jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

Bold those you have read. Italicize those you want to read. Underline those you started, but haven’t actually finished yet. * indicates personal favorites.
+indicates having seen on stage

Beowulf (a translation)
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice*
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot+
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre*
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard+
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities*
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers*
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary*
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies*
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter*
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House+
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw+
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible*
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac*
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet+*
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth+
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream+*
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet+*
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn+
Voltaire – Candide+
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Harrison Bergeron
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie+*
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard – Native Son

I think I’m exhausted by the political. Damon was jogging today and the President and Laura drove right past him. Aside from being tickled at the novelty, I was uninterested. I tried to work up some nasty thing to say about W, but the truth is that I just didn’t feel anything. Many of my friends are political, and I feel a little bit like we have the same conversations over and over again. It’s not that I won’t eagerly take my place at the polls. I’ll also pretty readily engage in a debate on the topics I feel particularly passionate about. Gay marriage rights lives pretty much at the top of that list right now. But I just don’t feel like I want to go through any more “George Bush sucks” “Yes he does” kind of exchanges. Yes, yes, yes, he’s awful. I know.

It occurs to me that many of my friends on LJ swing liberal (as I do). I’m all for it. And I’m all for their activism — Eastlake and Elemess are particularly involved and admirable for it.

I just… am I the only one who sometimes gets as tired of self-righteous liberals as I do of self-righteous conservatives?

There’s a fairly persuasive editorial in the NYT today about how the bashing of conservative Christians is heartily enjoyed on the left. And I know I’ve done that. And the worst part is that I already knew that it was rife with hypocrisy to do it, but I sometimes do it anyway.

After just about nine months in DC, it looks like my tenure here is over. AOL is kicking me up to the majors. Which means Damon and I will be relocating to Manhattan! I’ll spend next weekend looking for an apartment and I think they want me in place June 1. I’ll find out more next week.

So I’m supposed to take the next few days to figure out what it will take to get me up there. AOL will have to buy out our aparment lease, which isn’t a big deal since August is the last month, anyway.

For some reason I’m dying to actually go through the move process. Some company is going to come pack us up, we don’t have to do anything. So that should be fun to watch.

I feel full of energy, full of potential… Being invested in like this makes me like I can take my job and go plowing forward. I’m so fortunate. I get to write and be creative and work with people across the U.S. who do all sorts of interesting things… And now I’m going to be so rewarded for that.

But for now all this glamour means that I have to get up at 5:30 so I can catch the Acela for NYC for meetings tomorrow. And I am tired tired. So good night.

So I was reading a magazine or something that was positing that boys gravitate towards playing sports because it’s the only socially acceptable way many cultures offer males for touching. The theory was basically that frequent physical contact is a fairly basic human desire and that while girls are generally allowed to be physcial, boys are not. So they seek other avenues. I would think that thought could extend to the arts world as well, since it’s a physically permissive community — not to mention that actors touch people as part of their jobs.

I’ll have to ask Damon what he thinks.

So I’m all tucked in at Deanna’s. Ella the dog is napping on the squishy bed and I’ve figured out what I want to eat and how to work the Tivo. I just looked at myself in the mirror and my face has the flushed look that means I’m warm and comfy. I could spend so many days like this. It’s nice to be able to keep the heat up without worrying about the cost.

But I do wonder if I’ve lived in apartments too long to really use a house. This one is pretty huge, and what I’ve done is pick three rooms (bedroom, sitting room and bathroom) and close all the doors leading in. Now I’m living happily in those three rooms and pretending the rest of the house isn’t there.