Since I entered and graduated college, it has come to my attention that I’m a bit of a literary idiot. An avid reader since kindergarten (Me ‘n my bestie read more books than anyone in my class and so my teacher took us out for McDonald’s and a movie but when “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” wasn’t playing in my hometown, she took us to see “Weekend at Bernie’s”. Not kidding.) I’ve always been an overachiever in my own pleasure reading - I was always “that kid” who’d read all of my summer reading requirements by July. But, it’s come to my attention that I’ve read maybe 1/3 of what’s considered imperative for a normal graduate of the American public school system and maybe 1/5 of what is expected of a friggin’ English major. (This inevitably had a lot to do with the fact that my last two years of high school were spent at an institution that hardly noticed I was never there and didn’t really assign us anything useful to begin with.) Naturally, within the company I adopted while earning an English degree, my literary ignorance was punctuated and I often felt myself asking, “Um, why haven’t I read any Faulkner/Poe/Huxley/Friedan/Vonnegut/Emerson/Whitman/Sarte/Voltaire/Heller yet?” and then immediately feeling like an idiot for it. The problem was that, while in undergrad I was busy reading 15-ish books for my literature classes anyway (which I LOVED) so I didn’t really have time to stay going after these others that had somehow slipped by me. Now, with a library 3 miles from my home, I feel like I have the perfect opportunity to delve into the classics I desperately need to expose myself to. True, I don’t have a lot of spare time, but I do read for about an hour before I go to sleep every night and I think that if I really focus on this little side project, I can knock out a handful of essentials. At the casual pace I set for myself, I usually knock out 20-ish books a year but I’m thinking I might set a goal for myself from now until 2011… And yes, I’m fully aware this makes me a giant post-grad English nerd. I just don’t want to look/sound like a moron anymore when my peers are making literary references and I’m just staring blankly at nothing in particular. (Not that I feel like I’ve been selling myself short by reading a crapload of Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Sedaris and Eggers and Crosley and Palahniuk and Klosterman, by the way. They’re the neo-canon as far as I’m concerned… well, except when Eggers tries fiction. What a snooze.)

So here’s the tentative list I’d like to valiantly attempt to conquer by 2011. I’m going to be working to get myself back into school during that time so I won’t have any homework getting in the way of this just yet. I also kinda thought about doing a separate blog on this kinda like that woman who cooked a Julia Child recipe every day for a year that became a book and then a movie, but I thought that would appeal to no one, so I’m skipping that ridiculous endeavor and just working on the self-improvement aspect of exposing myself to a crapload of important literature.

If you have any suggestions/recommendations/reminders of what I may have forgotten, let me know. Again, this is just a starting point:

At the moment I’m reading “A Light in August” by Will Faulkner.
Next up is “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman.
(I was reminded of my desire to read this by that new Levi’s commerical that recites “Pioneers, O Pioneers.” Although pretentious with all the models and such, I actually think the commercial is beautiful and a great way to bring classic poetry into mainstream.)
And I’ve been working on “Bonfire of the Vanities” by Wolfe for a while but I cannot get into it. I’ll keep trying.
Next up is Voltaire’s “Candide”
and then “Anna Karenina” which I’ve had staring at me from my shelf for literally 5 years now
and then Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”
Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique”
“As I Lay Dying” and “The Sound and the Fury” ~ Faulkner
“Notes from Underground” - Dostoevsky
“Song of Myself” ~ Whitman
“Cyrano de Bergerac” ~ Rostand
“Moby Dick” ~ Melville (I know, it’s a crying shame I haven’t read that one.)
“Nausea” - Sarte
“Portrait of a Lady” ~ James
“Scenes of Bohemian Life” ~ Murger
“Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom” and “Letters from Prison” ~Marquis de Sade
“Brave New World” - Huxley (aaaanother shame)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” ~ Stowe
“Old Man and the Sea” ~ Hemingway (I’ve been to the man’s house so I feel I owe him another chance after “Farewell to Arms” which I loathed.)
“Fall of the House of Usher” ~ Poe
“Three Lives” and “Tender Buttons” ~ Stein
“Catch-22″ - Heller
“Call of the Wild” ~ London (I know… I’m a damned shame…)
“The Complete Works of Emerson and Thoreau” ~ Um.. Emerson and Thoreau
“The Second Sex” ~ de Beauvoir
“The Life you Save may be Your Own” ~ Elie
“Middlemarch” ~ Eliot
“Tess of the Turbevilles” ~ Hardy
“Watership Down” ~ Adams
“Pillars of the Earth” ~ Follett
“Grapes of Wrath” ~ Steinbeck
“Tale of Two Cities” ~ Dickens
“Midnight’s Children” ~ Rushdie
“Breakfast of Champions” ~ Vonnegut
“Of Mice and Men” ~ Steinbeck
“Flowers of Evil” ~Baudelaire
“All Quiet on the Western Front” ~ Remarque
“Ulysses” ~ Joyce (another shame)
“Jane Eyre” ~ Bronte (I know.. shameful)
“Lady Chatterly’s Lover” ~ D.H. Lawrence
“Tropic of Cancer” ~ Miller
“The Reef” and/or “Ethan Frome” ~ Wharton (LOVED “House of Mirth”… not so much “Age of Innocence”)
“The Venus Firs” ~ Sacher-Masoch
“Junky” “Naked Lunch” and “Queer” ~ Burroughs
“Fear and Loathing…” ~ Thompson
“Howl & Other Poems” ~ Ginsberg
and the Narrative of Douglass

Various stuff by Sandburg (I’ve been to his house!) and Wordsworth and O’Connor and Pound and Frost and Franklin and Ibsen and Carver and Welty and Emily Dickenson, too. Of course, if I take a liking to one of these guys/gals, I may stay there for a while (there’s a lot of Melville I have to cover.) but if something sucks halfway through then I’m not waiting until the end for it to get better like I did with “Red Badge of Courage” and countless other pointless “classics.” And I’m going to try to get into some philosophy/political writings while I’m there: Rousseau, Diderot, Boccaccio, Plato, Descartes, Wollstonecraft (I did read some Plato and Socrates in my rhetoric classes but it’s all gone out the window since then. As far as I’m concerned “logos” is that amazing gay channel between Showtime and HBO”) I’m also going to make it a point to do at least a little brief reading about the author so I have some frame of reference to draw from while I’m reading. I don’t think there’s anyone less educated about who came from what era and what part of the globe than I when it comes to literary figures. (Poe was from the 60’s, right? Or no! He was 1890’s Bohemia. duh…)

…And maybe I’ll sneak in Klosterman’s “Fargo, Rock City“… I’ve been meaning to get to that one for a while.

Crap. Maybe I should give myself until 2012.