The places we have known do not belong only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. - Marcel Proust

Saturday, June 12, 2010

At the month 6

(mostly in order):

David Madden - Revising Fiction
D.H. Lawrence - The Virgin and the Gipsy
John Steinbeck - The Red Pony and Travels with Charley
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities and Difficult Loves and The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
GK Chesterton - Heretics
Soren Kierkegaard - The Modern Library Collection of...
Paul Auster - Man in the Dark
Arthur Schopenhauer - On Pessimism

Surely this cannot be it. I can say the 90 percent of this has occurred in the last month and a half. So where have I been? January through March was an awful stretch. Little reading, writing, enjoying. Much anxiety and velocity. Dark, early nights. Depression. Heart aches. I am pleased with my progress.

This Kierkegaard book has been a steady, faithful companion.

And now for Korea (I have still to hear from GSU regarding funding, which I take as a less than good sign), and of which books I will choose. Allowing for space, I am planning on these:

The Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Complete Stories of Eudora Welty
You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

And a toss up between Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and Certain Things Last by Sherwood Anderson.

The prospect of such a shrunken library frightens me, but this will make for some relaxed, albeit close, reading.

Lately, I've come across a terrific collection of audiobooks at http://www.audiobookemporiumb2.no-ip.com/index.php

It simply requires registration and you have complete access to Saul Bellow, Richard Ford, Jeffrey Eugenides, John Updike, George MacDonald, Elizabeth Strout, whoever. It's quite overwhelming. Highly recommend!!!