Reading list 2009

I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall. I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends. I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations. Generally one of these false coalitions died after a day or a day and a half, but this one had lasted more than a year. Later on one of them got hurt when we were burglarizing a pharmacy , and the other two of us dropped him bleeding at the back entrance of the hospital and he was arrested and all the bonds were dissolved. We bailed him out later, and still later all the charges against him were dropped, but we'd torn open our chests and shown him our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that.

-Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

My favorite thing about reading a book is getting a glimpse of unexpected truth. That is to say a piece of information or knowledge never occurred to me before, but then some passage provides a flash of insight. Maybe this can happen in other media as well, but I get it most reading post-modern fiction, a genre I have been into as of late. Specifically DeLillo. I recently tried to remember all the books I'd read in the past year, and list them.

The Macrophenomenal Pro-Basketball Almanac
Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Cosmopolis by Don Delillo
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut


Yeah, so that's a pretty self-indulgent post, and not as many books as I thought. Oh well.