Books, The Last Book

The Braintree, Massachusetts Borders is having an everything-must-go-going-out-of-business sale: everything is 40% to 70% off.  I'm a bit disappointed because Borders is a better book store than Barnes & Noble, but after visting several times, I have put together a huge backlog of reading material, so the loss of one Borders is not going to significantly impact my life.

Plus, I can speculate on what book will be the last sold: will it be Arthur Agatston's The South Beach Diet?  Sarah Palin's masterpiece, America by Heart?  Could it be one of the many books remaining in the holocaust section?  Or Bill O'Reilly's porno novel?  And what does the last book say about human nature?  What does it say about Massachusetts?

Anyways, in the few weeks I've been home, I've managed to get my hands on several books that I've wanted to read for quite some time, and I'm making reading them a priority for this spring and summer.  Here they are in the order in which I intend to read them.  (Reviews should appear spread throughout the next several months.)

1.  The Pale King - David Foster Wallace - I don't really have high expectations for this one, since Wallace was a perfectionist and this book was just pieced together from some papers he left on his desk.  That's a dick move if you ask me.  (Of course, I still have to read it.)    

2.  The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 - edited by Jerome Groopman - The Best American series is excellent.  This will be the first time I read the science and nature anthology, and I'm looking forward to it.  In general, science writing in America is poor, but there are some gems out there.  Those gems are likely to be displayed in the Best American series.

3.  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - Jurgen Habermas - I started reading this classic work several months ago, and it's fairly short, so I should finish it quickly.  Describing Habermas's work is really beyond my abilities, but so far I would recommend it highly.  I think.    

4.  Zeitoun - Dave Eggers - The McSweeney's founder ties together the two great failures of the Bush Administration - Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror - in this nonfiction offering.

5.  Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene - the 1959 thriller/satire provides a light break among some relatively heavy tomes.  (Good band name!)

6.  The Song of Roland - translated from the Old French by Glyn Burgess - Long before the French demigods Joan of Arc, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Gerard Depardieu, there was the French demigod, Roland.  I'm excited to read this extraordinarily violent primary account of the medieval battle in which the eponymous one perished.

7.  The Best American Travel Writing 2010 - edited by Bill Buford - I read 2007, 2008, and 2009 when I was hellbent on becoming a travel writer (I still am).  Travel writing continues to be grossly underread and far from the mainstream - definitely compared to science writing, which is qualitatively poorer.

8.  A Passage to India - E.M. Forster - Forster has long been one of my favorite novelists.  I've never read a Passage to India, but if it's half as good as Howard's End, it's a masterpiece.

9.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales - Oliver Sacks - I don't believe I've ever read anything by Dr. Sacks, but his reputation certainly precedes him.  Sacks has introduced the world to Temple Grandin and many other incredible people.  In addition to being a top writer, he's a top neurologist. 

10.  The Social Transformation of American Medicine - Paul Starr - This 500-page-massive scholarly work won the 1983 C. Wright Mills Award in sociology, the 1984 Bancroft Prize in American history, and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction.  It's required reading for anyone interested in medicine or public health.

11.  The Authenticity Hoax - Andrew Potter - I've long been a reader of Potter's blog of the same name, so I'm sure this book will leave me even more amazed/depressed/nihilistic than I am now.  So why would I read it?  When I was little, I was always the kid who picked up the snakes and spiders he found in his backyard; so even though I know I will probably come out of this book even more bitter than I will be going in, I'm going to read it anyways, but I'll make it last so I can enjoy the summer. 

If anyone else wants to read these books as well and have an online book club of sorts, let's do it.  I'll be discussing the themes of the texts above all summer long, so it might help to share a common background with the Inductive readership.