Today, I’m jotting down what I’ve read thus far in 2010 as we careen right over the hump into the second half of it. I’m not going to annotate for now, just list; perhaps I’ll come back later and amplify thoughts on individual pieces. I read a lot to prepare for teaching, but I’ve been on a bit of a tear of pleasure-reading since May (meaning, I suppose, reading without a pencil in hand). Honestly, I recommend all of these. Here goes:
January
- The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
- Homicide Survivors Picnic by Lorraine Lopez
January-May
- Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman
- Hiroshima by John Hersey
- Kindred by Octavia Butler
- “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa
- Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey
- In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
- “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” by Richard Bausch
- “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern
- “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri
- “Brownies” by ZZ Packer
- “My Flamboyant Grandson” by George Saunders
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- Brownsville by Oscar Casares
- The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters by Lorraine Lopez
- The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer
- Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
- Select chapters from Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua
- Select essays from An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots, ed. Lorraine Lopez
- The Truth Book by Joy Castro
- “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” by Ana Menendez
- Poems from A Question of Gravity and Light by Blas Falconer
- How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez
- “Homecoming” by Julia Alvarez
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
May-present
- Open Secrets by Alice Munro
- Negotiating the Dead by Margaret Atwood
- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
- Home by Marilynne Robinson
- Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
- Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
- Bone Key Elegies by Danielle Sellers
- Temper by Beth Bachmann
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Select chapters of Method and Madness by Alice LaPlante
- Falling Man by Don Delillo
- That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
In progress
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (150 in, only 650 to go!)
On list next (hurry, hurry, before school prep starts!)
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Attention Please Now by Matthew Pitt
- From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Bryn Chancellor 