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June 14, 2006
summer reading list
The summer reading pile started small. A trip to Mercer Street Books (at Bleecker and Broadway, smack dab between the east and the west Village) around midnight on Saturday night left me with a very do-able three titles. But my hope of how many pages I can read a day inflated like a housing market riding a bubble with my visit to the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore City on Monday (eight books, 2200 pages). Here is the annotated list as it stands now (notice the few math books thrown in here in case any of the faculty find my blog — gotta make it look like I’m doing me some math this summer!):
(in rough order of priority)
Old School by Tobias Wolff
His story “Bullet in the Brain” has stuck with me ever since I read it five or so years ago. This is his a novel (maybe his only one). I’ve started it. It’s okay so far. Set at a east-coast prep school in the 60s. Nothing earth-shaking.
About A Boy by Nick Hornby
People have been telling me I need to read some of his stuff, and I liked High Fidelity (the movie) quite a bit. That’s all it took to get me to drop $8 on this puppy at Mercer St.
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
When I was at Harpers in ‘01 we rejected the title story for this collection. I thought it was a mistake, but the fiction-picking editorial sessions saw some serious pissing contests between the editors, especially when they had an opportunity to show how edgy they were by rejecting a story by one of the hippest writers around.
“The Mayflower Moment: Reading Whitman during the Vietnam War” by Patricia Hampl (found in I Could Tell You Stories)
Recommended by my friend Josh. He’s political. He studies American Lit at Penn. He said I should read this for a nice treatment of nationalism and a folksy, populist notion of America. Or something like that.
Classification and Regression Trees by Breiman et al.
Mmmmm, math….. Looks like I’m going to be doing some work on these kinds of predictive models this summer, and this seems to be the definitive book.
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaassen
Recommended by gribley as a good anti-corporate page-turner.
Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws by Manfred Schroeder
Couldn’t resist this as I used to do some research on chaos theory (as an undergrad) and I’ve been intruiged by power laws since I’ve been doing more stats and reading some Malcolm Gladwell…
Geralds Party by Robert Coover
Enjoyed The Universal Baseball association over spring break, figured I’d try another.
Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell
I’m feeling like never having read any Russell is a glaring gap in my mathematical/philosophical history.
Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner
Recommended by musician, sage, mystic, all-round-crazy guy John Kruth.
Essays in Analysis by Bertrand Russell
see above.
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
People have been telling me to read this for a long time. It’s very long.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Also long, but I think I might have a better chance of getting into it now than when I started it as a over-earnest high school senior.
The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover
It’s short (maybe 30 pages) and by Coover.
Posted by nick at June 14, 2006 12:10 PM
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