Reading List

Picture of random books taken some time in the past somewhere in the house.

I am tired of talking about downsizing. That isn't all I do. Really. Right now I'm reading three books. Well, I'm reading two books and I'm listening to another one in my car. I go from riding the recumbent bicycle to nowhere and reading James Joyce's Ulysses to driving home in the car listening to an unabridged A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith on tape. At home I'm reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. OK. I'm reading that in the bathroom, I will confess. Too much information I'm afraid. Of course, I'm reading newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Austin American-Statesman. I've read a few articles in The New Yorker of late, too.

I'm about 200 pages in on Ulysses. (My edition has 933 pages.) So when I'm reading that I'm immersed in the conversations and stream of consciousness of people in Dublin in 1904. I've well-prepared myself for this endeavor. (See here.) Still it's a dense and confusing book. Fun, though.

I'm at least three quarters of the way through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and it's been good listening. I decided to listen to the tapes since I still have a cassette player in my car. After I finish this listen I'm going to give them to a friend. So I'm transported to the early twentieth century there, too. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A clearer exposition but lots of details of life there.

I'm nearing the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I love the movie made from this book and I'm always thinking about it as I read. But the book has lots of philosophy and such, too, it's not straight narrative. So they both stand quite well, the book and its movie. Here I'm in the late '60's and early '70's in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland.

It's funny how the books you are reading occupy a little track in your brain. And when there are three? Well, it might seem like clutter but it works pretty well.