32 books for my 32nd year

I'll be be turning 32 on Sunday.

Reading is something I love but am incredible lazy at. As a way to motivate slash intimidate myself to read more, I drew up a list of 32 books to read before I turn 33.

This list includes stuff I've had on the shelves for years, classics I've never read, things I've heard are good, highlights from Donald Barthleme's syllabus, books that just looked interesting when researching on Amazon.

It's all fiction. That's where I want to focus.

These are in no particular order, but updated with an order as soon as I finish them. The list is likely to change per my whim, and I'm very whimmy. Crossed out things mean I've finished them, blue ones mean I'm currently reading. (List started Nov 7, updated Nov 26)

1. Amelia Gray - Museum of the Weird
2. Linsay Hunter - Daddy's
3. William Gass - Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
4. Leonard Michaels - Complete Stories
5. Georges Perec - Life A User's Manual
6. Thomas Pynchon - V
7. Don DeLillo - White Noise
8. William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
9. Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom
   
10. Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions
11. Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
12. William Gass - Omensetter's Luck
13. Mary Robison - Tell Me
14. Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg Ohio
15. Donald Barthleme - 60 Stories
16. John Hawkes - The Lime Twig
17. Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
18. Nicole Kraus - Great House
19. Borges - Labyrinths
20. Franz Kafka - The Castle
21. Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
22. Isaac Bashevis Singer - Gimpel the Fool
23. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
24. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn
25. Brian Evenson - Fugue State
26. Christine Schutt - Nightwork
27. Barry Hannah - High Lonesome
28. Barry Hannah - Bats Out of Hell
29. Richard Yates - The Easter Parade
30. Salvador Plascencia - The People of Paper
31. Stanley Crawford - Gascoyne
32. David Ohle - Motorman

sumo wrestling and problem reading

Went out to Boswell Book Company today to pick up the copy of Geronimo Rex they told me had come in. The fiction section's shunted to the ass of the store. I went back there and saw a reading going on, chairs placed in front of most of the alphabet.

David Benjamin was talking about Sumo wrestling to a half dozen...sumo enthusiasts? I squirreled my way to the H's, barging through the crowd, and grabbed what I needed. Then I moved on, reading spines and listening more, thinking, What the hell? Sumo? Or maybe: What the hell? Sumo!

Then I went to the front of the store. There were more people, sitting in a square of tables by the magazines, where I wanted to look for Noon. Some kind of group therapy for book addicts.

They were saying, "My name is —. This is my 8th time here. I used to start so many books at one time that I didn't finish any. Now I start more and finish them. All of them. Then start more."

There was guilt, remorse, nervous laughing. There was sympathetic sighing. Like problem drinkers telling each other, it's ok. Stop your old ways of drinking. Try this drink instead. You'll be ok. You'll be fine.

leonard michaels

"And then I awoke as if from a nightmare and it was a brilliant morning. She was standing like a stork on one leg, pulling a stocking up the other. She said, "Hello," and her voice was full of welcome, but I saw she was too much in motion, already someplace else. Her eyes were pleasant, but they looked through mine as if mine weren't eyes, just tunnels that zoomed out the back of my head."
Leonard Michaels - "Making Changes"

RAYSS

from The Golden Book Illustrated Dictionary, v5: Po/St