A Trip to my Childhood Bookstore

I never come on a visit to my childhood home of Washington, DC without making a (consistently very indulgent and biblioholic) visit to our neighborhood bookstore, Politics and Prose. The bookstore has been in this neighborhood for as long as my family has (i.e. decades), and I can't (not even one time) resist the remainder section sandwiched between the children's nook and the coffee-shop in the basement. So here is my haul from yesterday, when my mother and I left for what we claimed was a healthy, long walk, and I returned with two huge bags of books:

Apologies for the imprecise focus on this first picture - my camera's autofocus is staging a small-scale rebellion. Here's what I have here:

• Platform by Michel Houellebecq, which is on my list of 1001 books I must read before I die.
  
• Mountain Time by Ivan Doig, whose work was recommended highly in a recent issue of Bookmarks
  
• Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem, whose Men and Cartoons I recently read and disliked. Lethem fans on LibraryThing, however, convinced me that I had not chosen the most appropriate starting point.
  
• The Caged Virgin by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. After fleeing an arranged marriage in Somalia, Ali became Theo van Gogh's collaborator on the film that led to his assassination and was later elected to the Dutch parliament. She is an eloquent (if controversial) figure, and I have been eager to take a gander at this book since I first heard her speak about it on various radio programs.
  
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire, which almost everyone else in the world besides me seems to have read already
  
• The Stories of Alice Adams
  
• The Heart of Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
  

• After the Fall by Arthur Miller, the premier production of which my mother actually saw. The only time I ever saw the play I was swaying gently in the lighting booth and running a 103 degree fever. So perhaps it is time for another encounter.
• Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays - a lot of equivocation that comes after the bold word "complete" in this title, but this is a book I have long felt the absence of on my shelf.
• The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction by John Phillips, because a fictional version of the Marquis himself makes a prominent appearance in my dissertation
• Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement by Fergus M. Bordewich
• Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra
• The Golden Bowl by Henry James, a novel so dense that my friends and I inserted it into our favorite board game: if you drew the "Heckling Henry" card, you became so engrossed in reading a single sentence of The Golden Bowl that you missed your next two turns.
  
• Two Lives by Vikram Seth - To date, the only Seth I have read is (oddly enough) The Golden Gate, his long verse novel. Two Lives was very well received, so it will go on my list of other Vikram Seth books I am desperate to read but are too heavy to transport away from my parents' house.
  
• Plato's Symposium
• The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Mohommed to the Reformation by Richard Fletcher
  

July Reading Goals

So, naturally, after last month's total reading goal failure, I am going to be more prudent in the number and difficulty of reading goals I set for myself this month. Ha! (Ha, I say!)

In all honesty, I feel a little more confident about the amount of time I have to devote to reading over the next month, since I will be settled (for the most part) in one place, working on my dissertation, and avoiding the epic car trips and midnight plane journeys that characterized June. So, another month of unbridled readerly ambition. I will let you know how it goes. (And I should say that I form these goals as a challenge to the upper limits of my time and ability, not fully expecting to be able to finish every book I set my sights on. Still, it would be nice to get a little closer to completion than I did last month.)

• New York Times Notable Books Challenge
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
• Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury
• [If I have time: Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, which I was meant to read last month]
  
• Year of Down Under (the same two short books as last month)
  
• Alice Springs by Nikki Gemmell
• The Cardboard Crown by Martin Boyd
  
• 52 Plays/52 Weeks Challenge
• Let's be serious, now: at least 10 plays this month.
  
• Non-fiction Five Challenge
• Watching the English by Kate Fox, which I am halfway through.
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Chunkster Challenge (sneakily extended by one month to enable me to finish my last two books
• Watching the English (see above)
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (also a work-long-in-process for me, and an enjoyable one at that)
  
• Book Groups
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Classic Lit)
• The Vision of Emma Blau by Ursula Hegi (21st C Fiction)
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (Beyond Reality)
• Hard-boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami (Beyond Reality)
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme (Book Awards)
• Black Swan Green (see above) (Booker Prize)
• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (Slaves of Golconda)
• David Copperfield (see above) (Inimitable Boz)
  
• Preparing for teaching next year
• The Iliad by Homer
• As much Euripides as I can fit into my 52 plays project.
  
• Unaffiliated Reading
• The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin (I am halfway through this read from last month)
• Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning
• Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (which has been sitting on my "currently reading" list for far, far too long)
  

So, all in all, I am aiming to finish a novel-length book (fiction or non-fiction) about every second day, and a play every third day. Well, we can but dream.

(And it is so fun to plot my imaginary reading.)

June Goals - a Clear-Eyed Assessment

So, while I work on some longer posts incorporating my pictures from the California coast, I thought I would take a long hard look at how many of my (admittedly ambitious) June reading goals I actually accomplished. The works I actually finished are in italics.

• Once Upon a Time Challenge - FINISHED
  
• "The Golden Ass" by Apuleius
  
• "Metamorphoses" by Ovid - alas, not even started
  
• "Morphology of the Folktale" by Propp
  
• (Optional) John Gardner's "Grendel" - my replacement in the Challenge for the Ovid
  
• New York Times Notable Book Challenge - I am even farther behind now than I was at this time last month, so I will have to give this challenge some serious attention this month.
  
• "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai
• Elias Khoury's "Gate of the Sun"
  
• Non-fiction Five Challenge - I still haven't finished a single book for this challenge (gulp), although they all look so appealing, gazing at me from the shelf. Another must-do project for this month. I am, however, halfway through another chunky selection for this challenge, "Watching the English" by anthropologist Kate Fox.
  
• "1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare" by Shapiro
• Capote's "In Cold Blood"
  
• Year of Down Under - For a long time this was the only challenge I was caught up on. Well, no more.
  
• "Alice Springs" by Nikki Gemmell
• "The Cardboard Crown" by Martin Boyd
  
• 52 plays 2007 Challenge
• 6 this month - Well (ha ha!), no. But I feel confident that now that I am really getting down to work this month (chortle), reading drama shouldn't be a problem.
  
• Chunkster Challenge - (God, what a grim parade of non-accomplishment) Well, this challenge is officially over, and I only completed 4 of the 6 I promised to consume. I am halfway through two others, though, ("David Copperfield" and "Watching the English") so maybe I will be lenient with myself and allow a purely indulgent one month extension.
  
• "David Copperfield"
  
• "Cloudsplitter" by Russell Banks
  
• Reading Groups (all on Yahoo!) - nope, nope, and nope.
  
• Inimitable Boz - "David Copperfield"
  
• Book Awards - "The Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields
• 20th Century World Lit - "Cloudsplitter"
  
• Non-Challenge, non-reading group books: (Ha! here, in the realm of non-required reading, is where I really shone. That is, where I accomplished a whopping 50% of my goals)
  
• "Housekeeping," Marilynne Robinson's first novel
  
• Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"
• "Booked to Die" by John Dunning
• "The Farthest Shore," the third in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series. (I am halfway through this as we speak. Or rather, as I type and you read. If you are reading at the beginning of July.)

So, a grand total of 5 books. Sigh. Well, I blame the almost ceaseless travel this month. That's right, astonishing new places and people I encountered, it's your fault I didn't read more in 2007. How can you live with yourselves? I'm looking at you, Hawaiian turtles and Californian otters.*

P.S. Why is this post written in uncharacteristic black font? To express my shame at having met only a tiny fraction of my goals.**



*Pictures of the latter coming soon.
** Actually, blogger's font settings are acting up a bit for me. I may just stick to my same-old, same-old style from this point foreward. Trying to highlight the titles of my goals caused nothing but trouble.