The Summer of Self-Loathing

I'm a glutton for punishment.

Case in point: I'd been working on a post declaring my temporary sabbatical from blogging when I realized that I'd wanted to elucidate an idea I'd been alluding to, both here and on various other forms of Internet communication services, for some time now. And so no sooner did I get myself through the "goodbye for now" than did I realize that there was another post that needed to happen. (Eight minutes later, you'll note, that very post began to form.)

It is with this thought in mind that I bring you an explanation for what I've been calling "The Summer of Self-Loathing."

It's not, for starters, about viciously masochistic self-hatred, at least not in a literal sense. It means that I'm attempting to do way too much in way too small a span of time, and that the end result will likely be an untangled, frayed Dave dangling perilously in the wind.

The biggest conflict is the one between my summer job and my commitments, both personally and professionally, to my graduate work. I knew that the time was shortly to come when I'd need to draw a line in the sand and declare that my academic work was simply more important than a mindless paycheck. Unfortunately, with my needing to be home for my brother's October wedding (and all the best-mannish/house-fixer-upper-ing that that entails), staying home was a damn near necessity.

So I'm still working my boring-ass summer gig, and it still doesn't excite me in the least, and it still distracts me from the massive pile of books I'm meaning to read this summer. What pile, you ask?



THAT pile.

For those of you with bad vision, and those wondering why exactly I've ordered things the way I have, I assure you there's a method to my madness. My to-be-read pile for the summer consists of three distinct categories:

"Pleasure" Reading (or, anything not required but not necessarily light or fun)
Julian Barnes - Arthur & George
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Octavia E. Butler - Lilith's Brood
Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler
Willa Cather - O Pioneers!
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Samuel R. Delany - Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Neal Gabler - Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Alan Garner - Thursbitch
Seamus Heaney [translator] - Beowulf (Bilingual Edition)
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Kazuo Ishiguro - When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Henry James - Tales of Henry James
Franz Kafka - Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared)
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
Haruki Murakami - after the quake: stories
Vladimir Nabokov - Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Thomas Nevins - The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future [a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book!]
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Chuck Palahniuk - Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Bram Stoker - Dracula
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Kurt Vonnegut - Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Kurt Vonnegut - Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5
Jennifer Hart Weed, Richard Davis, and Ronald Weed [editors] - 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack

Writing Books That I Must Peruse in Order to Decide Which Texts I'll Use in My Writing Classes Come This Fall
Dohra Ahmad [editor] - Rotten English: A Literary Anthology
John Dufresne - The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein - "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky - From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Practical Guide
Diana Hacker - A Pocket Style Manual [Fifth Edition]
Diana Hacker - Rules for Writers [Sixth Edition]
Maxine Hairston and Michael Keene - Successful Writing [Fifth Edition]
Sharon Hamilton - Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises
Noah Lukeman - A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation
Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz - Everything's an Argument [Fourth Edition]
Louis Mendoza and S. Shankar [editors] - Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration
Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett [editors] - The Story Behind the Story: 26 Writers and How They Work

Advance Reading for Next Semester's Classes
Peter Ackroyd - The Trial of Elizabeth Cree
E. Lynn Harris - If This World Were Mine
Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian
Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Ruth Ozeki - All Over Creation
Susan Power - The Grass Dancer
Richard Powers - Gain
Nelly Rosario - Song of the Water Saints
Adrian Tomine - Shortcomings
M. G. Vassanji - The Book of Secrets
William T. Vollmann - Europe Central
Martin Heidegger - Basic Writings
Michael Cunningham - The Hours
E. M. Forster - Howards End
E. M. Forster - A Passage to India
E. M. Forster - Maurice
Christopher Reed - Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

In order to make this list somewhat more palatable, I've given myself some timelines. I need to make my textbook orders by June 13, so sometime soon, I'm gonna knock out most if not all of that second column. Outside of that, there's the sensible idea that books read closer to the fall will be better retained, so I'm saving most of the third column for later in the summer. So I've been working through the first list so far, with mostly success.

My real-time progress on the reading can be found by either looking at my LibraryThing profile and reading my reviews, or by checking out my AIM profile.

Oh, and one more thing. The truly eagle-eyed among you might notice that not all the books on the above list are represented in the further-above photo. That's because some have been added in the intervening weeks since I took said photo. And since I'm a compulsive book buyer, and can't resist a well-timed coupon from Barnes & Noble or Borders, that list is almost always growing on a day-by-day basis.

Fingers crossed I don't drop before the leaves change.