read a book a week

Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep
Assassination Vacation

The Historian
A Boy’s Own Story
Pen on Fire
Against Joie De Vivre
In the Devil’s Garden

Pere Goriot Balzac
America John Stewart
The Genius Factory by David Plotz
The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells
The Line of Beauty by Allan Hollinghurst

Specimen Days Michael Cunningham

The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Granta:the Factory/ The Plot Against America/
McSweeneys Enchanted Chamber

In the Days of the Comet: H.G. Wells: Great piece of old fashioned sci-fi, comet creats socialist Utopia rather than relieving Republicrap Bruce Willis of “taxes” to the tinny sound of Aerosmith.

Never Let Me Go: Kazuo Ishiguro: amazing and sad, don’t listen to the people who poo-pooh this book because they “don’t like depressing fiction.”

The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula K. LeGuin (still awesome!)

The Radioactive Boyscout:His backyard was glowing!

Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
Classic Tales of Ghosts and Vampires
The Take Down

True Notebooks by Mark Salzman
After the Plague by T.C. Boyle (fantastic, in particular the lead story, but most of his characters seem to be the same guy. An interesting, semi-psychotic guy, so no problems there.)
The Great Movie Serials by (I forgot the name, out of print library book. Interesting read on the movie serials but not enough behind the scenes stories, other than the one where Kirk Alyn [Superman] and Lyle Talbott [Lex Luthor] traded recipes on the set. Also, Buster Crabbe’s fear of being thought to be a homosexual because of his bleach job. Dude! You’re in tights!)
more to come…
Granta 88:Mothers (I know it’s a mag but the content is good and the page numbers enough)
The Short History of Nearly Everything:Bill Bryson
City of Quartz by Mike Davis (note to self: get Nathaniel West)
Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard (not all of it, really liked the title story and Mars Attacks but couldn’t get into the rest. Does this count for 1/8 of a book? (:

Patricia Highsmith’s Price of Salt
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener
Curtis White’s The Middle Mind(blech! This guy is right about Spielberg but otherwise off his gourd.Also, he needs to remember that Spielberg allowed the intellectual to live in Jaws, and that therefore the travesty of Private Ryan may well be just a guy aging rather than the conspiracy of stupidity White makes it out to be.