30 before 30!

A week or so ago, I turned the big 2-9, and given that I only have just under 360 days left in my 20s, I'm putting together a literary bucket list of sorts:  My 30 before 30.  This is comprised of books I've either been dying to read, should have read by this point, or want to revisit with the perspective of age.


Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck
Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading


Of course I'll supplement with my typical diet of new releases and review all along the way.  Looking forward to getting started!!!

Literary billboards?

Loving it!  

Writers on Reading, Writers on Writing: Jeffrey Eugenides

"What I want in a book is a refuge from the noise and confusion, plus a reminder that another human being is on the other end of the exchange, someone who isn't peddling me false consciousness but is bringing, or at least attempting to bring, things into light...To be different without being confusing, to be radical without promoting a scorched-earth policy, to be intellectual while remaining emotional and to be emotional without succumbing to sentimentality, to find a new form that is immediately negotiable--these would be the aims I'd shoot for, in our drear day."    ~Jeffrey Eugenides 


Read the exchange between Eugenides and Jim Lewis in Slate on the legacy of James Joyce