Man. I told myself I wouldn�t buy anything. Not today�I�ll buy on Friday when everything is one dollar. But I found this excellent excellent book. I�m putting it up on my books I love list this week (to be updated every Saturday, I think. Except I�m notoriously lazy, remember, so I�m not really holding myself to any strict thing).

So I�ve been thinking about creating a reading list for myself. I�ve spent my whole life completely undisciplined about reading. I find, therefore, great gaps in my knowledge. I mean great huge canyon-sized gaps. This can lead to no small amount of embarrassment. I had one student asking me questions about The Scarlet Letter last week. I had no clue what to answer. And this actually was a book I�d read in high school but that was so many eons ago and this is the other thing about me�I can�t ever remember the ending to books or movies and so I had no idea what to say to her. I faked it. Ah bloody hell. I need to stop faking it and get some actual knowledge in my brain.

So for that and for myself because I need some kind of direction and I long to know what�s what, I am starting over. I need to read Dickens�reread because again, I read at least two or three of his novels in junior high and high school but I can�t remember them. I need to read Flaubert. It all fades so bloody quickly. I have read Madame Bovary and not that long ago, but I can�t remember anything. And what novella was that? With the parrot��heart� was surely in the title. And of course I need to read all of Henry James. I�ve only read The American and The Bostonians--not even Portrait of a Lady which is his most famous book, isn�t it? And I must go back, start over, with George Eliot. I must reread Silas Marner which I remember hating so fiercely, but Middlemarch is perhaps my favorite novel of all time. And then also I want to read James Joyce (never�not one thing have I read!) and Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald and for god�s sake, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. And Nabokov and D.H. Lawrence and Steinbeck and E. M. Forster and Faulkner and Flannery O�Connor and James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Keroac and Charles Bukowski and Willa Cather and Somerset Maugham and Iris Murdoch and Thomas Hardy and Raymond Chandler and who else who else who else? Tell me.

I am attempting to understand things a bit more, you see. I�ve read a lot, but I�ve read all out of context and I don�t understand anything about the world of fiction or the evolution of the novel or short story or novella. So I�m starting over a bit�I�m looking to read turn of the 20th century or early 20th century (let�s say 1850s-1950s) stuff. So, you know, tell me what I must read all you out there. Tell me now.