Do the 2008 TBR challenge

Just wondering if we will do a 2009 TBR goal together? I’m feeling quite confident that I can do this in 09! Seriously, I have started reading for pleasure again in the last month or so and I am ready to do my list for 2009. Anyone else going to join me?

yes I read it yes
Ulysses yes I liked it
confused but yes, yes

Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

Ah, what a perfect ending to the books I’ve been reading all year. This was a spur of the moment read, but I’ve had the book for well over a year. An utterly enjoyable romp through an ingenious transreal ficton. Rucker conjures up characters and events so bizarre, and yet so tied into his explanations of infinite math and the gnarl of chaotic processes as well as discussions of what constitute human consciousness and human beingness. Wow!!! It was quite literally a psychedelic experience (driven only by my own neurotransmitters drifting to new places by the new connections being formed by the text).

Synchronistically enough, this book tied together multiple ideas from about half the other TBR books I’ve read this year. Certainly the most important ones. Now it’s time to get home and make up my list for 2009.

Fight Club: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk

The first rule of FIGHT CLUB is “Nobody talks about FIGHT CLUB.”

The second rule of FIGHT CLUB is “Nobody talks about FIGHT CLUB.”

(Let’s just say that while the movie and the book share a certain amount of common material, simply enjoying the movie is an insufficient reason for reading this book. If you’re a Palahniuk junkie then why haven’t you read this one yet? An excellent experience, but it required a long karmic shower.)

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

This is the third time I’ve attempted this book. This time I couldn’t put it down. The other times I couldn’t dig my way into it.

I’m not a real William Gibson fan. I don’t really enjoy his cyberpunk. But this book worked well for me. I didn’t want it to be over. It’s also probably the next to last book I’ll read this year. I’m digging into another book from last year’s list, Fight Club. It’s enjoyable enough that I wish I hadn’t already seen the movie several times.

Okay, it was not on the list I compiled early in the year but, you know what, it has been on my actual To Be Read List for a couple of years. Now that I have read it, I cannot imagine what took me so long. What a lovely, lyrical book. The kind of read where you don’t want to finish the book because then it will be over, if you know what I mean. The spell will be broken. Real life will return to center stage. I want to go back through the book now that I have finished and highlight some of the passages that made me say, “Oh, my, that was a lovely arrangement of words!” Definitely the best book I have read this year. Maybe in the last few years, though perhaps I should review what I have read before I make such a bold statement! :)

Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show by Geoffrey Nunberg

This book seems to have been read by the Obama campaign. Nunberg dissects the language games of the right and the counter games of the Democrats and finds that semantics cannot save the Democratic Party. Nunberg only briefly suggests that authoring a New Story about what it means to be American. Barack Obama won the election largely by telling an American Tale that most voters could identify with.

Mathematicians in Love, by Rudy Rucker

This was a wonderful and refreshing read. A psychedelic, gnarly interdimensional excursion through determinate, non-predictable math into parallel universes, politics, music, anarchy and just plain fun. But it’s well frosted with love, lust, loss, and union. In the end, it’s a life affirming adventure through mindspace we rarely traverse.

If you’ve read Rucker’s The Seashell, the Lifebox, and the Soul, many themes from that are played out in this story. If not, don’t worry. This book is a mind expanding adventure through love and chaos. Definitely sad to finish it.

If 3 hours sitting around in the hospital laboratory for my glucose tolerance test was not enough to get me to start reading the Fountainhead, nothing will be. I don’t want to read it, and I don’t have to! It’s not like I even own it – I don’t have stacks of unread books lying around, so my TBR books have all been from the library.

I’ve read 11 books that I’ve been meaning to read, and a number of other books in addition. I think that’s good enough.

I’m not going to get through 5 more TBR books and I don’t want to try. I’d rather make an attempt to get through my comics.

So there it is!