A Slight Delay

Another post that Phil suggested, whether he realized it or not. After this, I’ll stop writing about books for a bit. Okay. A day, at least. Here’s my top fifty-two books. I picked 52 of them since you could read one a week and have a year’s worth of good books. The reviews, if you want to call them that, are by no means comprehensive; they’re meant more to give you a small taste (like those tiny little spoons you get at ice cream shops) of what the book’s about. Hopefully you’ll get a good enough idea to want to score a pint copy. Here (in no particular order) goes nothing…

1. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, by Dave Barry. One of those books that you should probably be careful of reading in public; you’ll laugh out loud, getting all sorts of funny, or dirty, looks from those around you.
2. High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. The author’s first book, and still my favorite of the buch. The film, which featured John Cusack and Jack Black, is one of the few that wasn’t a disappointment after reading the novel.
3. Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington: mines some of the same territory that Hornby did in High Fidelity, but will also be familiar to anyone who’s seen “The Office,” or that’s worked in a terribly dysfunctional work environment.
4. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: The author committed suicide some time before the book was published; in the years since, there’s been speculation that it was finished by his mother. Whatever the case may be, by the time the book’s over, you’ll wish that one or the other of them had written another. Ignatius Reilly is literally an unforgettable character.
5. A Crack at the Edge of the World, by Simon Winchester. Winchester first gained acclaim for The Professor and the Madman, a page-turner about the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary (I shit you not). In this work, he turns his attention to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. As with his other works, he examines the history of the event, along with a fascinating explanation of the geology that caused the disaster.
6. The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley. Benchley is, sadly, a largely forgotten figure. From the 1920’s ‘til his death in 1945, though, he was a star, writing witty short pieces for his newspaper column, contributing to the New Yorker in its early days, reviewing theater, appearing in vaudeville, and acting in countless short subjects and feature films. This anthologizes the best of his writing over the course of his career. (more…)

 Thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody for a post that will probably end up killing an afternoon. After the “Read The Rest of This Entry” link, you’ll find a list of 106 books that someone, somewhere, decided that people keep on their bookshelves to make them look smart. While I know some people use books as furniture (cf. Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture” in The Size of Thoughts), I guess I’ve never felt the need to impress someone with my reading list. If I did, I probably wouldn’t keep Dinosaur Bob or Bloom County Babylon in good company with Shakespeare.

Books I’ve read and purchased, I’ve bolded; I’m sure that there are books here that were on everybody’s required academic reading at one time or another, but if I liked it well enough to buy it and read it again, it goes into that category. Books I read at school and never really read again, for one reason or another, I’ve italicized. The rest I’ve just left as is. Here goes nothing… (more…)