My summer reading list.
It's that time of the year again. I'm bored, jobless and now I've finished university I'm basically a useless lazy ass who sits around on the Internet and shoving my face with chocolate. It's also the time of the year when I always make myself a book list, you know that list of books you either should of read as graduate or that book you know is going to be adapted next year that you will hypothetically get through when its warm and free booze is available every weekend? Yeah, that list.
But as well as never getting through the list (Ulysses is twice as hard when hang over and sunburnt) I always have trouble even forming it. With books being around since the ancients it's safe to say there is a lot to read before I die even if discredit a lot of it (That unforgettably bad teen angst supernatural series) there is still very large 50+ list.
So this year I set myself a task: dwindle down my list and only focus on the stuff I wanted to read for ages or books I know that I won’t be able to put down. In all seriousness it was a difficult task. Choosing between something summery and easy and something difficult but oh so good? Hard. Choosing between the one thing that will complete your collection and that book all friends talk about? Also hard. But I did succeed (at least I think so) and here’s the result:
1. The Sun Also Rises/A Moveable Feast.
Basically I want to make my way through every Hemingway book as he is the one writer of that group (except Gertrude Stein) that I have yet to really touch . As you can tell by my blog and my tumblr I am obsessed with 20s and 30s so much so that Owen Wilsons characters journey in Midnight in Paris seemed eerily personal.
2. A song of fire and ice series.
Yes, I want to drill through the lot of them and I kinda cheated in shortening my list. I've never really been one for fantasy (I actually remember laughing at Lord of the Rings when I was 11) but after I watched Game of Thrones I had to read these books.
3. Nightwood.
A friend, knowing my little obsession with the 20’s, actually recommended this to me. Written by Djuna Barnes in 1937 it is probably one the first famous novels about a lesbian relationship (based upon Barnes real life relationship with Thelma Wood). It was originally edited by T.S. Elliott, who also provided an introduction, but now you can get with its full sexually and religious meaning.
4. Orlando
Out of the books on the list this probably the one I questioned the most including. I’ve wanted to at least give Woolf a try for ages and this is meant to be the easiest of her works, plus it covers over 300 years of history and adding this to my list with the above makes my summer seem very pro female which is change a pace from the usual stuff I read. After all holidays and summer is about a little change isn’t it?
5. Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems.
This one is quite simply to explain. Thomas is in my top 5 of poets and is the only one I don’t own a collected poems of. Call it my OCD coming out.
6. Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle.
This book actually came to be on this after some nerdy viewing on Foxtel. On a program about the State Library of New South Wales they talked about interesting objects in the archive including a lock of Mary Shelleys hair sent to her nephew Edward Wottstonecraft after her death. It was after this that came to not very important realization: I knew nothing really about the romantics, a group of poets I’ve liked on and off since high school. So after some searching *cough* Wikipedia *cough* I found out more about the most fascinating and tragic of the family/group, Fanny Wollstonecraft, the half-sister of Mary Shelley who killed herself at 22. Although there are a few biographies about her and her family this one sounded the most interesting and I can’t wait to get it.