What to read...

I’m tired and worn out at the moment so I’ll try to keep this short tonight. I’ll have more time later in the week to try to be witty and clever and explain why a fire truck is a great gift to receive on Christmas morning until your older brothers take it from you but I just don’t really have the creative drive to write that at the moment. Instead I am going to put in a call for a request.

It has been tradition that I spend the month of January reading one incredibly challenging book. This is part of my annual triple reading challenge along with a) reading a Shakespeare play and b) reading something written by a woman. I know that last one sounds horrible and it is but it was added years ago after I looked at everything that I had read over the course of the year and discovered that I did not have a single female author in the bunch. (I’ll always accept any suggestions of female writers that I must read (as long as their names are not Anne Rice or J. K. Rowling)).

In the past I have used the month of January to read books such as Infinite Jest, Ulysses, Faust, On the Road and To Kill a Mockingbird. Ok, so they are not all challenging reads but the idea is really simple. It should be a book of solid artistic merit, the type of book that the lazy student will by a copy of Cliff Notes for, and I must read it over the course of the month. This is meant to fill in the gaps of my non-English major background and take advantage of the fact that January is really cold out so I’ll spend a lot of time at home alone during the month.

So I’m asking everyone out there to throw out the books that you feel that I need to read in order to consider myself an educated individual. Whether you like these books or not really isn’t important. I would prefer them to be worth reading but part of this is meant to be a challenge. Post your thoughts in the comments and I’ll choose the best one to be my focus for the rest of the month.

Until then, I’ll just work on the three books I have with me at the moments: Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (a frank look at Vietnam), a Neil Gaiman career retrospective and “How to Talk to a Widower”, another one of those guy Bridget Jones’ books that I don’t actually like but don’t tax my brain in the least. At least I finished my Shakespeare already.