Summer of Books

Yep.

The ladies at The Architecture and Engineering school are starting to think I"m nuts for not having a real job. But with freelancing and my summer of books project I keep from feeling...I don't know...worthless. But alas, dear American society I will contribute to your strange machinations one day.

For now these are the books that have been completely. A partner and I are both reading Ulysses with a companion of allusions. Our hands are by the phone. We call when we simply don't get it which is often. His theological training has come in very handy. We will do most of these U readings at Barnes and Noble at our counter.

I list the following books not to show off but to encourage a dialogue about them. To give a recommendation or not. And I do it for my own personal record.

Summer so far:

Les Miserables- Victor Hugo (worth the time, will return to it surely, never read the word "immensity" so much)

Old Man and the Sea- Hemingway (better than my first read, great ending)

Books of my Life-Henry Miller----makes me want to read more DH Lawrence and Whitman

Obama- Dreams of My Father (seems a good portrait of the man as ponderous wanderer)

Larry McMurtry- Walter Benjamin and the Dairy Queen

Kevin Costello- 14 Left (a screenplay by a friend

James Nghiem- The Kid in Manny. He still says the character isn't named after me. Deflating to the ego. But it is true I would never swallow so many caffeine pills and then drive!

On the Road- Jack Kerouac (He lived with his mom too....)

Snows of Kiliminjaro (short story)- Ernest Hemingway. All those stories he "didn't write" if he didn't write them.

Hart Crane (poem)- The Bridge

The Shipping News- Annie Proulx (great supplement to my brief brush with the journalism world, inventive descriptions, hillarious, good little kid characters, reminds me of my visit to the Aran Islands with its unforgiving Newfoundland setting. And like many books I like it has a theme of a dying era, for fishing, newspapers)

Much work to do with Joyce, Capote, some Oklahoma History and a little Chuck Klosterman for the death metal soul........