book obsession

Here is a list of all the books that I read this year. I read books by authors from 22 different countries: Russia, France, England, Germany, South Africa, Japan, India, USA, Austria, Persia, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, Columbia, Turkey, Iraq, Peru, Iran, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Hungary, and Chile. Last year I decided that I wanted to read more Latin American writers, and I definitely did so. My reading list has a strong gender bias: only 1/5th of these were written by women. Only about 2/7 were written before the 20th century.


The List
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Candide - Voltaire
Meditations on First Philosophy - Rene Descartes
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Master of Petersburg - J.M. Coetzee
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
Musui's Story - Katsu Kokichi
Fury - Salman Rushdie
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
Adventures in Missing the Point - Campolo/McLaren
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis - Sigmund Freud
A Very Short Introduction to Globalization - Manfred Steger
Runaway World - Anthony Giddens
The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam
First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Black Company - Glen Cook
The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler
Ceremony - Leslie Silko
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Sherman Alexie
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
Blindness - Jose Saramago
The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell -Jorge Amado
Diary of a Mad Old Man - Junichiro Tanizaki
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
City of Djinns - William Dalrymple
The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
The First Horseman - John Aberth
After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee
Epic of Gilgamesh
Arabian Nights
The War of the Saints - Jorge Amado
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words - Jay Rubin
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
If This Be Treason - Gregory Rabassa
Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins
Baghdad Burning - Riverbend
The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki
In Praise of the Stepmother - Mario Vargas Llosa
Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
Fantasia - Assia Djebar
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
The Book of Not - Tsitsi Dangarembga
Adam Bede - George Eliot
The Icarus Girl - Helen Oyeyemi
The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi
A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon - Jose Saramago


Top Ten Novels (no order)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano.
The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Blindness - Jose Saramago
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

This is a pretty unsurprising list, considering what I read. They weren't necessarily the ten best reading experiences, some of them are really frustrating/exhausting books to read (Savage Detectives, One Hundred Years, Black Book). But, this is probably close to the list that I would make in 5 years looking back. I wish that everyone in the world would read Brothers Karamazov. Another reflection: I read fatty books, fatty novels, but they're often the best books I read.

All in all, I think it was a good year for reading. I don't think there's anything on the list that I regret reading. Some of what I read just wasn't very good, but I still think it was worth reading for one purpose or another. Reading ambitions for the coming year: I want to read more non-fiction. Part of this is more reading on diseases and epidemics (the historical and societal side, not the biological side). I'd also like to read more academic theological writing, since most books on Christianity that I've read have been popular inspirational writings, or writing on spirituality and "Christian living." That's fine, but I want something more meaty. And, I want to read some good travel writing. I say that I want to read more philosophy, but I'm not sure how helpful it is to just dive in and read philosophical works, or how realistic it is. Specifically, I want to read more works on epistemology. And, finally, I want to read more linguistic theory.

On the fiction side, I want to keep up with reading Japanese and Latin American authors, as well as more 19th century literature and more American authors. Books that I'm either excited to read, planning to read, or wanting to read in the next year:

- 2666 - Roberto Bolano. I just finished reading The Savage Detectives, and wanted to keep reading his writing. Apparently 2666 is his masterpiece.
- Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian. I know some of my friends had trouble reading this, but I'd still like to give it a shot.
- Don DeLillo. I'll probably end up reading White Noise, and maybe Cosmopolis.
- All the Names - Jose Saramago. Like Rushdie, or Marquez, Saramago can be a really irritating writer. But, I keep going back to read more, so he's doing something right or I'm just dumb.
- The Unconsoled / When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro.
- Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado. Another irritating writer that I like to read.
-Dickens. I'm not sure which of his novels yet, but Oliver Twist is on my shelf, so that's a likely candidate, although this is another book that friends of mine have hated.
-N.T. Wright. I haven't read anything by him, and don't know what to read of his, but I want to read something.
- I am a Cat - Natsume Soseki. Worth it for the title alone.
- The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie.

