#30 The Dubliners by James Joyce

This book by the great James Joyce is a collection of short stories dealing with characters who live in the city of, you guessed it, Dublin. There seems to be connections between some of the stories--some characters have the same names. Yet, after reading these short stories, I felt as though they lack in ways his novels do not. For instance, after reading some of the stories I felt as though there was more to be told; they felt incomplete. I'm not sure if other people have felt the same way about this collection or the individual stories. However, what is nice about this collection is that it is recognizably James Joyce. The stories exhibit his language, his themes, well everything that one would expect. But with that said, I would not recommend this to someone just starting off with Joyce, perhaps The Portrait of the Artist... is a more suitable place to start.

#29 I, Claudius

This took me longer than I would have liked to finish it, but that's not to say that it was bad. The book was quit amazing, and this was my first attempt at reading historical fiction. Many have called I, Claudius a masterpiece, and for many reasons this label is accurate. At quite a few points, I forgot that I was even reading historical fiction and had to remind myself that it was not the Emperor Claudius who wrote the book, but Robert Graves. Easily the most fascinating span of the book is during Caligula's reign, and the subsequent chapter of how Claudius became Emperor. Of course, his rise to the throne is not surprising, but that's not the point. Here, and as with all history, the lesson that should be taken away is to learn from the mistakes and not make those same ones.

I recommend the book to any who are intrigued by the Roman Empire and I will make it a point to read Claudius the god now.

#28 Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Another amazing novel by the Nobel Prizer winner. He never fails to impress me with his insight and execution. While this novel is shorter than his more celebrated works, it does not lack anything that I've grown to expect from Gabo. The use of magical realism is in place; the wrenching consequences of the choices the characters make cause both the heart to drop and the stomach to boil.

#27 Neuromancer by William Gibson

First time reading anything by William Gibson, and will be my last. The book wasn't bad, really good science fiction, but that's the problem, all science fiction is the same stuff. Any genre fiction has certain parameters that it must abide by in order for a work to be considered that particular set of genre. After a while, if you are a close reader, you start to pick up the nuances (this just doesn't work for me). Yet, if you area devoted science fiction fan and haven't read this, you must.

sidenote: The Wachowski brothers ripped Gibson off when they made The Matrix.

#26

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

What can I say? It's a book by Thomas Pynchon, a master at crafting complex, paranoiac stories that seem completely out of this world yet all too familiar. I love his complex sentence structure, yet because of that, many readers are turned off from his work. If you haven't read anything by Pynchon before I suggest starting with Inherent Vice or The Crying of Lot 49 then working your way up to his other novels, especially in the case of Gravity's Rainbow.

#25 The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

While I love Gabo's work, I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. The elements of his other novels are there, but the lack of dialogue (and I mean complete lack of dialogue) made reading the book tedious. I suggest reading his work, but not this one. Try One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera.

Catching Up

I haven't written on this blog in almost a year and I'm not quite sure why I've decided that I would like to write here more. With that said, a year is a long time, and to try to encapsulate what has happened in that time span now seems utterly pointless. One positive to come out of the year was that I really do need to read more, and so I set a goal for myself to read at least fifty books by the end of May. I will be keeping track here.

Here is the list of what I have read so far:

#1 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

#2 Looking Backwards, 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy

#3 Atonement by Ian Mcewan

#4 Love is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski

#5 Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

#6 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

#7 Ubik By Philip K. Dick

#8 An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

#9 The Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

#10 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

#11 Candide by Voltaire

#12 Heart of Joy by John Repp

#13 Paycheck and other classic stories by Philip K. Dick

#14 The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould

#15 When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

#16 The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins

#17 Ballistics by Billy Collins

#18 Agape Agape by William Gaddis

#19 Earth (The Book) by the writer's of the daily show *

#20 Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

#21 The Room by Hubert Selby Jr.

#22 On Writing by Stephen King

#23 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

#24 Never Let Me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

* It seems unfair to consider this a book, but I read it none the less.