Spring Reading

We’ve had an early spring this year (at least, it seems like an early spring; there’s always a chance a cold snap can come back but I hope not because the lettuces and cucumbers are really happy) which has nothing to do with this blog entry other than “Spring Cleaning” sounds a lot to me like “Spring Reading.”

I’ve been challenged by my good friend and disciple Chops (I’d link but Chops isn’t public) to build a reading list he can look at every day of his life only to be reminded how little time he has to read, and how much reading there is always to be done. Let’s hope, for his sake, he’s read a few on this list already. I think it will make him feel better.

There’s phenomenon I experience in the world: people who are polarized, often believe in the same things. For instance (spoiler: inexcusably overweight generalizations coming up): lefties eating whole foods because industrialized farming is a capitalist evil that poisons people and helps keep farmers and poor people in poverty. Righties eating whole foods because foods produced in an industrialized manner go against God and nature, poisoning people, keeping the first first and the last last. We end up bashing each other’s heads in at the same anti-pesticide demonstrations.

So in honor of this phenomenon, my reading list is of books I would recommend to my bestest friends, and my worst enemies – must reads for anyone who loves me or hates me. In the end: you can’t deny the wonder that is in these books.

For all you moderates out there: I got nuthin’ for ya.

Enjoy!

Top 35 books (and one bonus book) I’ve read that I would and have recommended to my friends and enemies (in no particular order).

Antarctic Traveller, Katha Pollitt**
Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems, Wayne Koestenbaum
The Complete Poems 1927 – 1979, Elizabeth Bishop**
Music and Suicide, Jeff Clark
If Not Winter, Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson
Black Candle, Chitra Divakaruni
Ararat, Louise Gluck
American Primitive, Mary Oliver
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Tender Hooks, Beth Ann Fennelly
Loose Sugar, Brenda Hillman
The Tether, Carl Phillips
Beautiful Signor, Cyrus Cassells
The Lord and the General Din of the World, Jane Mead
The World Doesn’t End, Charles Simic
View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska (my people!)
Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson
Night, Elie Wiesel
My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki
The Hours, Michael Cunningham**
The Wife, Meg Wolitzer**
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin**
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Caucasia, Danzy Senna
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
Wasted, Maria Hornbacher
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan**
The Myserty of Capital, Hernando de Soto
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
Watership Down, Richard Adams (it’s about bunnies!)

**super ultimate teenage mutant ninja turtle hardcore recommend

And a bonus: The World Without Us, Alan Weisman** which will be available by July, 2007.

…oh I could so easily make this the top 100…

Oh – and if anybody wants to be tagged, I’d like to hear from Poetmom, Dennis, Moxie, 9 to 5, Sam, Collin, Brent, Storygoil, L, Marilyn, Up High, and of course, the unlinkable Chopsie Brown…and anyone else who wants to play!