I have a long, long, long list of books to read.
Any bookshelf is the
candy store to my kid. Hours after entering a bookstore I hobble over to the register under a mountain of books. As I wait in line I weed books out of my stack willy-nilly because I can’t afford to buy them all. (To say nothing of the fact that I do not have time to read them all.) Needless to say I still leave the store with too many books to read. I zip through them and do not take the time to think about them such is my hurry to start the next. I am dissatisfied. I dream of literature classes long gone and the book clubs I would lead if I were a stay-at-home mom in the 1950’s.
I come across a NY Times article:
What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? . Another list* of books for me to read! But these, these books are not
candy, these novels are
rich chocolate cakes to be lingered over and mulled upon. Who will help me? Some of my favorite bibliophiles are hundreds of miles away?
We e-mail. We want to read Underworld. We create this: a book-club-blog.
*THE LIST
Winner:
Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
Runners-Up: Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (1985)
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, John Updike (1995)
American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
Also Multiple Votes: A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson (1980)
Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin (1983)
White Noise, Don DeLillo (1985)
The Counterlife, Philip Roth (1986)
Libra, Don DeLillo (1988)
Where I'm Calling From, Raymond Carver (1988)
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
Mating, Norman Rush (1991)
Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
Operation Shylock, Philip Roth (1993)
Independence Day,Richard Ford (1995)
Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth(1995)
Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy (1999)
The Human Stain, Philip Roth (2000)
The Known World, Edward P. Jones (2003)
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth (2004)
