Reading list for the summer (and beyond).

Following on from my last post about the stack of grubby second-hand books...
Beware! My list may sound a wee bit pretentious. The reason for this is that I'm far more inclined to put the highbrow books on the long finger. The last five books I finished were:

• John Perkins - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
• Jonathan Coe - Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
• Asne Seierstad - With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia
• Bertrand Russell - Sceptical Essays
• Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

OK, not exactly a collection of popular fiction. I stand indicted of middle-brow tastes at the least. What can I say? When I want pure entertainment, I hit the town, go to the cinema, watch TV, scream at a football match, or listen to music. I still find books fun. For instance, that biography of B.S. Johnson was addictive. Best book I've read in ages. Even better: I have it in hardback. :)

Currently, I'm dipping in and out of, or juggling, a small cohort of books:

• Tacitus - The Annals and The Histories
• Gore Vidal - United States: Essays 1952-1992
• H.J. Blackham - Six Existentialist Thinkers
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Christopher Hitchens - Love, Poverty & War: Journeys and Essays
• Baylis & Smith - The Globalization of World Politics (a textbook: dull but necessary)
• Franz Kafka - The Complete Novels
• P.J. O'Rourke - Holidays in Hell
• Hamilton, Jay & Madison - The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States

Meanwhile, a fair few books haven't been started, or were abandoned half-way through. Among these, my priorities are:

• Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma
• Garrison Keillor - We Are Still Married
• Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness & Other Stories
• Marcel Proust - The Way By Swann's
• Byron - Selected Poetry of Lord Byron
• Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey
• Norman Porter - Rethinking Unionism
• Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
• Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilization

I would tell you about the books on my wish-list, but I think I'd lose my last few readers. Even if they're far more contemporary than the set you've just waded through! Masochists can click here for a look. Don't worry, I'm not fishing for gifts. I haven't added a mailing address or anything! ;)

A much shorter quiz.

The last one of these I'll post for a while, I promise. :)

Tell me about your favourite...

Book: Jack Kerouac's On the Road weakly scrapes home. I don't have a favourite book, really. I like the sheer adventure, the jazzy rhythms of the prose, and the sense that these characters are pioneers - muddled, confused and lost pioneers - ploughing a new and risky furrow. It's not the greatest book ever, but it stirred my sense of adventure and inspired me to travel, and for that I'll always cherish my grey paperback.

Album: The Smiths' The Queen is Dead. I know: hardly a curve ball selection. Never mind that it's one of the seminal records of indie; what I care about is its relation to me. I'm not a permanent misanthrope by any means, but I certainly identify with Morrissey in so many of his songs. He doesn't just express his sadness and alienation in the romantic spirit - he does it with wit. "I Know It's Over" and "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" are inimitable. If you've never had a moment where those songs echoed your very essence, then you've lived a charmed life.

Song: This is far more transient than the album choice. Recently, I've had a crush on Bjork's "Hyper-ballad". I'm not entirely sure why. I understand the song and what it's expressing, but I haven't experienced that. I think it's refracting through my own life to produce a strange, unforeseen yet heartfelt interpretation.

Film: Tough, because there's no film I've watched more than ten times. Very few over three even. Right now, I'll go for Amelie, simply because it's a delight of a movie.

Place: San Francisco. Closer to home, the Iveagh Gardens off Harcourt Street are peaceful, relatively unknown, and lovely. More generally, bed, but anywhere with my favourite people will keep me cheery.

Person: I decline to answer. I do have a definite group of favourite people, from whom I could probably pick one right now. But I won't. Suffice to say that the winner is someone I trust completely, who makes me giggle at the silliest things, who laughs at and humours my woeful puns and one-liners, who's smart and challenging (and pulls me up when I'm not), shares a goody set of my interests, and whose very appearance makes me smile, because I love their company so. Note too that each person on the shortlist ticks most, maybe even all, of those boxes.

