Recommended Reading

In looking at people's Mighty Life Lists, it seems to be a common desire to read more books, such as a goal to read 12 books in a year, finish certain book lists, etc. I though it might be interesting to share some of the books I've loved and the ones currently catching my interest. Also, after writing down the books I've read in 2012 (32) and 2013 (38), I seem to read in phases. (Mostly in May and July, weird?)

Here are the reads that have most recently drawn my attention...

1. The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion) – "I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of a response. I read something in the paper that I would normally have read to him. I notice some change in the neighborhood that would interest him: Ralph Lauren has expanded into more space between Seventy-first and Seventy-second Streets, say, or the empty space where the the Madison Avenue Bookshop used to be has finally been leased. I recall coming in from Central Park one morning in mid-August with urgent news to report: the deep summer green has faded overnight frm the trees, the season is already changing. We need to make a plan for the fall, I remember thinking. We need to decide where we want to be at Thanksgiving, Christmas, the end of the year."

2. Ethan Hawke AMA on Reddit – coffeeandme: I love all of your movies Ethan!! What's your favorite place to visit? Ethan Hawke: You know, we set the opening of BEFORE SUNSET in a bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare And Company, and I think that would have to go down as my favorite place to visit. It's right there on the Seine overlooking Notre Dame and has a long history of some of the great minds in literature passing through the doors, and there's a feel there that is unlike any other place I've ever been.

3. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) – “Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”

4. The Marriage Plot: A Novel (Jeffrey Eugenides) – "Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine's jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of each other. In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable."

If you have any recommendations, I'd love to hear them, too.

(inspired via Elephantine)