Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Books to reread

It turns out that one of the books that is quickly approaching from my TBR pile is MacLennan's Two Solitudes.  I don't recall this at all, but apparently I did read this, perhaps in the late 90s.

There are a great many books I've read that surely deserve rereading, but I feel I do not have time to do so.  But if that is the case, then why am I hanging onto so many books?  And paying to move them again and again??  I suppose I do have some vague sense that my children will start reading serious literary fiction in their late teens, which is exactly what happened for me.  But if that is not the case, then I will need to do a serious purge.  If there is another big move (and hopefully that will not be the case), I think the academic books will have to go.

As far as books that I remember reading twice, it is a relatively short list (I'm not counting poetry or plays and am not worrying overmuch about short story collections or SF for that matter):

M. Atwood Cat's Eye
Paul Auster New York Trilogy (City of Glass for sure and probably the whole enchilada)
Djuna Barnes Nightwood
Barthelme The Dead Father
Bellow Dangling Man
Bellow Seize the Day
Borges Ficciones
Borges A Personal Anthology
Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (and a third time in 2021!)
Calvino Invisible Cities
Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Lookingglass
Conrad Heart of Darkness/Secret Sharer
Coover Pinocchio in Venice
Dickens A Christmas Carol
Dickens Pickwick Papers
Dostoevsky Notes From Underground
Ellison Invisible Man
Faulkner Absalom, Absalom
Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
Findley Headhunter
Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
G. Greene Travels With My Aunt
Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
Joyce Ulysses
Kafka Amerika
Kafka The Trial
Kafka The Castle
Kroetsch The Studhorse Man
Kurkov Death and the Penguin
Lamming In the Castle of My Skin
Leacock Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town
MacLennan Two Solitudes
MacLennan The Watch That Ends the Night
Melville Moby Dick
Narayan Mr. Sampath: the Printer of Malgudi
Katherine Anne Porter Ship of Fools
Powers Morte D'Urban
Rushdie Midnight's Children
Rushdie The Satanic Verses
Tayeb Salih Season of Migration to the North
Swift Gulliver's Travels
Toole A Confederacy of Dunces
Turgenev Fathers and Sons
V. Woolf Jacob's Room
Zelazny Roadmarks

It does seem that being on the short side increases the odds I'll try to reread a particular book.

It's definitely a longer list of books that I think I will probably get around to reading a second time (which is a very small subset of books that deserve a second or third reading, but I don't want to expand this too much).  These are the ones I'll make a real effort to reread, though I notice that only Madison Smartt Bell's Waiting for the End of the World has actually made it onto a TBR list as of yet, though I just added Mrs. Dalloway to the very end.  (I am expecting to start adding Barbara Pym and Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers to the list soon, but probably won't get to them until 2016 at the earliest.)

Martin Amis London Fields
Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman
Austen Sense and Sensibility 
Donald Barthelme Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme Forty Stories
Madison Smartt Bell Waiting for the End of the World
Bellow The Adventures of Augie March*
Bellow The Dean's December
George Bowering Burning Water
Bronte Wuthering Heights
Cervantes Don Quixote
Chaucer Canterbury Tales
Cheever The Wapshot Chronicle (not read originally under conducive circumstances)
Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy (& there is a reasonable chance that I will tackle the Cornish and Salterton trilogies again some day)
Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers
Don DeLillo White Noise
P.K. Dick The Man in the High Castle (& possibly Flow My Tears/Do Androids Dream...)
Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Stuart Dybek The Coast of Chicago
William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
Timothy Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage
Carlos Fuentes Christopher Unborn
Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Garcia Marquez In Evil Hour
Garcia Marquez The Autumn of the Patriarch
Garcia Marquez Love In the Time of Cholera
Garcia Marquez No One Writes to the Colonel
Greene The Quiet American
Greene Monsignor Quixote
James Joyce Dubliners
James Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce Ulysses (yes, a third go-round)
Kafka Complete Short Stories
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible (while I would like to get through this again, it is probably the least likely of all of them)
George Lamming The Emigrants
Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing The Diaries of Jane Somers
MacLennan The Watch That Ends the Night (I barely remember this at all, other than I did read it)
Mahfouz Midaq Alley
Melville The Confidence Man
Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison Sula
James Morrow Towing Jehovah (and possibly This is the Way the World Ends)
V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas
Flann O'Brien At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman
Tim O'Brien Going After Cacciato
Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried
Ovid Metamorphoses
Barbara Pym (pretty much all her novels)
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow (and probably V as well for good measure)
Rushdie Shame
Slesinger The Unpossessed
Steinbeck Cannery Row  
Anthony Trollope The Palliser novels (this may be just a pipe dream -- I definitely need to read The Chronicles of Barsetshire first!)
Vanderhaege My Present Age
Vargas Llosa The Green House
Vargas Llosa Conversation in a Cathedral
V. Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
V. Woolf To the Lighthouse

* I'm thinking more and more seriously about rereading Bellow's Herzog and Seize the Day.  It turns out that LOA has a volume with Herzog, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King.  It is so tempting to order it, but I wasn't all that taken with Henderson the Rain King.  Seize the Day is a short novel, and I could vaguely imagine reading it a third time, but when would I ever read Herzog more than once more?  So I will try to be mature about it and just borrow these from the library at the appropriate time. 

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