...You may know that your society is doomed.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."

-Ayn Rand (via Francisco D'Anconia)
In Atlas Shrugged

My Essential Reading List.

The title seems to say it all. This however, is only a list of novels.


1) Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
2) 1984 – George Orwell
3) Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
4) The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Sallinger
5) The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
6) Lord of the Flies – William Golding
7) As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
8) The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas
9) Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen
10) War & Peace – Leo Tolstoy
11) Animal Farm – George Orwell
12) Crime & Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
13) Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
14) David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
15) The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
16) Moby Dick – Herman Melville
17) Lolita – Vladimir Nobokov
18) The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
19) East of Eden – John Steinbeck
20) Catch – 22 – Joseph Heller
21) A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
22) Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
23) Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
24) The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
25) Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
26) The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
27) To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
28) A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
29) Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
30) A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
31) One Flew Over the Coockoo's Nest – Ken Kesey
32) Uncle Tom's Cabin – Harriett Beecher Stowe
33) Call of the Wild – Jack London
34) The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingslover
35) Life of Pi – Yann Martel
36) Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
37) Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
38) Watership Down - Richard Adams
39) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
40) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
41) On the Road & The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
42) This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
43) Siddharthra - Herman Hesse
44) Absolam Absolam - Faulker
45) Hey Rube - Hunter S. Thompson
46) Naked Lunch -William Burroughs
47) Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
48) The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
49) Dracula - Bram Stoker
50) Where the Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls
51) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
52) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
53) Ulysses - James Joyce
54) Post Office - Charles Bukowski
55) Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
56) Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
57) Gavity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchoon
58) Island - Aldous Huxley
59) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
60) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
61) Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
62) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
63) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
64) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
65) The Good Soldier - Ford Maddox Ford
66) Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
67) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
68) The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
69) Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
70) Cadide - Voltaire
71) Paradise Lost - John Milton
73) The Border Trilogy - Cormac McCarthy
74) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
75) Any Human Heart - William Boyd
76) Rain of Gold - Victor Villasenor
77) The Republic - Plato
78) Night - Elie Weisel
79) The Constant Gardner - John Le Carre
80) High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
81) A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
82) Rabbit at Rest - John Updike
83) American Pastoral - Philip Roth
84) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John Le Carre
85) A Fan's Notes - Fredrick Exley
86) Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
87) Sophie's Choice - William Styron
88) Roscoe - William Kennedy
89) The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk
90) Lies, Inc - Philip K. Dick
91) The Lime Twig - John Hawkes
92) In the Memory of the Forest - Charles T. Powers
93) Mary's Neck - Booth Tarkington
94) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami


I would love any recommendations that you feel must be added.
cheers.
mb.

Books and words and books.

Last night, I had a dream about Thomas Pynchoon's opus Gravity's Rainbow. Not even about the happenings of the literary work but rather, about the book itself. I have been reading a lot lately but I didn't think I had been reading that much. So far this year I have finished 7 books, and am currently working on Ayn Rand's tome Atlas Shrugged. It is definitely a laborious read but I absolutely loved her earlier work The Fountainhead which I had read earlier in January. I can't say I agree with her philosophy but she is such a wordsmith and a has a sort of very industrial prose that is rather unique. Earlier in the week, I had been discussing Atlas Shrugged with a friend and I compared her to Trent Reznor. A far-fetch analogy I know, but still what he is to music I feel she is to literature. So rarely do we read about the grandiose glory of industrial America. Most writers perceive as a monstrous anomaly with which only greed is spewed. To each their own I suppose but I find the change of pace refreshing. And the books I've completed thus far this year are as follows:

Books Read in 2010:
1) Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
2) Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
3) Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird
4) Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
5) Jack Kerouac - On The Road
6) Stephen Jay Gould - Bully for Brontosaurus
7) Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Hopefully sooner rather than later I get through Atlas Shrugged.
Cheers.
mb.

I love the library.

I have spent my last two days, almost in their entirety, at the local library. I love the silence of mind, I love the company of so many brilliant minds, and most of all I love the whispered scheming and hushed dreams that bounce off every shelf and every hardback. I overheard two probably high-school aged boys planning their great escape to some tropical destination (most likely Los Angeles or New York or Miami or Chicago or at least I hope so for their sake). Then I remembered my initial achings for the coast. What took me there, how I got there, and I envied their youth. I was jealous of their naivete, and for the first time in my life I felt old.

Books by the Dozen.

I have constructed a list of "essential books" that I need to add to my collection and have realized that it is fiscally impossible for me to do so via Amazon or Borders or the likes...

I have therefore started hitting thrift store after thrift store (pounding the pavement as they say) in search of the books on my list. Today, I was able to cross three off my list thanks to thrift store in Belleville, Illinois owned by a friend of mine's brother. I was able to secure each book for a staggering two quarters a piece. I have realized this is the only way to buy books anymore; classics anyways. Sometimes you can even find affordable first editions.

Tomorrow, I will post the list.