Books I Am Currently Reading

Believe it or not, this is how I read. It works out just fine except for the novels. You really can’t read much more than one novel at once. Maybe two. I’m not sure. But more than that and things really start to bog down hard. Everything else is fine to read concurrently – essays, nonfiction, short stories, poetry, social sciences, etc.

Looks like I’m currently reading 47 books. Actually it’s more than that because there are a lot of others that I just dip into and put away without even getting 10-15 pages into them. Anyway, if any of you have read any of these books or have heard of them or their authors, feel free to discuss!

Fiction – 20

Novels – 11

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, 90 pages, classic.

Pat Conroy: Beach Music, 18 pages; The Death of Santini, 16 pages.

Joanne Harris: Coastliners, 18 pages.

Franz Kafka: The Trial, 48 pages, classic.

Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, 38 pages, classic.

Khaled Husseini: A Thousand Splendid Suns, 134 pages, half-finished.

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea, 15 pages, classic.

Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker: A Sort of a Love Story, 48 pages.

Richard Russo: Empire Falls, 20 pages.

Robert Stone: A Flag for Sunrise, 54 pages.

John Updike: Toward the End of Time, 66 pages.

Poetry – 2

John Milton: Paradise Lost, 156 pages, half-finished, classic. Hard to read.

Steven St. Vincent Millay: The Western Star, 17 pages.

Short Stories – 7

Ernest Hemingway: Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 420 pages, 2/3 finished, classic.

Daniel F. Howard: The Modern Tradition: Short Stories, 180 pages, classics.

Alice Munro: Runaway: Stories, 48 pages.; Too Much Happiness: Stories, 34 pages.

Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, 22 pages, classic.

Joyce Carol Oates: Night-Side, 34 pages.

John Steinbeck: The Long Valley, 19 pages, classic.

Kurt Vonnegut: Welcome to the Monkey House, 21 pages (reread).

General Readers: Fiction and Nonfiction – 1

George Murphy: The Key West Reader: The Best of Key West’s Writers, 1830-1990, 28 pages.

Nonfiction -27

Biography – 1

Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx, 20 pages. Hard to read.

Environmentalism – 2

Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 142 pages, half-finished, classic; Down the River, 130 pages, half-finished.

Essays – 3

Loren Eisley: The Night Country: Confessions of a Bone-Hunting Man, 15 pages.

Adam Gopnik: Paris to the Moon, 19 pages.

Barbara Kingsolver: High Tide in Tuscon: Essays from Now or Never, 150 pages, half-finished.

General Nonfiction – 3

John Colapinto: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, 14 pages.

Malcolm Gladwell: Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, 156 pages, half-finished.

David Halberstam: The Powers That Be, p. 22.

History – 1

Tom Reiss: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, 32 pages.

Humor – 1

James Thurber: Is Sex Necessary?, 35 pages.

Law – 1

Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith: No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America, 46 pages.

Linguistics – 1

Derek Bickerton: Language and Species, 122 pages, half-finished. Hard to read.

Philosophy – 2

Soren Kierkegaard: Either/Or, 26 pages, classic. Hard to read.

Frederich Nietzsche: The Twilight of the Idols, 24 pages, classic. Hard to read.

Political Science – 7

Cicero: Select Political Speeches, 48 pages, classic.

Joe Conason: Big Lies: The Rightwing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, 14 pages.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Memoir on Pauperism, 37 pages, classic.

William Grieder: Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy, 38 pages.

Showan Khurshid: Knowledge Processing, Creativity, and Politics: A Political Theory Based on Evolutionary Theory, 10 pages. Hard to read.

Eric Walberg: Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games, p. 32.

David Woodward and Carl Bernstein: The Final Days, p. 22.

Psychology – 1

Julian Barnes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 22 pages.

Science – 1

John C. Greene: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought: The Death of Adam, 19 pages.

Sociology – 2

Carolina Maria de Jesus: Children of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, 17 pages, classic.

Emile Durkheim: Suicide: A Study in Sociology, 58 pages, classic. Hard to read.

Travelogue – 1

Anthony Daniels: Coups and Cocaine: Travels in South America, 34 pages.

Wildlife – 1

Doug Peacock: Grizzly Years: In Search of American Wilderness, 158 pages.

Please follow and like us:
error3
fb-share-icon20
Tweet 20
fb-share-icon20

6 thoughts on “Books I Am Currently Reading”

      1. The Red Monarch – Scenes from the life of Stalin (1979) by Yuri Krotkov. An often funny and entertaining book written by Krotkov, an ethnic Russian, born and raised in Georgia. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. It’s a short book and at times, funny as hell. Part fact (as when discussing Stalin or those he opposed like Trotsky), part imagination, i.e. a novel. Not boring. There’s more, but people shouldn’t babble on taking up Highbrow space.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)