Reading list for December 2005

Reading list for December 2005

Currently reading
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany - again
Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann - still

Recently read
Paul Arden, It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
Doris Dörrie, Der Mann meiner Träume
Jean-Pierre Luminet, Alexandria 642

Reading Proust is turning into a real marathon, and I'd be lying if I said I was still doing it purely for the pleasure. Not to deny that reading it in the original is nice, but I am painfully aware of how poor my French has become, I'm sure that 90% of the wordplay goes unnoticed by me. And the complicated deep-past-subjunctive verb forms! there are parts that I can only follow because I know them from the English translation.

Every book geek knows what happened in Alexandria in 642 A.D.: the burning of the Great Library by the Muslim invaders. Luminet's book is a historical fiction in this setting, entertaining and thought-provoking for well-read geeks and probably deeply pointless for anyone else.

Summary

The reason I started this reading list, was to discover how many books I read in a year. The answer is (drum roll please) 63, excluding Proust and Irving because I haven't finished them. I have to admit that this is fewer than I expected, I did think I'd average one-and-a-half books a week for the year.

Next month's list
Last month's list