The Wife:

I know we don’t usually foray into books on this blog, tending to focus our pop culture prowess on television and – if we ever get around to writing about them – movies. I often wonder about the question of accessibility and communal experience when it comes to books, and while I would say that they are currently a less accessible medium than movies or television, literature has a great history of influence over popular culture and I would be remiss to leave them out of a blog that claims to be dedicated to pop culture narratives. I spend a lot of time reading on the train, in addition to all the television I watch, and I wanted to share some proof of that with my readers. Here’s my reading list from 2008, complete with page count. (An asterisk indicates that a book is very highly recommended by me.)

    1) Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes* (Edith Grossman translation) (932 pages)
    2) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (384 pages)
    3) The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (159 pages)
    4) Struwwellpeter by Heinrich Hoffman, Sarita Vendetta and Jack Zipes (124 pages)
    5) This Side of Paradise* by F. Scott Fitzgerald (244 pages)
    6) Ahab’s Wife: Or, the Star-gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund (704 pages)
    7) Slam by Nick Hornby (304 pages)
    8) Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins (422 pages)
    9) Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (303 pages)
    10) House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (709 pages)
    11) The Life of Language by Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer (400 pages)
    12) The Grapes of Wrath* by John Steinbeck (455 pages)
    13) Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence (560 pages)
    14) In Defense of Food* by Michael Pollan (244 pages)
    15) I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley (240 pages)
    16) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (576 pages)
    17) Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (385 pages)
    18) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao* by Junot Diaz (355 pages)
    19) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (418 pages)
    20) Um: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean by Michael Erard (320 pages)
    21) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (176 pages)
    22) World War Z by Max Brooks (352 pages)
    23) All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen (256 pages)
    24) Paradise Lost by John Milton (442 pages)
    25) A Cook’s Tour* by Anthony Bourdain (288 pages)
    26) Blindness by Jose Saramango (304 pages)
    27) When You Are Engulfed in Flames* by David Sedaris (336 pages)
    28) The Greek Plays* by Ellen McLoughlin (240 pages)
    29) On the Road by Jack Kerouac (320 pages)
    30) Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (544 pages)
    31) My Antonia* by Willa Cather (226 pages)
    32) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (228 pages)
    33) The History of Love* by Nicole Krauss (272 pages)
    34) The Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (220 pages)
    35) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (326 pages)
    36) Decantations by Frank J. Prail (320 pages)
    37) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (336 pages)
    38) New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (563 pages)

Total Pages Read in 2008: 13,987