Books and Plays of Note, 2009

I miss that lamp. I left it in the lobby of my New York dorm when I moved away. Will Guzzardi and I raced to pack my too-many boxes into his hatchback to get back nine hours to North Carolina and drove off without it. Bye bye, lamp.

This is the dreadfully and embarrassingly short list of works that I read carefully in 2009. I would like to have read more, but I spent a lot of time reading for school, either for my Modernism and drama history courses in the fall or primary and secondary research for my honors thesis—the novels, letters, and diaries of Virginia Woolf and Woolf criticism and then information about synesthesia, color, and the Bloomsbury group (approximately respectively). I like to keep track of this kind of thing because some of the authors and people that I like did or do the same. I would like to remember what I read and when; it encourages me to develop as a reader. Hopefully my list will be twice as long in 2009 (though now, as of May, it’s even shorter).

Chaucer, The Love Visions†

Jose Saramago, Blindness

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita*

Franz Kafka, The Trial†

Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird*

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy

Naomi Wallace, One Flea Spare

Patrick Süskind, Perfume*

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury*†

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Virginia Woolf, The Years

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own*†

Virginia Woolf, The Waves*

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

David Kessler, The End of Overeating

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Sophocles, Philoctetes

Aeschylus, The Oresteia*

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice†

Donald Barthelme, Snow White

*Indicates something I really enjoyed or something that was deeply affective or significant for me. These are things I might like to talk to you about. Important ones. I could probably say this for all of them, but I’ve tried to only pick a few.

†Indicates a conscious or intelligent rereading for pleasure or a deep analysis for school, possibly of something I read in high school, or something I had previously flown through for a paper.