Journal

Reading Lists

My friend is planning a reading list for the coming semester. I believe he would like to read more widely and to be exposed to literature of a certain depth. In a way, he’s not been quite a literary sort of bloke. He’s not even been reading a lot. So when he asked me to choose between certain books that he had in mind, I thought it would be an opportunity to suggest things, to maybe take him out of his comfort zone and challenge him a bit. I hoped that by cooking up a list of suggestions, he had a chance of finding something artistically exciting, something completely brand new to him, or–who knows–something somewhat life-changing.

The task is kind of trickier than I would have supposed. I mean, if you had to suggest a nice set of reading materials for a friend of yours, what would you put on it? It certainly can’t be a Greatest Hits album of any sort because you’ve everyone’s different and you’ve got to tailor it to your friend. And you want to assemble a list that’s wide enough to represent a variety of writing in a case like this. So I sought to put together writing not just in an array of styles, but also an assortment of forms. My final suggested list consisted of short fiction, poetry, a play, two novels, and a number of essays.

I tried to draw from a reasonably broad base of writers and also to avoid recommending anything I thought he might find difficult to get into. I also avoided anything too long except for one long novel (Saramago’s Blindness) because he claims to be a slow reader and the amount of investment or discipline required for a longer work is not something he’s quite acquainted with, particularly with our schedule for this upcoming semester. Finally, I picked things that I thought might appeal to him (aesthetically, philosophically, or in terms of plot).

So eventually I emerged with a list that contained things of importance (the world can never read enough Borges), the poetry of my youth (Eliot), and a host of influences that I hold dear. In retrospect, I could possibly have cast a wider net, pooled together a more comprehensive and diverse representation of writing (the poets are mainly American and the rest of them are m

And so I had a tidy little list that he might conceivably make use of. I don’t know, but in the meantime, I have to admit to being quite proud of it.

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