esme - With Love and Squalor”

Books: Fiction & memoir
(Only one title is listed per author, though many have published several wonderful things.)

Baldwin (James), Giovanni’s Room
Banks (Russell), The Sweet Hereafter
Bellow (Saul), Herzog
Colette, The Vagabond
Cunningham (Michael), The Hours
Didion (Joan), Play It as It Lays
Dillard (Annie), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dostoevsky (Fyodor), Crime and Punishment
Duras (Margueritte), The Lover
Ernaux (Annie), Happening
Eugenides (Jeffrey), Middlesex
Faulkner (William), Light in August
Fitzgerald (F. Scott), The Great Gatsby
Flaubert (Gustave), Madame Bovary
Foer (Jonathan Safran), Everything is Illuminated
Franzen (Jonathan), The Corrections
Gogol (Nikolai), The Overcoat
Greene (Graham), The End of the Affair
Hemingway (Ernest), A Moveable Feast
Irving (John), The Cider House Rules
Jelinek (Elfrieda), The Piano Teacher
Kundera (Milan), The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lahiri (Jhumpa), Interpreter of Maladies
Marquez (Gabriel Garcia), Innocent Erendira
Miller (Henry), Tropic of Cancer
Nabokov (Vladimir), Lolita
Nin (Anais), Henry and June
O’Connor (Flannery), The Complete Stories
Olmstead (Robert), Stay Here With Me
Ondaatje (Micheal), The English Patient
Patchett (Ann), Bel Canto
Plath (Sylvia), The Bell Jar
Proulx (E. Annie), The Shipping News
Robbins (Tom), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Robinson (Marilynne), Housekeeping
Robison (Mary), Why Did I Ever
Roy (Arundhati), The God of Small Things
Salinger (J. D.), Franny and Zooey
Sartre (Jean-Paul), Nausea
Sedaris (David), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Smith (Lee), The Fair and Tender Ladies
Tolstoy (Leo), Anna Karenina
Winterson (Jeanette), The Passion
Woolf (Virginia), Mrs. Dalloway