read more books for fun

Been reading a bunch more in the last several months: Action Philosophers! Volume 1, Philosophers Without Gods, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, Adventures in the Screen Trade, The Anansi Boys. Currently my wife and I are beginning to look at the Brussat’s Spiritual Literacy, and I’m reading The Film Club.

I’ve just recently finally seen all three of the original Star Wars movies. What does that have to do with this goal? I also saw a great documentary about the making of Star Wars, and George Lucas talked about being inspired by the books of Joseph Campbell. Comparing mythologies (and religions and the human experience) really interests me, so I’ve started reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’m out of school so no one assigned it, it’s just for fun.

White Noise, Don DeLillo
White Teeth, Zadie Smith

currently working on:
Theory of Religion, Georges Bataille
The Face of Another, Kobo Abe

(Should I make the transition over to All Consuming?)

3. Saving Beauty from the Beast: How to Protect Your Daughter from an Unhealthy Relationship, by Vicki Crompton and Ellen Kessner (2003). I cried on almost every page.

2. Nickel and Dimed: on (not) getting by in American by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001). It was good. Gave me insight not only into the working poor of America but my own choices of employment in life. I have worked my fair share of minimum wage jobs and I know some of the coping mechanism that she reports. Life can really be tough if not impossible when you are forced to live paycheck to paycheck. She manages to have a constant fight for survival and humanity in all of the women’s voices. and even many times that make me chuckle or laugh outright. while always incorportaing the important stats in edible sizes. Wonderful. for a middle class audience.

1. Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir (2002) It’s so good. This woman has lived a prisoner for all of her life, either as the adopted daughter under the king rarely allowed outside the palace walls or in a real prison with her birth mother and siblings. She comments upon human nature, survival tactics and so much more. Great story line. too. I can’t wait to finish it!

and found it more beautiful than the first time I’d read it. It’s one of the best book recommendations I’ve ever gotten, I think. I’d like to reread The Corrections next, I wonder if I will have time while I’m home?

I am getting excited about my summer reading list! But I’m also looking forward to finding other things to read. I want to go into next year with a really solid social theory background. I don’t know that that’s something I can do on my own, though. But you know what? It doesn’t matter – summer is great because I’ll have as much free time as I want!

I need to remember to find the Chip Kidd book somewhere. Maybe I should start using “All Consuming.”

I want to read more social and aesthetic theory, as well as more modernist fiction.

So far this is what I’m thinking of reading:
Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Henry Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
plus lots of Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov, etc.

I can’t wait for summer! And free time! I made a list of all of the things that I want to do this summer that makes me really happy every time I look at it.

Charles Bukowski, Love Is A Dog From Hell
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

just finished:The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

in progress:Love is a Dog from Hell, Charles Bukowski

on hold:Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, ed. Boris Fishman
The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Charlotte Cotton
Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky
Erotism, Georges Bataille

I should start using my reading journal again.