I Miss (Enjoying) Reading

Lately I've been feeling very "blah" about books.
I have to literally force myself to read every night. Reading is becoming more of a chore than a relaxing activity and that worries me. I used to loveee reading! Also, I'm not in class this semester and I fear I may become dumber and less able to concentrate if I stop educating myself through recreational reading. Or maybe I'm just reading books that do not really interest me right now. Once I start a book though, I need to finish it.

The two puppies that I've been working tirelessly on for a bit are
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (Super good, but sooo long, I feel like I've been reading it for a year. I'm just ready to be done with it already.)



and Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Not as funny as I initially thought.)


I also started Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger the other day (Which I loveeee, but I really want to finish other two books before I really get into it.)



Today however, I came across two lists of books to read that I think (hope) with reinvigorate my appetite for literature.
They are: 100 books every man should read (http://artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books-the-essential-mans-library/) and 100 books every woman should read (http://www.thecompletewomanblog.com/2009/01/100-books-every-woman-should-read-1/).
I'm going to (try to) read all of them.
In doing so, I shall conquer the looming fate of my own illiteracy while also mastering the complexities of both the male and female sexes. Or not...but it's a good challenge :).

Here they are, I'll update this post and review each in a new post as I go.
I think my strategy will be to read the books alphabetically by author.
And if more than one book by one author is listed, I will read them in chronological order by the date they were published.
Also, even if I've read a book on the list before I'm going to re-read it.

(Obviously if a book is cross-listed I'm just going to read it once...but if that's the case, it's probably a super awesome book so maybe I will read it twice just for fun)

Yay! Excited! Books!

200ish Books Men/Women Should Read
*cross listed
bold = read

Chinua Acebe: Things Fall Apart
Douglas Adams: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide
Lousia May Alcott: Little Women
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy*
William Alocott: The Young Man's Guide
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
Stephen Ambrose: Undaunted Courage
Aristotle: The Politics
Saint Augustine: The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Jane Austen:

• Sense and Sensibility
• Pride and Prejudice
• Mansfield Park
• Emma
• Northanger Abbey
• Persuasion
  

Daniel Carter Beard: The American Boys' Handy Book
Boy Scouts of America: The First Edition of The Boy Scout Handbook
James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Pearl S. Buck: The Good Earth
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita*
John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes
John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
Italo Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
Geoffrey Chaucher: The Canterbury Tales
Anton Checkhov: Short Stories
G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
Winston Churchill: The Crisis
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Daniel Dafoe: Robinson Crusoe
Roald Dahl: The BFG
Joy Davidman: Smoke on the Mountain
Don Delillo: White Noise
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Fyodor Dostoevsky:

• Crime and Punishment*
  
• The Idiot
  
• Brothers Karamazov

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo*
Umberto Eco:

• The Name of the Rose
  
• Foucault's Pendulum

George Eliot:

• The Mill on the Floss
• Middlemarch
  

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self Reliance
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
Dorothy Canfield Fisher: Seasoned Timber
F. Scott Fitzgerald:

• This Side of Paradise
  
• The Great Gatsby

E.M. Forster: Howard's End
Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
William Golding: The Lord of the Flies
Kennethe Grahame: The Wind in the Willows
Graham Green: The Human Factor
H. Rider Haggard:

• King Solomon's Mines
• She
  

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
Cicely Hamilton: William: An Englishman
Dashiell Hammet: The Maltese Falcon
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlett Letter
Ernest Hemingway:

• Men Without Women
  
• A Farewell to Arms
  
• For Whom the Bell Tolls

Herodotus: The Histories
Herman Hesse: Steppenwolf
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey*
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World*
Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House
Conn and Hal Iggulden: The Dangerous Book for Boys
Denis Johnson: Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
James Jones:

• From Here to Eternity
• The Thin Red Line
  

James Joyce: Ulysses
Roger Kahn: The Boys of Summer
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
Jack Kerouac:

• On the Road
  
• Dharma Bums

Soren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling
Maxine Hong Kingston:

• China Men
  
• The Woman Warrior

John Knowles: A Separate Peace
John Krakauer:

• Into the Wild
  
• Into Thin Air

D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird*
Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera
C.S. Lewis:

• The Great Divorce
  
• Chronicles of Narnia Collection
  
• Till We Have Faces
  

Jack London: Call of the Wild
George Macdonald: Lilith
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince*
Denis Mackail: Greenery Street
Norman F. Maclean: A River Runs Through It
Norman Mailer: The Naked and The Dead
Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur
Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers
Catherine Marshall: Christy
W. Somerset Maugham: The Razor's Edge
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Larry McMurty: Lonesome Dove
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer
John Milton: Paradise Lost*
Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind
Edmund Morris

