Just a quick head’s up: this is where my reading stands!

Catch-22 [Heller] (Carryover from Spring Semester)
Mountains Beyond Mountains [Kidder]
Pride and Prejudice [Austen]
The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century [Lomas]
Slaughterhouse Five [Vonnegut]
No Country for Old Men [McCarthy]
Fahrenheit 451 [Bradbury]
Cat’s Cradle [Vonnegut]
The Martian Chronicles [Bradbury]
The Sunset Limited [McCarthy]
The Last Question [Asimov]
The Road [McCarthy]
Breakfast of Champions [Vonnegut]
Neuromancer [Gibson]
Lolita [Nabokov]

I was so ambitious when I first cobbled together the list, but I don’t know if I’m going to make it though! I couldn’t find the Road when I wanted it, so I just started No Country, which proved to be surprisingly dense. My mom sent Martian Chronicles along when she brought me Fahrenheit 451; it’s a really cool collection of stories. It’s a bit hard to approach because there’s no clear, driving narrative, but it’s interesting to see a really “big” story (the colonization of the planet Mars) told in a little piecewise fashion, through vignettes. It’s kinda like the Twilight Zone (a lot, really), but it takes place not in a ‘universe of mind’, but also byond that plain old one of ‘sight and sound’. In truth, somewhere between the two is the best way to describe it.

I read The Sunset Limited in just under two days; it’s a short play with only two people in it. It was well written, and I enjoyed it, but the ending kinda throws you for a loop. I would also love to see it performed; you can almost feel the characters struggling to get off the pages and trying to be more real than a bound stack of pages will allow. I have this weird ambition to stage it, but I don’t know how I’d even manage that, but I think it could be fun.

When school starts it’s really going to burn me that I can’t read as much as I’d like to, but I guess that’s the way it is; at the very least, I’ll have the desire to fight it harder. Gotta get back to learning, though, I suppose.