keylime1006

I have always been a physics buff- it is my best class in school, I read about it, and in an ideal world I’d work in physics. However, quantum mechanics baffles me. Reading two sentences of Feynman (reportedly only Feynman and God understood the subject) leaves me baffled and bewildered. So, to start off with, I am taking a course “Saturday Morning Physics” at Fermilab and reading “Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell.” We’ll see where everything goes from there…

I’ve already made headway into my list! I read Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” and David Eggers “What is the What” Both were books that I simply could not put down! “Things Fall Apart” was not a long book, but it was gripping and truly brought the reader into the story. The ending of the book left me with such strong feelings and conveyed a deeply powerful message- two things that many readers hope for after they’ve finished a novel. “What is the What” was absolutely fantastic. It was about the life of one of the “Lost Boys,” a refugee from the Sudanese Civil War living in the United States- telling his story, while also showing the struggle of his new life in America. I had also read “A Long Way Gone” which was along the same vein (about the Lost Boys) and released around the same time. However, I found “What is the What” to be far more meaningful and eye-opening to the ongoing struggle of those people that escaped the war- seeing the way they still struggle and suffer in America. I recommend both books! Currently I’m wading through “Independent People”... This woeful tale of an Icelandic Sheepfarmer has excellent writing but is SLOW READING

I’m that person that always wishes they read more than they actually did, so this summer I’m going to make a concerted effort to take a nice chunk out of this list. If anyone has any suggestions please add some!!

Achebe, Chinua- Things Fall Apart
Alvarez, Julia- How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Anaya, Rudolfo- Bless me, Ultima
Atwood, Margaret- The Handmaid’s Tale
Austen, Jane- Sense and Sensibility
de Balzac, Honore- Lost Illusions
de Balzac, Honore- Cousin Bette
Bronte, Charlotte- Jane Eyre
Lord Byron- Selected Poems
Burgess, Anthony- A Clockwork Orange
Camus, Albert- The Stranger
Clarke, Susanna- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Clavell, James- Shogun
Dickens, Charles- Bleak House
Dostoevsky, Fyodor- The Idiot
Dreiser, Theodore- An American Tragedy
Eggers, David- What is the What
Eliot, George- Middlemarch
Eliot, T.S.- The Waste Land
Faulkner, William- The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald, Scott- This Side of Paradise
Fowles, John- The Collector
Gogol, Nikolai- The Overcoat and other stories
Greene, Brian- The Elegant Universe
Hosseini, Khaled- The Kite Runner
Huxley, Aldous- Brave New World
Isaacson, Walter- Einstein
Irving, John- The World According to Garp
Ishiguro, Kazuo- Remains of the Day
Ishiguro, Kazuo- Never Let Me Go
James, Henry- The Portrait of a Lady
Joyce, James- Ulysses
Kerouac, Jack- On The Road
Kesey, Ken- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Kingsolver, Barbara- The Poisonwood Bible
Lahiri, Jhumpa- The Interpreter of Maladies
Laxness, Halldór- Independent People
Mahfouz, Naguib- The Cairo Trilogy
Márquez, Gabriel García- 100 Years of Solitude
McCourt, Frank- Angela’s Ashes
Miller, Arthur- Death of a Salesman
Nabokov, Vladimir- Lolita
O’Neil, Eugene- The Iceman Cometh
Orwell, George- Burmese Days
Rushdie, Salman- The Satanic Verses
Russo, Richard- Empire Falls
Stowe, Harriet Beecher- Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Steinbeck, John- Grapes of Wrath
Tennyson, Alfred- Maud
Tolstoy, Leo- War and Peace
Tolstoy, Leo- Anna Karenina
Updike, John- Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux
Virgil- The Aeneid
Walker, Alice- The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith- The House of Mirth
Wilde, Oscar- The Picture of Dorian Gray
Woolf, Virginia- Mrs. Dalloway
Zamyatinm, Yevgeny- We
Zee, A.- Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell