Torn

I'm torn between writing about our visit to church today or continuing the reading thread a little longer. I want church to ripen a little before I pluck it. Reading it is.

Thanks Ali, Amie and Hallie and Infurriated Squirrel (and darknessatnoon, an internet hero) for all your great reading suggestions.

One reason for the women-only guideline is that I want to limit my pool of available books and further I want to limit the pool to an area in which I am weak. I somehow managed to not read a novel for any high school English class and so I am struggling to catch up on the classics and the canon. (I don't think I'll ever read Silas Marner or Wuthering Heights, though, and won't get to them even this year, sorry.) I also want to read women authors because I've bypassed them for so long.

There is a long, cogent argument to be made that one simply doesn't have the time to read all the great books anymore. Since the fifties books have blown up and the numbers of great books, for many reasons, have increased by an order of magnitude. But I don't have the capacity for argument. I have to take two naps and then go to bed.

My list so far:

Patricia Highsmith The Talented Mr. Ripley
Banality of Evil
Little House on the Prairie
Queen Bees and Wannabes
Zadie Smith On Beauty and White Teeth
Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm
PD James Children of Men
Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Lydia Millet

I'm also planning on buying Tale of Genji in the Royall Tyler translation and reading it throughout the year. I like having a bulky classic in reserve although I don't much like reading non-English books anymore. I got enough of that in college. But for Murasaki Shikibu I'll make an exception.

Oh, word, I'll go to bed now. I'm tired.