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
• Theodore Rex

Freidrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil
Flannery O'Conner: A Good Man is Hard to Find
Baroness Emmuska Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernal
George Orwell:

• Animal Farm*
• 1984

Ovid: Metamorphoses
Thomas Paine: Common Sense
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Gary Paulson: Hatchet
Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Christine De Pizan: The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry
Plato: The Republic*
Plutarch: Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans
Gene Stratton-Porter: A Girl of the Limberlost
Peter Post: Essential Manners for Men
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
Erich Maria Remarq: All Quiet on The Western Front
Tom Robbins: Another Roadside Attraction
Theodore Roosevelt:

• The Rough Riders
  
• The Strenuous Life

Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac*
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher and the Rye
Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
Anna Sewell: Black Beauty
Shakespeare:

• Hamlet*
• The Complete Works
  

Michael Sharra: The Killer Angels
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein*
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Robert Southey: The Chronicle of the Sid
Elizabeth George Speare: The Witch of Blackbeard Pond
John Steinbeck:

• The Grapes of Wrath*
• Cannery Row
  
• The Pearl*
  
• East of Eden
  

Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Paul Theroux: The Great Railway Bazaar
Henry David Thoreau: Walden*
J.R.R. Tolkein:

• The Hobbit
• Lord of the Rings Triology
  

Leo Tolstoy

• Anna Karenina
  

John Kennedy Toole: Confederacy of Dunces
Frederick Jackson Turner: The Frontier in American History
Mark Twain:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Joan of Arc
  

Sun Tzu: The Art of Warfare*
Unknown:

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Bible*
  

Kurt Vonnegut:

• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Bluebeard

Lew Wallace: Ben-Hur
Winifred Watson: Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
H.G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau
Dorothy Whipple: The Priory
Oscar Wilde:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Importance of Being Earnest
  

Owen Wister: The Virginian
P.G. Wodehouse: Very Good, Jeeves
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Johann David Wyss: Swiss Family Robinson
Malcolm X: Malcolm X: The Autobiography

Activities of An Isomniac (This One to be Exact)

Loads of people have trouble falling asleep at night, and I am unfortunately one of that multitude. When I am lying there in my bed not sleeping, I am instead spending the wee hours of the night/morning doing the following (5 the least often, and so on to 1):

5) Planning the Next Day:
VS.
I envision myself waking up early, doing yoga, eating healthy meals, doing productive things, and going on adventures. However, the next day I usually get up at 12, eat less than healthy meals, do nothing productive, watch about 8 hours of Mad Men/Conan/Craig/30 Rock, waste money on movie tickets/dinner/unnecessary purchases such as tv box sets, and then go back to bed. The initial exercise of planning is therefore pointless and kind of sad. Which leads me to my next activity...

4) Berating Myself:

Here are some sample questions I ask myself/torture myself with: "Why didn't you do anything today?" "Don't you know that your time on this earth gets shorter every day?" "Why didn't you flirt back with that cute boy on the T?" "Shouldn't you have taken a shower today?"

3) Having Mock Conversations:

Such as with the aforementioned "cute boy on the T". We usually discuss how excited we both are for the last season of Lost, how awesome fun. is, and the changes in Conan's approach to comedy on the Tonight Show compared to Late Night.
Wow. That looks even sadder written down.
Moral of the story: worst life.

2) Writing:

I am currently typing The Rum Diary on my portable underwood, and writing The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye in notebooks. I started doing this because I read/saw? somewhere that Hunter S. Thompson used to type his favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway works to better understand the flow of the writing.
There are sometimes (sad) attempts at writing my own stuff, mainly poems and short stories.
I have also started (and scrapped/gave up on) mock Grey's Anatomy scripts, an orginal tv series called "Chuckleheads", and the next great american novel about 12 times.
On another note: Why haven't I become a wunderkind yet?

1) Interviewing For Prospective Jobs:

I do this a lot in the shower as well. For reasons unknown, I really enjoy daydreaming about future interviews I will go on. (While re-reading this before posting it I am proud that I wrote "will" instead of "want to" or "might") It is usually for jobs with NBC page program, Tonight Show, 30 Rock, Late Late Show, or SNL. Basically what I do is think of what kind of questions they will ask me, and then attempt to craft the perfect response. I've come to the conclusion that if I never get a job in television the last few years of my life may or may not have been a waste.