What I Read, Summer 2004

It was a busy summer, what with getting engaged and working at a law firm for 13 weeks. But I still managed to average two books a week (and get laughed at by my friends at the firm for always carrying a book with me), a pace I'm going to try and keep throughout the semester. It'll be difficult here at the beginning, as I try to get ahead in my classes, and blogging may be light for the same reason. Anyhow, here's what I read, in the order I read it:

Emma - Jane Austen
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Theban Plays - Sophocles
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Beauty & Sadness - Yasunari Kawabata
Dreamtigers - Jorge Luis Borges
The Iceman Cometh - Eugene O'Neill
Krapp's Last Tape - Samuel Beckett
Endgame - Samuel Beckett
Vietnam - Stanley Karnow
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
Candide - Voltaire
Founding Brothers - Joseph Ellis
The Plague - Albert Camus
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The English Teacher - R.K. Narayan
Candida - George Bernard Shaw
American Sphinx - Joseph Ellis
What Kind of Nation - James Simon
Pere Goriot - Honore Balzac
Patriots - A.J. Langguth
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Barabbas - Par Lagerkvist
Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen
Robert Kennedy: His Life - Evan Thomas
A Death in the Family - James Agee
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata

I enjoyed everything but the Beckett, and especially recommend Kawabata's Beauty & Sadness and Lagerkvist's Barabbas, since those are two books that don't appear on many people's short lists.