Category: books

The Great American Read PBS series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, with To Kill A Mockingbird as the number one book on the list. Here’s a link to the results page for the full list. When the series started, with a special back in June, I joined a Goodreads group related to it, and set myself a challenge to read 13 books from the list, before the show ended. I didn’t quite meet that challenge, but I managed to read 12 books from the list.

Here’s a list of the books I read during the challenge:

1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
3. The Martian by Andy Weir
4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
6. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
7. Ghost,
8. Patina,
9. and Sunny, all by Jason Reynolds
10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
11. 1984 by George Orwell
12. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

So that’s not bad, for my summer reading this year. Several of those books are pretty short, but there are a few longer ones in there too. And a few of them were re-reads. (And I’m not sure if the whole Track series by Jason Reynolds counts as “on the list”, or just the first one, Ghost, but I’m counting them all.) I would have hit my 13-book goal if I hadn’t decided to read Lonesome Dove with the Goodreads group. That’s 900 pages long. (I’m about two-thirds of the way through that.) And I’ve been slowly working my way through Catch-22 at the same time. (I’m about a quarter of the way through that one.)

The Goodreads groups is continuing, and will be reading The Lovely Bones this month and To Kill A Mockingbird next month. I’ve purchased copies of both of those, and plan to read them with the group, though I really want to finish either Lonesome Dove or Catch-22 before starting a new book.

And since I’m posting lists, here’s a list of books from the main 100-book list that I’d like to read, but still haven’t read yet:

1. Great Expectations
2. Frankenstein
3. Game of Thrones (series)
4. The Picture of Dorian Gray
5. Invisible Man
6. Gulliver’s Travels
7. Ready Player One
8. The Intuitionist

There are others that I’d probably find interesting, but this is the short list I came up with, after watching the series and reviewing the list again.

Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between reading physical books and ebooks, and between buying books and getting them from the library. All other things being equal, I’d almost always prefer to read the Kindle version for most novels, but I balk at paying the prices that they charge for some Kindle books, especially for older book that (in my mind at least) shouldn’t be priced as high as new books. In cases where I can get the ebook from the library, that’s always the best option. I get the benefits of reading on my Kindle, for free. When I can’t, I’ll often buy a used copy from eBay or Amazon for $4.

Following up on Thursday’s post, here are links to a few remembrances of Ellison by some of his friends and colleagues:

• Mark Evanier
• Leonard Maltin
• John Scalzi
• Peter David
• Cory Doctorow

And the NY Times has now posted their obituary for him.

I was sad to hear of Harlan Ellison’s passing today. Here’s an obituary from the AP (via the NYT) and another one from the Chicago Tribune. (I haven’t seen an official NYT obituary yet.)

I loved Harlan Ellison’s stuff when I was younger. I distinctly remember reading “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” when I was way too young to read something like that. And buying a hardcover of Shatterday from the Science Fiction Book Club. (I really liked “Jeffty is Five” from that one.) And buying Dangerous Visions at a used book store in Cranford. And of course everyone loves his Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever. He was really one of my favorite SF authors when I was a teenager.

I haven’t read much of anything by him lately though. I picked up a copy of the 1000+ page doorstop The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective back in 2000, but have barely put a dent in it. It’s too big and heavy to carry around, so it mostly just sits on the shelf. I occasionally grab it and read a story, but it’s been a while. (I wish they’d publish a Kindle version.)

Best quote from the AP obituary:

When a publisher broke a contract by allowing a cigarette ad in one of Ellison’s books, the writer mailed him dozens of bricks and, finally, a ripe, dead gopher.

I enjoyed watching The Great American Read launch special on PBS a couple of weeks ago. The idea is to present a list of 100 (fiction) books as American’s most-loved books, then let people vote, and pick a winner. The show then returns to PBS in September with an eight-part series, leading up to the announcement of the winning book in October. (This article at thirteen.org explains the concept better than I just did.)

I’m a sucker for book lists and reading challenges, so I’m getting into this thing a bit. (Mind you, I was also enthusiastic about the Now Read This book club that PBS NewsHour and the New York Times started in January, and I haven’t read any of those books yet.)

So far, I’ve joined the official Facebook group for The Great American Read, and an unofficial Goodreads group. The Facebook group is currently very active, while the Goodreads group has less than two dozen members, with only a few people posting. The Goodreads group is planning to read one or two books a month, selected by a poll of the members. For June, we’re reading Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. That works for me, since I’ve had a copy of Sirens of Titan sitting on my bookshelf for at least ten years, unread. I’ve read a few Vonnegut books over the years, including of course Slaughterhouse-Five, but I’ve never read this one. (Speaking of which, the selection of Sirens of Titans rather than Slaughterhouse-Five for the Great American Reads list is curious. But it works for me, since it gives me an excuse to read it!)

Because I love lists, here’s a list of the books from the Great American Reads list that I’ve already read:

1. 1984 – George Orwell
2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
3. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
4. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D Salinger
5. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
6. Dune – Frank Herbert
7. Foundation (series) – Isaac Asimov
8. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
10. Harry Potter (series) – J.K. Rowling
11. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
12. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
13. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
14. The Lord of the Rings (series) – J.R.R. Tolkien
15. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
16. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
17. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The “rules” for the Great American Read list allow for a whole series of books to count as one entry, so Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books can be on the list rather than just one book from the series. For each series that I’ve read, I’ve read all of it. (Though maybe not for the Foundation series, depending on whether or not you count the books that came after the original trilogy.) And it’s interesting to see that they included Dune and Hitchhiker’s Guide as individual books and not the whole series. That makes a lot of sense with Dune, since the book stands alone well, and (from what I understand) some of the later books aren’t that great.

So, anyway, I’m looking forward to reading some more books from the list. There are a few on the list that have been on my mental “want to read” shelf for quite some time, including classics like Catch-22 and more recent books like Ready Player One and The Martian.

There’s so much stuff I want to read right now. I’m thinking about adopting Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50. I rarely abandon books; maybe I should do that more often.