100 Books

I was watching the news a few minutes ago and it seems the average Mexican reads 2.9 books a year. Ouch.

It reminds me of something– a few weeks ago, I was looking at the Facebook profile of one of my classmates from high school. Nobody really liked her, because she wasn't nice and she sucked up to all the teachers at the expense of the rest of the class. She worked hard to get good grades, but she wasn't one to enjoy knowledge. Just good grades.

ANYWAYZ. In her profile she'd listed about fifteen "favorite books". Cien Años de Soledad, Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, El Amor en los Tiempos de Cólera, María, ... Hmm. That's odd, those are ALL THE BOOKS THEY MADE US READ IN HIGH SCHOOL. And you're not fooling anyone, María is really crappy. Seriously, hardly anyone actually read the whole thing (I did, it sucked. Waste of time). I'll bet my eyelashes that she just listed every books she's read in the past ten years, and that those books happened to be obligatory.

So, the whole Facebook-book fiasco coupled with the thingy on the news have spurred me to try to raise the national average by about 0.000000001 books per capita. Not that it will have any effect on the survey– not so much because it's such a small amount, but because they've never included me in their little survey (party poopers!). Oh, unless they're basing their data on that which is collected from book fairs, which they shouldn't.

So I've cobbled together a list of books I want to (re)read this year. Not Anna Karenina or similar paper bricks, just something nice and doable. Also, I'm going to start the counter at zero as of today. I've finished some books this year, but I'm not quite sure which ones were in January and which were last December. Better to start fresh.

This is going to be a lovely mash-up of really good, good, okay and crappy books.

1. Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)
2. One of the many Lord Peter Wimsey novels (Dorothy L. Sayers)
3. Chocky (John Wyndham)
4. Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)
5. Something by Dick Francis.
6. Something by Jane Austen
7. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
8. Prince of Foxes (Samuel Shellabarger)
9. Seeing Voices (Oliver Sacks)
10. The Third Chimpanzee (Jared Diamond)
11. Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)
12. Something by Ursula K. LeGuin

I've started Three Men in A Boat about five times, and each time I absolutely love it, but then slowly grind to a halt when Jerome gets to the point where he rambles about the scenery and the kings of years gone by more than he talks about George getting lost in a maze, or Harris trying to sing a comic song and failing miserably. But this time I'm further in than I'd ever been before, and I'm determined to finish it.

It's clicked in my mind, now– in Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of The Dog, there's all these jokes about Victorian people having sudden fits of poetic-ness. I'd never fully understood just how severe they were.

And as for #12 on the list, I have read one Ursula K. LeGuin's books– I picked up The Word for World is Forest last year, and enjoyed it very much. I'm liking science fiction quite a bit, but I'm very under-read in it (actually, I'm under-read in general).

Speaking of science fiction, I never got to finish Ender's Game. My sister brought it with her during her visit last summer, and I got really into it, but she left with it when I was maybe 30 pages from the end. Fruuuuustrating. If I can wheedle my Mom into ordering a copy, I'll add that to my list and re-read it. Ditto Kurt Vonnegut; I read Slaughterhouse Five last year and it was amazing, so I'd like to read more of his.

Oops. I've really rambled on. Ah well. This list– the blog, actually– is for myself (in the future, you know. In case I bonk my head and have amnesia, or if I make it to old age but can't remember what my life was like back in the day).