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Reading List

Last year I read Dante’s Inferno. It was a surprisingly good read, thanks to a fantastic translation, great notes by the translator, and very fine and handsome craftsmanship of the physical object itself.

However, I felt many of the finer points of the allusions were lost on me (the notes do a great job of getting the gist of the thing) since my knowledge of Greek & Roman mythology is very foggy at best and often times outright absent. After some research, I created a brief reading list that should fill in the gaps before I dig into Purgatory and Paradise.

Shortly after I finished Inferno I also discovered NYRB Classics, a series of books being issued by the New York Review of Books’s publishing arm. It’s a fascinatingly eclectic mixture to which I’ve become somewhat addicted.

In fact, that addiction has slowed my progress through the pre-Dante reading list and is causing my monthly periodical reading to back up. In order to serve both desires, I’m merging and publishing these reading lists. I hope this structured exercise and the shame of public failure if I don’t follow through will get me back on track.

Here then, with Amazon Associate links to make me wealthy, is the list, no longer brief:

• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
• Metamorphoses of Ovid I started with Allan Mandelbaum’s translation because his version of Divine Comedy is so good. However, his Metamorphoses has no notes, which makes for at times extremely confusing reading, too-big dimensions that make it a pain to hold, and suspect binding that probably won’t last multiple readings. I’ll be starting over with Charles Martin’s translation.
• Realms of Fantasy (about a year’s worth—six or seven—of back issues; and Yes! RoF is coming back this fall.)
• My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley
• Illiad translated by Robert Fagles
• The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, translated by Larry Korn
• Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles
• Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman
• Aeneid translated by Robert Fagles
• Stoner by John Williams
• Purgatory translated by Allen Mandelbaum
• The Other House by Henry James
• Paradise translated by Allen Mandelbaum
• Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
• Beowolf translated and edited by Seamus Heaney
• My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley
• Gilgamesh translated by Andrew George
• The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrel

I’m guessing this will take me into January of 2010.

If you are curious, here are the other NYRB Classics I’ve read so far, in the order I’ve read them:

• The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton; might be “too British” and slow burning for some, but the climax and denouement are very satisfying.
• The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated by Joel Rotenberg; breathtaking, my favorite so far, still haunts me.
• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes; horrifyingly matter-of-fact, a great novel.
• White Walls by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated by Jamey Gambrell and Antonina Bouis; collection of short stories by a contemporary Russian author who has been compared to Nabokov and Chekhov—some of the most amazing prose I’ve read. I recommend taking your time with and between stories. Reading it straight through was too much and didn’t give the individual tales the space they need to really resonate. I’m looking forward to picking this up again and again in the future to reread.