• Old Reads (more recent reads are listed first)
• Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
  (Too much like someone I used to know, was more creepy than funny.)
• Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
  (What a spectacle of metaphor and simile. The story hardly matters with Chandler's use of language.)
• Dubliners, James Joyce
  (There's no denying that I'm jealous of his command of a place, but the inability of emotions and wills to align seems to be the thing he has even better command of here.)
• On Love, Alain de Botton
  (Bought this years ago in Providence. Never got around to reading it. M. de Botton is what he is, but the lesson still manages to peak through his hubris—there's no thinking through that mess.)
• Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard
  (The more I read of her the more impressed I am. This one is particularly pointed. And I always love a good polemic.)
• Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, Katie Roiphe
  (Gossip is gossip, literary or not. I'm just as guilty as the next one.)
• Reading Like A Writer, Francine Prose
  (See note about educative mood below.)
• Poetics, Aristotle, translated by S.H. Butcher
  (In an educative mood lately, and wanted to reread this—the last reading was in college. It seems to me that he missed the most important question—not how to write effective tragedies, i.e. like those of his predecessors and contemporaries, but why tragedy has persisted as a form for as long as it has. But that wasn't his aim, or I suppose he would say he did answer that question, but I'm not giving it to him, gall-darn-it.)
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
  (Oh, Virginia, what a state you are. And my first prolonged experience with Ms. Dillard—the rewards were many.)
• Letters to a Young Artist, various contributors, compiled by Art on Paper magazine
  (Half graduation speech, half interesting stuff--a clever little book.)
• Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
  (Okay, I admit, it's a good read.)
• The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert
  (There's little else to say other than this is a masterfully painted portrait.)
• The View From Castle Rock, Alice Munro
  (Not a bad read, a great way to string a collection of stories together, but my mind was prone to wandering--whether it's me or the book, I can't say, and this hardly constitutes a review--nor do any of these comments, for that matter.)
• Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Lydia Davis
  (There's something about that dead pan delivery that gets me every time.)
• Night Flight, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  (Because I will always love the sensation of flight and Saint-Ex for capturing it so beautifully.)
• The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter
  (I like some of her other stuff, but I have to admit I wasn't thrilled by this one, though I do have a bias against juvenile narrators...)
• Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, Mary Edwards Wertsch
  (Because both my mother and I are military brats and I was working on an article about a documentary on military brats.)
• Growing up with a City, Louise de Koven Bowen
  (My mother discovered this relative of ours in her research. Eager to know more about any social reformer in the fam, I bought myself a first edition. I can't necessarily recommend the book, but the bits in between the words reveal more than anything about the lady, I think.)
• Three Pigs in Five Days, Francine Prose
  (I'd never read anything by Prose, and I have to admit I picked up a volume of her novellas--this one included--on my way to Lydia Davis' translation of Proust at the library, but there it was all the same. I'm not sure I would recommend this one in particular.)
• Life Interrupted, Spalding Gray
  (The power of a story well told remains, despite everything else.)
• Art & Science, Siân Ede
  (A wonderful range of subjects are woven together here in writing that is neither obtuse nor obscure. I thought it was very well done.)
• A Backward Glance: An Autobiography, Edith Wharton
  (Because even thought there's a brand new and well-remarked biography about her, I still like to hear it in her own words and see all the ways she tries to cover herself up.)
• A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut
  (Ah, Vonnegut. A surly old fellow. Sorry he is so sad with the world, sorry the world made him so sad.)
• The Group, Mary McCarthy
  (Remarkably for its frankness alone, though the storytelling itself is worth its own remarks.)
• The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
  (I figured I had to read at least one of her books after reading her biography this past summer. What was striking was how transparent the style writing and the flow of the writing are. There's something in it that captures the feeling of watching an athelete accomplish a difficult physical feat and seem not even to break a sweat.)
• Les Femmes Savantes, Molière
  (Not one of his more challenging pieces.)
• La Dame d'Espirit: A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet, Judith Zinsser
  (A lady I have long admired and the most admirable biography of her so far.)
• M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang
  (A remarkable piece to read up against a book by Hardy, in highlighting the idea of a woman created in man's imagination.)
• Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
  (It's difficult to know what to say in response to this novel. I wanted to read a book about the struggle between the mind and the heart, or the intellect and the 'animal' as he puts it, but I'm afraid it was too much of something else for me. That being said, he's a brilliant observer on many points.)
• The Plague, Albert Camus
  (Borrowed from a good friend while living in her room for a week.)
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
  (Because what else does a girl read when she's moving to Brooklyn?)
• Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
  (Recommended by the ever effervescent Katharine Peachey, the best UK actress I know. A pleasure to read. A well told and straight-forward story. Not as easy to find these days on the literature shelves.)
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Man Himself
  (Went to his old house in London to have a look around, couldn't resist picking this up on the way out.)
• Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley
  (Right, well, a 500+ page book in the midst of exam studies may seem foolish, but a mind needs a rest once in awhile. And you have to admit it's quite an impressive piece of work.)
  
• Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne
  (I couldn't resist, even though I ought to be studying, this school business is hopeless I fear...)
  
• Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
  (I can offer no insightful commentary on this one, if I could on any that I've read. I can only say it was a wonderful novel, wholly absorbing through every page, allowing the story to tell itself, the characters to play their cards, and offering innumerable insights into what we still can't quite seem to grasp--America.)
  
• Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley
  (I picked this up while on a brief visit to Edinburgh, in one of the used bookshops, recognizing the authoress' name, Agnes Smedley, from the title of a biography of the same person which recently came out. The book is long since out of print I gather, and by the price I paid, I don't gather anyone anticipates it will be of interest any time soon, but I can recommend the book highly to those that can find it, if for no other reason than the fact that it demonstrates well the the conflicts between ideals and life.)
  

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