Moment: I'm not sure. Certain marvellous moments spring to mind - those brief occasions you wish you could enjoy forever. When nothing else seemed to matter, nor did it seem like anything else ever would. A close runner-up would have to be gliding through a hamlet in Virginia. On a sweaty, starry July night, at 2am in a dark and touching-silent carriage, the air-conditioning set to shiver, I leaned on the window, enraptured, drinking with my eyes the porches of cheap wooden homes, just metres away, unshielded from the track. Laundry hung and toys lay strewn. Lights glowed softly on the porches and through some windows. In warm butter a couple in silhouette embraced, dead to the passing voyeur, yet so bewitchingly vital to him.

By my bedside this week.

My usual reading habit is to digest a single novel at a time. However, most of my latest acquisitions haven't been novels. So in addition to (as diversion from?) my academic work, I'm dipping into four books on the go.

Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty & War - Journeys and Essays
Lord Byron, Selected Poetry of Lord Byron
Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also, I finished Aldous Huxley's Brave New World last night. By coincidence, I discovered that one of the pieces in the Hitchens collection is a foreword he wrote... to an edition of that very book!

I like this new mode of reading. I enjoy essays immensely - as long as they have at least a mild literary bent. Economic and philosophical essays intrigue me also, but they require so much more effort; 'lucid and clear' being a dictum seldom heeded. They need to be studied, not read in bed. Admittedly, any good essay should be examined as well as read, but it's nice to enjoy a first (or subsequent) reading, isn't it?

There's some superb literature in the forementioned books. All come highly recommended! If I was to pick a favourite so far, it would be the Fitzgerald collection, but I haven't read a majority of any of the books. Byron's poetry is masterful, but it requires dedication to read through just a single canto; really, you lose by taking a canto in stages. I owe Hitchens and Russell (of all people!) the honour of a more attentive read. Some of Hitchens' short tales recall a more detached Hunter S. Thompson. Witty and inspired! (To be fair, wit is nine-tenths inspiration.)

I want to know... your literary crushes.

I've finally found the time and the temperament to write this post. A couple of weeks back, I read an article on Slate.com called "My First Literary Crush". Essentially, two dozen writers and 'great thinkers' (tongue-in-cheek, surely?!) answered the question "What's the most influential book you read in college?". And I gave thanks - it wasn't universally pretentious! Just kidding. I've read and relished many pretentious books.

So, I'm going to pose a similar challenge to all of you.

Tell me about a book that influenced you; preferably (but not necessarily) in your college years. I'm setting your 18th birthday as an arbitrary cut-off. I don't want to hear about books that stunned you as a child or teenager - regardless of how good they might be. I want to know about a book that blew your mature, adult mind the first time you read it. We all have at least one. So leave a comment! Tell me the book, a little about it, and give a little story if you want about what it meant to you. Maybe it was the first time you read your favourite author - who really did become your literary crush!

I'll start the ball rolling.

I could pick any of half a dozen books, but I'm going to go with Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was the end of my second year in college, and my brain had been numbed by interminable tracts of philosophy. Sure, some of them had blown my mind - and changed my world-view - but none of them had truly excited me.

Reading On the Road wasn't just a breath of fresh air; it was a giddy sugar-rush of euphoria. The jazzy rhythms of the prose and the sheer thrill of the story stirred my soul. It inspired me to travel, to broaden my then-narrow horizons, to drink up every experience I came across. OK, I was moving in that direction anyway, but this novel lit the afterburners. It set in my mind the desire to explore the US - not to relive the book, but to live my own adventure, to know myself and the world through travel, not via books (!) and TV or the vicarious experiences of others.

A couple of months later, I stayed on alone after a weekend with friends in Paris. Nothing major: I only stayed a few extra days (surviving on wired money), but it was the first time I'd been alone in a foreign land. The independence, the self-reliance, the freedom was dazzling and terrifying. Ever since those days, I've lusted after that freedom. So, in the summer just gone, I finally went on my own little adventure across America. And there, immersed in the deliriously epic milieu that is America, I finally grasped 'the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being'.

But this post isn't about me - it's about you and your books. Comment away! Especially those of you who've never commented before! :)