We'll see what happens.

tsunami

Today is the 4th anniversary of the south-east asian tsunami. This is something I realized early after waking up this morning, and I remember thinking about it last year as well (and probably the year before that, as well). What's strange for me isn't necessarily that most people have "forgotten" or that they just don't remember. The strange part is that the tsunami, for me, is the most important historical event of my lifetime, more important to me than 9/11, or hurricane katrina, the war in iraq, the election of a black president, darfur, etc. I'm not making claims about its historical importance in relation to these other events, just its importance to me. But the tsunami is much more haunting to me and has much more impact than these other events. I don't even understand why I feel this way, or I why I feel so strongly about it, but I do. One year from now, I want to be in Phuket attending the tsunami memorials, but we'll see if that happens. In large part, I would just like to talk to the people who were there when it came.

undeworld

I like to know what people do. What their work is, how their work works, what they do there, how things run. I'm excited for more of my friends to graduate and get jobs so that I can talk to them about what they do and how it works, what it requires of them, and what they think of all of that. Which is partially why I feel drawn to the underworld, I'm curious about what goes on and how things work.

christmas

Well, I haven't bought or made a single Christmas present for anyone so far this year. Several years back I would say that I wasn't getting presents for people because I would rather get them something at a random point in the year that I knew they cared about rather than buying them junk that they'll never use. But I never actually did that.

This is my first SPU Christmas break that I didn't go back to Thailand. Also the first that I had no wisdom teeth pulled, no visits to a clinic or hospital. No motorbike. This will be the first Christmas in 11 years that I have been in the States. I miss Thailand a lot, especially seeing the Christmas pictures popping up on my friends' sites. I do not miss being one of the wise men in my church's sunday school production of the Christmas story.

I am eager to avoid Christmas events this year, especially church Christmas events. I just don't care about fighting for "the real meaning of Christmas." What I want is to hear the story of Jesus' birth and the events surrounding his birth without any reference to "the real meaning," or even the meaning, of Christmas. Incidentally, griping about consumerism is also old hat and isn't very productive. In that way, I am bored of Christmas.

clips

1. Lately I've wanted to walk around the city late at night. I'm not sure why. I often walk by houses, or other buildings, and wish that I could go inside and see what is there. I'm not interested in stealing anything or in actually doing this, I'm just curious.

2. I've thought for a long time that I am an elitist snob, and maybe I am, but lately I've noticed that I'm not as much of an elitist as many of my friends, and that a lot of times their elitism, their disregard of music or novels or people or food or activities or ideas bothers me. I am skeptical of elitism or of the desire and the attempt to be high class, even if most people would not say that's what they are trying to be. Some of it I just don't understand. Small example: recently I was at a desert theatre where nice deserts were being served. During this experience, I realized that a lot of nice deserts, fancy foods, are expensive, have smaller portions, are not necessarily more nutritious, and don't taste very good. This is when elitism fails me, when it doesn't result in anything that's actually better. Then again, other times I'm angry about the shit that I see other people reading, especially when this is all they read. I feel like I'm accepted in both worlds.

3. Over the past quarter my life has been pretty predictable. This isn't necessarily bad, since my life has been pretty determined by what I've chosen to do, but it feels more boring sometimes, or lonely.

4. I am supremely frustrated when people appeal to law for an ethical standard, or as an argument with someone about what is right or wrong: "Well..it's illegal [therefore wrong.]" Along with this is my frustration with those who want to return to origins, whether this is the original intent of American government ("Just follow the constitution") or the early church, or translation, or anything. It can be useful, but it really shouldn't determine the way we live now.

5. I am skeptical when I hear people talking about revivals, or the need to spiritually revive the church, or a city, or a country, a school, whatever. Once again, this is a question of returns, where merely returning to a previous (perhaps non-existent) state will guarantee future success or growth of some sort. Similarly, I don't want to be a child again. I don't think that childhood was the best time of my life or that I was a better person as a toddler then than I am now. I don't mean this in the total depravity, original sin sort of way. What I mean is that as a child I really didn't have to make moral decisions, or at least the choices that I have to navigate now are much more complicated and ambiguous than in childhood.

6. Ethical approaches to history are meaningless, or at least are no longer historical. What I mean is looking back on history and asking whether a choice that someone made was right or wrong. These questions are meaningless. It is useful, meaningful, to ask what the results of a decision were, but trying to decide whether one choice was right or wrong means pulling that decision outside of its historical context. Talking in that way is just nonsense.