Scanning my Word files at work, I noticed a forgotten document, "Reading LIst," that I had started some months ago in order to remind myself of books, or authors, I"d like to read.
Lady Luck by Warren Weaver
Balzac
Edm. Wilson
Schopenhauer
Russell's History of Western Philosophy
Hughes on Goya; also, his memoir
The Red and the Black
Nietzsche
Kaufmann on Nietzsche
The Selfish Gene
The Merchant of Venice
Antony and Cleopatra
Robt. Sapolsky
I've since read The Selfish Gene, Lady Luck, and the 900-page Library of America volume devoted to Edmund Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1930s & 40s--basically, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, and Classics and Commercials. So I haven't altogether failed to follow through. I find now that my interest in most of the remaining items has waned. When I finally make it to the end of Righteous Victims, I mean to tackle Dickens--Bleak House, and then, possibly, Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit. I also would like to reread the principal novels of Dreiser, all of which--Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, An American Tragedy, and The Financier--are of Dickensian heft. I have a dim idea that Dreiser's stock is down, but I love him, and so did Saul Bellow, who knows something about novels. Speaking of Bellow, I'd like to read several of his novels again, too. Hell, why not Henry Adams's nine-volume History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Proust, and the late novels of Henry James?
It's a good thing that I don't get to most of what I intend, for if I did Amanda would divorce my sorry bookish ass.
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