Winter Reading List

It's the start of a new year. If you needed me to say as much, oh brother, I feel terrible for saying as much. As new years go, it is the custom to make all sorts of resolutions; these things have always seemed like the same things that people say and do at Lent, if they're Catholic.

I don't make new year's resolutions. I never have. Statistically speaking, any resolution that gets made on January one is destined to fail. I've never been able to deal with such failure, such disaster.

Rather, I generally make a really big to do list. And my big to do list may officially kick off on January first, but I compose the list in November.

That's right, I wrote a big list of all the things I'd like to do in 2018 back in November of 2017. I even started to work on these items back in November. This way, I had maybe twenty things out of two hundred already done before the new year even began.

I do plan on writing weekly blogposts. I plan on that every year and I have succeeded most years. Coming into 2018, I had to wonder what I might like to archive, or just to gain from maintaining my blog for another year. I've been doing it, nearly weekly, for over a decade. I mean, please, how much more do I really think I can do?

Of course, I had a few ideas.

Considering my early blog days, my mission was to have something to showcase my work, and have a tangible place to show that I do work. Initially it was Anthony ILacqua Reading, Writing and the Teaching of Writing. The description changed over the years and I eventually dropped the description altogether.

I also seemed to drop the reading part over the years too. For a few reasons reading became secondary. I'm not sure why.

I will admit that I read a fraction of the books that I used to read. This had happened only because my reading hours got replaced with child care hours. And when my time grew tight, reading had to go first. And even my writing time went for the first few years of my son's life.

As time goes on, my time has slowly returned to me. I don't have a demanding schedule, not like I did anyway. I get more writing hours and now, I got more reading hours.

The longer I consider that last point, the more I felt like was time to reinstate the seasonal reading list. So, here it goes.

This reading list is composed entirely of the books people close to me have urged me to read. These have been acquired for the last few years.

1 Jonathan Carroll The Land of Laughs

2 Kurt Vonnegut Cat's Cradle

3 Willa Cather Collected stories

4 John Berendt Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

5 Ursula Hegi Intrusions

6 Michael Ondaatje Anil's Ghost

7 William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

8 Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things

9 William Faulkner As I Lay Dying

10 Jeffery Eugenides Middlesex

11 Sylvia Plath Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

12 Richard Ford Independence Day