2008

Hesitation abound as I sit at my laptop, reviewing the reading I have done during 2008. It is well known that I struggle with the arbitrariness of temporal distinctions, affording them, no truth. Despite this, I feel the desire to take an intellectual field trip and analyze what I read. Below I have ranked what I read by category. I find it difficult to define exactly how I arrived at such rankings. In a word I would say that the rankings reflect the impact the works had on my thought and development. I am excluding three works from the philosophy list: Kant’s Critique of Pure reason, Prolegomena and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I read a considerable amount of the Critique, but do not feel that I fully understand it, thus excluding it from the list of read books. The same goes for the Prolegomena and Tractatus. This is not to say that I fully understand everything that I read, but with these works I am not comfortable including them on the list.

Novels

1. The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal; Philip Roth

2. Nausea; Jean-Paul Sartre

3. Life is Elsewhere; Milan Kundera

4. Niels Lyhne; Jens Peter Jacobson

5. Crime and Punishment; Dostoyevsky

6. Portnoy’s Complaint; Philip Roth

7. Ignorance; Milan Kundera

8. Everything is Illuminated; Jonathan Safran Foe

9. The Immoralist; Andre Gide

10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Junot Diaz

Philosophy

1. The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals; Immanuel Kant

2. On the Genealogy of Morals; Friedrich Nietzsche

3. Naming and Necessity; Saul Kripke

4. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: Michel Foucault

5. The Metastases of Enjoyment; Slavoj Zizke

Drama

1. The Three Sisters; Anton Chehov

2. The Frogs; Aristophanes

3. Peer Gynt; Henrik Ibsen

4. Uncle Vanya; Anton Chekhov

5. The Iceman Cometh; Eugene O’Neill

Poetry

1. Poems of Catullus

2. Poems of Martial

3. Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus

4. The Panther and the Lash; Langston Hughes

5. That Little Something; Charles Simic