Coffee on the Keyboard

Norman Mailer died today.

It doesn’t matter much to me. I didn’t know him. I’d never read any of his books. I rarely read any of his articles or columns, and then only when we crossed paths on the internet.

Norman Mailer

But I have not been reading lately, and the death of such a well-known author did give me cause to think about literature and reading in general. Soon, if the next month goes well, I will suddenly find myself with more free time than I have had in the last 42 months: I will be a college graduate with a 9-5 job and a few friends still in class.

In those 42 months, I have developed a nasty habit of spending my free time idly at my computer; scouring the vast emptiness of the internet for interesting things to read or to see and occasionally talking to real-live humans. I want to break myself of this habit and nurture a new dependency on reading that other great invention: the book.

To that end, I’m starting a list of books I want to read, which is something I should have done years ago. Below I am reproducing this list as an open call for additions and suggestions. This is in no particular order and is based only on what I’ve read recently.

• The Name of the Rose* Umberto Eco.
• The 42nd Parallel John Dos Passos.
• 1919 John Dos Passos.
• The Big Money John Dos Passos.
• The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer.
• Armies of the Night Norman Mailer.
• The Executioner Norman Mailer.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey.
• The Odyssey tr. Stanley Lombardon.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being* Milan Kundera.
• Carrie Stephen King.
• William Marshall* Georges Duby.
• Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell.
• Moby Dick* Herman Melville.
• L’Étranger (in French) Albert Camus.
• The Plague Albert Camus.
• Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov.
• Camera Obscura Vladimir Nabokov.

An * means I’ve already started the book.