Books

Some time in the late '90's, there was a year when I read a book a week. I don't think I set out to do it, but I did it, and it wasn't hard. These were real books, no padding with genre novels or collections of newspaper columns. The next year, I set out to do it again, and I read fewer than twenty-five books.

I got rid of a lot of books when I moved from a house to an apartment. I kept a few. I'm trying to avoid buying more, but sometimes I do. Mostly I rely on public libraries, and to a lesser extent, my university library.

Here are five books that you might enjoy reading. I did, though I haven't read any of these in full in at least twenty years (I have dipped into each of them on occasion).

1. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)
2. Under The Volcano (Malcolm Lowry, 1947)
3. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)
4. Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1974)
5. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace, 1996)

Shoutouts to: A.S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Jennifer Egan, Ruth Ozeki, Rachel Kushner.