Reading List

I remember all the books I've read to look cool, or hip, or intellectual, and I'm sad because now I want to read them again and I could have but chose not to. I felt that it'd be wasting time, because, hell, there's so much more other stuff to read.

But wouldn't it be better to read just one book and totally understand it (or admit that even after two or three readings you still don't get it), than to have read a hundred and not learned anything? That would be a fucking waste of time.

So. Here's a list of books I want to read (and understand) again:

1. The Great Gatsby -- I've totally forgotten what this book was about. It's as if I never read it. But I know I enjoyed it and I want to do so again.

2. Sense and Sensibility -- I just want to enjoy this one again. Probably the only Austen I haven't reread.

3. The Color Purple -- But this would make me sad. Again.

4. A Tale of Two Cities -- I hate Charles Dickens and his never-ending sentences, but I read the abridged version for a book report and got an A for it, which makes me feel guilty as hell.

5. Nine Stories -- especially the bananafish and Esme stories.

6. The Brothers Karamazov -- This was such a great book. Period.

7... I'm sure there's at least one I'm forgetting...

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I remember too, having this really awful English teacher in college. (He replaced a terrific one midsemester, when the other had to go on leave to get married). He was this I'm-an-intellectual-and-I'll-have-you-know-it type and assigned us eight (8!) books to read in three months or so. The list is bellow if you're interested:

1. One hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. Animal Farm by George Orwell

3. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac

4. Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality by some French guy Rousseau

5. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Hmm. This goes to #7 in the list above.)

7 and 8... I can't quite remember. Must've been really awful that I've blocked them out.

To survive the grueling pace of that class, I would barely skim through these books, just praying that their meaning would jump out at me like a really bad surprise, so that I could write a passable paper. Then on to the next book... and on and on... (I thought then that One Hundred Years was aptly titled: I thought it'd take me a century to finish it...)

And if that isn't bad, that teacher hated my guts. Once he gave us this 30-something-page of poems and songs related in one way or another to Nabokov's Lolita (which we were reading at that time), and he told us to chose anything (ANYthing!) and discuss. One of those poem/songs was The Police's Don't Stand So Close to Me, so I raised my hand and offered to talk about it.

He then gives me this really evil smirk, and drawled, "Oh, anything but that." So I gave him a dirty look and shut up for the rest of the semester.

But my best revenge was when I had to write my end-of-term paper. I chose to discuss Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, knowing that he hates books like these. (But anybody who'd choose Rousseau's Social whatever over Mockingbird is a pretentious asshole in my book.)

Anyway. I had a really old Mac Powerbook then (I now have a happy-shiny-new Smell* Inspiron 2200 named Charlie) with an illegally installed MS Word 6 with no spell check. And all over the paper, I spelled T-R-A-D-G-E-D-Y this way. (What a tragedy!) So he gave me a C-minus for the paper, and a C for the whole course (6 units, mind you), and he lived a very smug life thereafter, thinking what a stupid, spellcheck-deprived moron I was.

How is this the best revenge, you ask? I lead the rest of my life thinking he was a moron, too. And whereas he's wrong, I know I'm right. Haha. And I don't have to feel guilty about it.

By the way, his name was Ralph and I wish I had seen the movie (The Adventures of) Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert then. I'd have loved to call him Bernadette to his face and laugh like a loon.

Note *Smell Computers--for Tech Support, call somewhere in India or the Philippines. For further clarification, see Squirrelly Wrath link.