Reading

So I haven't felt like doing much planning lately. Honestly, I'm getting a bit antsy because I want to start writing the damn thing. Also, I've been given some new responsibility at work, so I've been a bit busier than expected during the day.

But no matter. I am still going to write.

Meanwhile, I've been reading a whole lot. Since I graduated college earlier this year, my love of reading has really returned. I was really burned out on very dense literary writing and scholarly writing by the end of school. It's been so wonderful to get back into reading for pleasure, which I had done very little of during my college years. In fact, here are books I remember reading during college (many of them on summer and winter vacation):

• Various Harry Potter books
• A Series of Unfortunate Events and related books
• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
• Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
• The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
• Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler
• Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
• America: The Book by Jon Stewart et. al.
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire
• Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
  
• About a gazillion other books that I started but never finished

I also reread some books I already liked, like 1984, but really, with at least a novel a week of assigned reading, it was all I could do to stay only slightly behind in my coursework.

Now here's what I've read in the five months since I graduated:

• The entire Harry Potter series (the 6th and 7th books twice)
• The entire A Series of Unfortunate Events series (plus a couple of related titles)
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime by Mark Haddon
• Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
• Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
• Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
• Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith
• Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith
• Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisburger

It feels great to be devouring books again. It makes me very excited to try to write one.

(By the way, the most amazing books on that list were coincidentally the ones by Jonathans: Lethem, Safran Foer, and Franzen. The most disappointing was The Devil Wears Prada.)

(Okay, my real favorite is Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler, but those were the most amazing first-time reads.)