The Ern of Life

Blue skies are callin'

Summer Lit

Here’s what I’ve read so far this summer. This page is mostly for my own eyes, because I need to write it down lest I forget, and obviously there will be repeats from the lit wish list as I read on, but c’est la vie.

  • Oscar Wao
  • An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  • The Shack by William P Young
  • Harry Potter, 1-5
  • America by Heart by Sarah Palin
  • Holes by Louis Sachar
  • Sideways Story from Wayside School by Louis Sachar (oh, yes, you could say I’ve branched a bit!)
  • Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
  • The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins
  • The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman
  • A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  • Digging to America by Anne Tyler
  • Watchmen by Allen Moore

Here’s what I’ve read starting senior year, in somewhat chronological order:

  • Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (thanks, anon. ;) )
  • The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatio by Yann Martel
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  • It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
  • The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (in prog)
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (in prog)
  • The Passage by Justin Cronin
  • On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  • The Tomb and Other Tales by H.P. Lovecraft (in prog)
  • Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (in prog)
  • Oedipus the King by Sophocles
  • Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
  • Antigone by Sophocles
  • Something Missing by Matthew Dicks
  • Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
  • Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
  • Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
  • The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
  • The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
  • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
  • V for Vendetta by Allen Moore
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Hamlet by Bill Shakespeare
  • Faithful Place by Tana French
  • In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
  • Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card
  • We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
  • How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
  • Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (at last!)
  • Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • The Known World by Edward Jones
  • Boomsday by Christopher Buckley (hated it)
  • Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (loved it)
  • Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliet (almost obligatory reading at this point)
  • Naked by David Sedaris (I keep thinking about bits of this book at random times during the day. Why.)
  • The Art of War by Sun Tzu (I didn’t have the sort of wildly flexible, symbolically-tolerant mind that could compare the battle fields of ancient China to modern day living so I’m not sure I absorbed every lesson. But that stuff about spies was high quality. Wink.)
  • Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi (500 pages of cliches; now I’ve got to form a coherent opinion about it for my four-page paper.)
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (for the umpteenth time; wept bitterly at the ending)
  • Nine Stories by JD Salinger (Especially loved the last one; precocious children that wind up killed are my favorite although not for the reason you might think)
  • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Great as always)
  • The Dogs of Babylon by Carolyn Parkhurst (read it so quickly; felt like I was absorbing all the events, but none of the emotions, of the book, almost like I was reading a summary of a summary of the book instead of the real thing)


Here’s what I will read.