Nicholas Laughlin's Life List

Nicholas Laughlin's Life List
An experiment in biblio-biography

Sunday, October 16, 2005

2005 update

Good lord, what have I been reading since the end of March?

- about two thirds of Crispin Sartwell's Six Names of Beauty
- started re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on an airplane (aloft, I need humour), but once I landed I didn't pick it up again
- Nicholas Guppy's Wai-Wai
- Nick Laird's To a Fault
- started the new Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down, & after twenty or thirty pages put it back on the shelf
- Denis Williams's Prehistoric Guiana, over & over again, slowly, to review it
- Wade Davis's One River, about ethnobotany in South America
- the new Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one very melancholy weekend in Tobago
- re-read Andrew Salkey's Georgetown Journal that same weekend
- Bruce Chatwin's Songlines
- B.C. Pires's Thank God It's Friday
- Philip Nanton's Frank Collymore book, Remembering the Sea
- started John Hearne's Voices under the Window, but didn't get past the first dozen pages
- A.J. Seymour's several volumes of memoirs, in stops & starts, when I can get to a library that has them (they're out of print)
- re-read Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust to remind myself what he did with Guyana
- re-read most of Sebald's Rings of Saturn
- the new Zadie Smith, On Beauty, week before last
- re-read most of Nicholson Baker's wonderful U & I, & some bits from The Size of Thoughts
- have been reading Alain de Botton's Essays in Love & The Art of Travel--both temporarily abandoned on my bedside table
- Dan Rhodes's Anthropology--a half-hour read
- I've always spurned how-to-write books (except of course for Strunk & White, which everyone should read young), but I picked up Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird & enjoyed it immensely, mostly because it's really a sort of autobiography, & very funny
- just finished Shiva Naipaul's book about Jonestown, Black & White
- picking my way through V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South
- reading the new Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse to review it
- & lots of things I can't remember

posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 1:08 PM