I spent part of my day of doing essentially nothing (thank you, Grover Cleveland) rearranging the reading pile next to my bed. Why haven’t I yet bought Jonathan Franzen’s new novel even though I hunger and thirst for it? Because I’ve got this enormous reading pile to get through. I’m trying to read through it, not add to it. Which means that before I get to Franzen I should finish:

Non-fiction:

•  “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan
• “Poor People” by William T. Vollmann
• “The Third Reich in Power” by Richard J. Evans
• “The Fall of the Roman Empire” by Peter Heather
• “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” by Haruki Murakami (I’m almost finished with this one)
• “The Element” by Sir Ken Robinson (and with this one as well)

Business:

• “The Advertising Agency Business” by Eugene J. Hameroff (I’ve read this; I’m now rereading it)
• “Pricing with Confidence” by Reed K. Holden and Mark R. Burton (read this one too; now rereading it)
• “Priceless” by William Poundstone (almost finished)
• “Trust Agents” by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Comics and graphic novels:

• “Death: The Time of Your Life” by Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo, and Mark Buckingham
• “The New Jack Kirby Collector,” volume 31
• “Concrete: Depths,” by Paul Chadwick
• “The Playwright” by Eddie Campbell and Darren White
• a stack of about three dozen recent comics (S.H.I.E.L.D., Doc Savage, Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow, Jonah Hex, B.P.R.D., Secret Warriors, Hercules, Hellblazer, Unknown Soldier, Hulk, Doctor Strange, and a few other things)

Unsolicited plays

• In other words, plays given to me unrequested by friends who wrote them. (And no, please do not send me any.) I’ll read the top two because they’re friends I work with creatively and because fair is fair.

What’s missing? Two things:  magazines and novels. (Or short-story collections.) My rule of thumb with magazines is this:  Be devastatingly quick about it. Get it, read it, recycle it. It’s the only way to get through them. Why no novels? Because I’ve read all the ones that were in my queue. (Not my long-term queue — which consists of one book I think about often but haven’t gotten to yet:  “The Brothers Karamazov.”) I go through binges of reading either a lot of biographies/histories or a lot of novels; I recently ended one of those novel-reading binges. Hence my desire for the new Franzen, “Freedom.” No, I don’t plan to get it right now. But I am leaving for Las Vegas on Thursday…. Watch me pick it up at the airport.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Comics, On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.