Kudos, Garfunkel

Being a fan of reading lists, and always trying to read more and get all the classics under my belt, I have to give Art Garfunkel, yes him, some credit. According to this New Yorker article, Garfunkel has been keeping a list of the books he's read since 1968. 1,023 books.

So, if you're looking for a reading list to last the next fourty years, here it is.

Reading List 2008

I managed to read only twenty books last year, which is just a little depressing. I could blame the slow pace on spending most of the summer reading Ulysses, but either way it demonstrates that I'm not spending nearly enough time reading. Given that my bookshelves are filled with books still waiting to be read, and each year new books come out or there are other books that I learn about and want to read, I'd better pick up the pace.

I figured that the best way to to approach reading this year was to give myself a list. So this is the list:

Ward No. 6 and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
High Lonesome: Stories - Joyce Carol Oates
Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
All Aunt Hagar's Children - Edward P. Jones
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Pushcart Prize 2007
Light in August - William Faulkner
Best American Short Stories 2007
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Lives of Rocks: Stories - Rick Bass
A Sport and a Pasttime - James Salter
Stories of John Cheever
Absalom Absalom - William Faulkner
Best New American Voices 2007
Death of Sweet Mister - Daniel Woodrell
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Gilead - Marilyn Robinson
Rabbit Run - John Updike
Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenidies
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Do With Me What You Will - Joyce Carol Oates
The Idiot - Doestoyevsky
Collected Stories - Richard Yates
Aloft - Chang Rae Lee
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Mercury - Anna Kavan
The Liars Club - Mary Carr

It is an ambitious list at thirty titles, with only a couple of epic titles (Garcia Marquez). The emphasis this year is on short stories, including the year's best of collections and collections by some masters. And Faulkner, McCarthy, and Oates each get two slots because I've got some catching up to do on their back catalog.

So, enough blogging, I've got reading to do.

The New Year - The Old Project

I guess it's time to get back at it. And maybe it's time I remark on the progress of my "project." While at this stage of the work, I'm more likely to call it a novel, what it is intended to become, but it remains only a manuscript until it is published as a novel.

I had hoped to be done with the second draft now and I'm probably over half-way to that, but I feel like there is much more to do. There are more chapters to be written. Certain characters got short shrift in the first draft and they really deserve more pages. And I don't think I can be positive about the ending until I see how all the pieces come together. More may be necessary there as well.

The story lines of most of the characters all come to a climax at one point and it's hard to get it all done for them in that moment, at a climactic pace. I would like it to all be apparent in those pivotal chapters what is happening to them, what changes are happening, what decisions are being made, what courses are being altered. And I would like to do it all without chapters of denouement. I fear over-telling in that. It should also be satisfying to the reader, and I know much of the satisfaction in reading a novel comes from learning the outcome, how things have turned out for the main characters. Having an ensemble, like I do, makes it difficult. I'm reluctant to give them each a chapter post-climax so that we know what's happened. I don't think I can really get that right until the rest of it comes together. While I know that much work lays ahead of me, I remain anxious to get ahead, to write new things.