UPDATE: With spare time on my hands and an itchy trigger finger on the buy button, I’ve just added these to my list:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter
Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Marie-Laure Ryan
Here’s what’s been backing up in my reading department, and what I have now sorted and displayed right in the living room where the books are not only readily available, but are staring me right in the face with their guilty stares (in some semblance of order by type):
8 Issues of Glimmertrain (that’s two years’ worth! Can’t believe I haven’t read them, so may find that I’ve been through some of them.)
2 Issues of Confrontations (have gotten more than halfway through one)
1 Issue of Ploughshares
2 Issues of Prairie Schooner
The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy
Agartha – A Journey to The Stars, Meredith Lady Young
She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb
The Bone Weaver, Victoria Zackheim
The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood
Child of God, Cormac McCarthy
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
Best American Short Stories of the Century
3 Copies, Best American Short Stories, 2002,2003, 2004
The Collected Stories, Peter Taylor
The Old Forest and Other Stories, Peter Taylor
100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, Michael Arnzen
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Love, Marriage, Alice Munro
Lives of Girls and Women, Munro
The Moons of Jupiter, Munro
Dances of the Happy Shades, Munro
Creating Fiction, Checkoway
Building Fiction, Kircheval
Writing From the Heart, Nancy Slonim Aronie
2 copies of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Novakovich
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor
Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
Negotiating With The Dead, Margaret Atwood
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter
The Language Police, Diane Ravitch
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I recognize several, either having dribbled my eyes across the pages, or at least allowed them the pleasure of keeping me company on the nightstand for months at a time. (*smile*)
She’s Come Undone was one I truly enjoyed. Great Title, and ever greater storytelling.
Bird by Bird is one I just recently ordered via audible.com, even though I also have the book. I’ve enjoyed reading this one (and re-reading it) so much that I wanted to be able to take it with me on CD whenever the mood struck.
You have some tasty treats on your list – surely you must force yourself to find the time to nibble now and then? Here’s hoping you manage to get past the snacking and actually indulge in a full meal now and then.
I agree, there are several that I’ve read and enjoyed. The stack of lit mags make me nervous, though. That’s why I don’t subscribe to them: they pile up and then I feel guilty like I’m not doing my homework.
I have a book I’m dying to read and I’m saving it…for what I don’t know! :Maps of the Imagination: The Writer As Cartographer”. I pick it up and sneak bits of it that rev me up to write.
Meditations was a wonderful, spiritual uplift for me. I read it in Western Civilization this past semester.