I don't recall who organized this particular list-making deal, but you can get the details over at Burgers's blog. He and I were talking about it Friday night; I was over at his house for a poker game. He was not playing in the game -- Pere de Burgers was hosting -- but Burgers occasionally emerged to count up the chips and see if they'd have to move to cheaper quarters any time soon and to run his hands over the 50" HDTV (whoa!) and to surreptitously munch a few of the proverbial salty snack treats one finds at card games. Anyhow, Burgers has already had a leg up on the Morrison, having taken a course on her, and is set for the Roths in an upcoming course. My issue with the list was not any complaint about its content, as they all look fine to me, but my misery over having read so few of them. I've bought almost all of them. You can rummage around the back corners of the chez and find just about every decent author ever (unless Kt has laid claim to them and smuggled them out to Brooklyn), but buying a book and reading it are two different things. And it's not that I shy from quality or literary heft; I've paid my English major dues and I still feel that there may be another final any day now and I'm still not quite sure about the whiteness of the whale and I'm willing to keep studying, but for some reason, when the time comes to read something serious of the fiction persuasion, I do tend to go old and I really do tend to worry about the whiteness of the whale. It might be because I have so little time to read serious fiction (my brain is scrambled at the end of my workday of reading popular fiction) that I want a sure bet, and if a book has been around since the Buchanan administration, I figure it's probably got something going for it, guaranteed, while these whippersnapper books by Roth and Morrison and DeLillo and the like haven't gotten moldy enough yet to make the cut. But I will get to them. As a matter of fact, I had been looking for some travel reading, and figured it might very well be Morrison time, and I know I've got Beloved around here somewhere, not to mention an omnibus of three of her novels with Song of Solomon, but I'll be damned if I could find it. I looked everywhere. On the bright side, I did turn up a Steven Pinker book I didn't remember acquiring, so that's a good thing. But no Morrison. Come on out with your hands up! I know you're in there!
My biggest reading problem is choosing something for vacation, especially if there's an airplane involved. You don't want to carry more books than absolutely necessary, because traveling is already a weight-lifting contest. Of course, a single new Harry Potter will fill the bill and that's the end of that, but I used up the new Harry going to London. Which means finding something for the upcoming trip, the fewest books for the longest duration. As I said, I read popular fiction all the time, and while that certainly works on a plane, it doesn't necessarily work on a train, and I've had enough during the day and hardly feel like a busman's holiday. So I need something with some meat. I'm torn now between a couple of Dickens (a favorite author) and a Peter Bogdanovich movie book, with a leaning toward the movie book. It's obviously not fiction, but I like reading Bogdanovich and it's just the right mix of heft and airiness. Then again, I always like when Esther gets the pox, and Copperfield is one of my absolute favorites, so it could be one of them (I've bought new editions of both, with nice readable type for these tired old eyes). Then again, if Beloved turns up, I could take a chance... I'll probably throw in a Wodehouse too, as travel insurance. If you finish what you're reading, or it comes a cropper, it's nice to know there's a Plum in the suitcase to cover the emergency.
If I'm real lucky, I'll sleep on the plane going over, and have decent movies to watch on the plane coming back. A decent plane movie is something you wouldn't otherwise watch but you wouldn't mind sitting through; it's hardly the best viewing situation, so you don't want to waste a good film on that lo-res little box on the back of the seat in front of you. Coming back from London I watched Wedding Crashers and a Inspector Morse mystery -- perfect plane fodder. I was happy I hadn't paid money for WC (discounting the cost of the plane tix) but it did have a few laughs, and I was happy I caught up on the Morse. What more could you ask for?
On a totally different note: worst product placement in history. My first nomination: Sony Playstation and X-Men III. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. You've barely gotten over the Dell monitor plug (although you've forgiven the Fox Network News as obvious synergy) and then you're in the airplane... I mean, really!
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