The List

Here's my list of summer reads. By no means is it final.

Finishing from the school year:
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Salem's Lot

Required:
Three Cups of Tea
State of Fear

Purchased at the beginning of summer:
World War Z
Lost in a Good Book
The Road
Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
Catch-22
The Hunger Games
The Knife of Never Letting Go

From school book sale:
Flatland
Splinter of the Mind's Eye (Star Wars book)
Myst: The Book of Atrus
Myst: The Book of Ti'ana
Body Bags
Burning Bones
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Hole in the Sky

Anthologies:
Smoke and Mirrors (Neil Gaiman)
Legends (ed. by Silverberg)
Unexpected Magic (Diana Wynne Jones)
New Skies / New Magic

Recently recommended by friends:
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Please Don't Kill the Freshman
The House of the Scorpion

From last Christmas:
Watchers
Strunk & White's Elements of Style
The Tales of Beetle the Bard
The Graveyard Book
Just After Sunset (Stephen King anthology)
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates

Comics:
V for Vendetta
The Essential Thor

The Essential Hulk

Showcase Presents Batman

Hope to acquire later:
Mimus
The Keys to the Kingdom series
Wizard's First Rule
Any stories by Borges

Also on my shelf:
The Wheel of Time
The Hobbit
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Interworld

Summer whims:
1984
Hamlet
1776
Summerland (Michael Chabon)
The Picture of Dorian Grey (Oscar Wilde)
Into the Wild

No way do I finish all these this summer. I'm going to try to get about half of them read, though. My current rate is 3.5 books a day and slipping. (World War Z is taking a while.)

A very merry summer!

Our society has become one based on electronics. We get most of our enjoyment these days from television, games, and the internet, while old crochety guys with walkers reminisce about the good old days, when the only thing to listen to was one guy jabbering on the radio, or barring that, the sound of crickets.

I've vowed to try to get myself out of this vicious cycle that will inevitably create a Matrix-like reality of machines rising above humans, so that when the resistance comes, I'll be fully armed with my deadly whirling LPs and my vicious paper-cut-giving books. In short: it's been a very tough year at school. Time to break out the creativity and step away from the hyperactivity of the internet -

Time to bring out the books.

...By posting about them on the internet.

Okay, so it's not the most foolproof plan, but I've got a lot of books that I want to talk about and I need somewhere to talk about them. Hence this blog. Rather self-serving, but what are blogs for? (Why are you reading them? --That's right, to hear what other people think. So I'm going to darn well tell you what I think!)

ANYway. In all seriousness, I hope this blog inspires you to read some of the books posted. I'm going to try to post my prospective list soon, along with my first reviews. (I've read two and a half books already.)