My 2008 Reading List

Early this year, I found a daily calendar, The Book Lover’s Calendar. The type where you tear off each page as your life passes you by. Each day's page had a book and a brief description of the story.

Daily, weekly, or whenever the hell I got around to it, I would read the listed book’s description and either keep the page to add to my list of books to read or toss that day if it wasn’t my style. And my style? Well, we run the gamut from true crime, to memoirs, to chick lit, to non-fiction, to sci fi, to classics and anything else you can imagine.

My goal is to read a bunch of these over the next year. Not all of them, not one a week or one a month or even one a year. I just want to catalogue these books and perhaps give you some interest in checking them out. Perhaps I will write about some of them over the year, perhaps I won’t. Perhaps I will remember to cross them off this post as I finish them. Most likely, I won’t.

In no particular order, here are the pages that survived my tossing:

1. The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq (John Crawford) FINISHED FEBRUARY SOMETIME.
   
2. The Footprints of God (Greg Iles)
3. On Bullshit (Harry G. Frankfurt)
4. The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (Slavomir Rawicz)
5. The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel (Andrew Sean Greer)
6. The Works: Anatomy of a City (Kate Ascher) FINISHED 2/24/08
   
7. Bonjour Tristesse (Francoise Sagan)
8. Dirty Sally (Michael Simon)
9. Girls (Frederick Busch)
10. The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-Up (Dan Zevin)
11. Jesus Land (Julia Scheeres)
12. Native Son (Richard Wright)
13. Oh The Glory of it All (Sean Wilsey)
14. Death of an Ordinary Man (Glen Duncan)
15. Black Robe (Brian Moore)
16. Sands of Empire (Robert W. Merry)
17. The Last Song of Dusk (Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi)
18. Brazzaville Beach (William Boyd)
19. War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars (Andrew Carroll)
20. Jenny (Sigrid Undset)
21. A Very Long Engagement (Sebastien Japrisot)
22. The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee (Stewart Lee Allen)
23. Consuming Kids (Susan Linn)
24. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie)
25. If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska (Heather Lende)
26. Small Island (Andrea Levy)
27. The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder and Survival in the Amazon (Robert Whitaker)
28. Gould's Book of Fish (Richard Flanagan)
29. The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis)
30. Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS (Richard Yancey)
31. There is Room For You (Charlotte Bacon)
32. The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene)
33. What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained (Robert L. Wolke) FINISHED 1/21/08
    
34. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (Dan Fesperman)
35. The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire (Tom Zoellner)
36. Black Bodies and Quantum Cats (Jennifer Ouellette)
37. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
38. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Robert D. Putnam)
39. The Pleasing Hour (Lily King)
40. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People AND The Sound of No Hands Clapping (Toby Young)
41. The Amateur Marriage (Anne Tyler) FINISHED 2/20/08 YAWN!!
    
42. Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
43. In the Province of Saints (Thomas O'Malley)
44. Responsible Men (Edward Schwarzschild)
45. Follies:New Stories (Ann Beattie)
46. Offer of Proof (Robert Heilbrun) FINISHED 1/26/08
    
47. Life is So Good (George Dawson and Richard Glaubman)
48. Crossing California (Adam Langer)
49. Sideways (Rex Pickett)
50. In the Hills of Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village (Sarah Erdman) FINISHED 2/9/08
    
51. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy (Lindsay Moran)
52. The Last Duel (Eric Jager) I AM TRYING TO READ THIS....NOT SURE I WILL FINISH...YAWN. (2/29/08)
    
53. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
54. Elbow Room (James Alan McPherson)
55. Instances of the Number 3 (Salley Vickers)
56. Youth in Revolt (C.D Payne)
57. Where is the Mango Princess? A Journey Back from Brain Injury (Cathy Crimmins)
58. New Orleans Stories: Great Writers on the City (John Miller)
59. Against Love: A Polemic (Laura Kipnis)
60. My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle (Marcel Pagnol)
61. The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (Barry Schwartz)
    
62. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
63. A Summons to Memphis (Peter Taylor)
64. Liars and Saints (Maile Meloy)
    
65. Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life (Lawrence LaRose)
66. Natasha: And Other Stories (David Bezmogis)
    
67. The Tender Bar (J.R. Moehringer)
68. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
69. Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (Andrew Scull)
70. Snobbery: The American Version (Joseph Epstein)
71. How to Win Friends & Influence People (Dale Carnegie)
72. Fourteen: Growing Up Alone in A Crowd (Stephen Zanichkowsky)
73. The Man With the Beautiful Voice: And More Stories From the Other Side of the Couch (Lillian B. Rubin)
74. West of Kabul, East of New York (Tamim Ansary)
75. An Innocent, A Broad (Ann Leary, Denis Leary's wife) FINISHED 5/31/08
    
76. Clay's Quilt (Silas House)
77. Whatever Makes You Happy (Lisa Grunwald)
78. Fan-Tan (Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell)
79. The Shop on Blossom Street (Debbie Macomber)
80. The Progress Paradox (Gregg Easterbrook)
81. I'm Not Scared (Niccolo Ammaniti)
82. Goodnight Nobody (Jennifer Weiner)
83. Runaway (Alice Munro)
84. Confidence (Rosabeth Moss Kanter)
85. The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of World War II's Most Decorated Platoon (Alex Kershaw)
86. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
87. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (Jung Chang)
88. Music for Chameleons (Truman Capote)
89. Slaves in the Family (Edward Ball)
90. Boy (Roald Dahl)
91. Silk (Alessandro Baricco)
    
92. Crimes Against Logic (Jamie Whyte)
93. Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Alan Burdick)
94. Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
95. Sarah (Marek Halter)
96. The History of Love: A Novel (Nicole Krauss) FINISHED 1/13/08.
    
97. All I Did Was Ask (Terry Gross)
98. Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (Jack Coughlin and Casey Kuhlman with Donald A. Davis)
    

Thoughts? Have you read any of these? Wanna join in? Let me know if you have read one, discuss it on your own innernet space, and I will link.

The linkies up there, all 2,626 of them, I just did a quick search on the book itself. I can't vouch that the links don't discuss killing clowns and feeding them to puppies. Or that they work. Or that puppies shouldn't eat clowns. Because I hear clowns are tasty. Either way, let me know if a link sucks or is screwy and if clowns are nutritionally balanced.