Wednesday, February 6, 2008

How Can You Read This? It Has No Pictures!

Intoxicated with that fact that with a click of a button I can order materials from any branch of the San Francisco library system to be delivered to the library at the bottom of my street, I requested books like crazy online. So now here I am, like a college student who doesn't understand how credit works. It was so easy to order all these books, but now I have to acknowledge the fact that I'll probably never get to them all. These books are like another stray to a cat lady or a child to Angelina Jolie. Putting my gluttonous behaviors aside, I can't read them all. As it is, there are books I've been working on since last summer.

1. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo. I'm on page 1180 out of 1463 and for the last dozen pages Hugo has been talking about not only the barricades built between the Rue de la Chanvrerie, but every barricade built in the city of Paris since then - their size, composition, etc.

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I haven't read this in so long I forget what it was about...besides the fact that everyone has the same name...

3. Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi. A wonderful book I got for Christmas about a group of girls who meet secretly to discuss banned books and life. I bet Oprah loves it.

4. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes. The late 19th century has to be one of my favorite time periods ever. Combine that with a fascinating look at the evolution of electricity, and it's a recipe for Haley reading on the Muni. Plus, George Westinghouse was a hottie.

5. Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. I just got this one from the library and read the prologue, but I've been itching to read it ever since I saw it at Borders. It's a look at how the brain has actually evolved to read language - written by a neuroscientist. "Computer scientists use the term 'open architecture' to describe a system that is versitile enough to change - or rearrange - to accommodate the varying demands on it," writes Wolf. "Our brain presents a beautiful example of open architecture."

6. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. After I read about this book on the New York Times top ten list of 2007 I really wanted to read it. I love love love memoirs and books about the depression, and a book by someone named Mildred has to be good.

7. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, by Marc J. Seifer. Oh Tesla, you are so weird and fascinating. You only do things in multiples of threes and hate women's earrings, but I can't stop reading about you. Sadly, this book looks pretty thick - I don't know if I'll be able to get through it before I have to return it.