Over the last year I have drifted from doing a lot of listening to instead doing a lot of reading. A couple of years ago I read a lot of poetry and philosophy. Since then my interests have broadened out. Consulting my journals I come up with the following list, in rough chronological order, of books I have read from June 2024 to November 2025.
- Art in Theory 1900 - 2000 eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood 1,200 pp.
- "S" J. J. Abrams & Doug Durst 450 pp.
- The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin - Ken Hirschkop 180 pp.
- House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski just the first 340 pages.
- The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn abridged 500 pp.
- Dictionary of the Khazars -Milorad Parić 335 pp.
- The Mexico Reader - eds. Joseph & Henderson 736 pp.
- The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner ed. John Williamson 260 pp.
- The Unknown Masterpiece -Honoré de Balzac 44 pp.
- The Poems - Catullus trans. Peter Whigham 228 pp.
- Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments - Sappho trans. Aaron Poochigian 93 pp.
- Metamorphoses - Ovid trans. David Raeburn 636 pp.
- Essays on Music -Theodor Adorno 679 pp.
- Frank Lloyd Wright text 100 pp. the rest photos
- Arnold Schoenberg - Charles Rosen 105 pp.
- Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire - Jonathan Dunsby 75 pp.
- Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques - Albert Giraud 117 pp.
- The Human Comedy: Selected Stories - Honoré de Balzac 415 pp.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel - Rabelais trans. M. A. Screech 1,041 pp.
- Selected Writings - William Hazlitt 358 pp.
- Fables - Alexander Theroux 411 pp.
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert trans. Lydia Davis 311 pp.
One of the most feared at the time and later renowned courses in English Literature was that offered by W. H. Auden in 1941 at an American university. It had a reading list of thirty-two books for a total of some 6,000 pages. Here is the
list. Lots of challenging stuff on that list. But if you add up the books I have read in the last
six months it comes to 8,647 pages. And I think it is certainly as challenging as Auden's. The year previous I read large volumes of Chinese and French poetry (in translation), the Iliad, and eleven books by and on Ludwig Wittgenstein. This year I read Dante's Inferno and Paradiso--second half of the year so it's not on the list yet.
In the above list, the hardest reads were the Art in Theory collection, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Adorno and Fables by Theroux. The easiest reads were Solzhenitsyn, Sappho and Flaubert. The most enjoyable were Dictionary of the Khazars, Sappho, Catullus and Rosen's book on Schoenberg. The poorest quality book, in my opinion, was Dunsby's book on Pierrot Lunaire. Several of the books (Solzhenitsyn, Flaubert, Balzac) would tie for the best quality.
I will list the books in the second half of the year in a separate post.
