Introduction

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." Paul Sweeney

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye"

"Medicine for the soul." The inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes

Wellll...

I'm an English Lit. major, and am going to teach, but, more to the point, I really enjoy reading. I can't understand people who have never fallen in love with a book, stayed up desperate and thirsty to find out how it ends, but also dreading it, each page turned a count down to losing something of terrific importance. I've under understood people who claim not to have the attention span for a book. How can you not have the attention to be a Phillie or philanderer-- or philanthropist, if that's more your flavour? All the same, I'm often disappointed with myself and with how little I read these days. I've started doing something else I've never been able to understand before: falling asleep when reading, not because the book is laid out on my chest like the hand of a lover but because if I don't sleep now I might actually vomit. I'm annoyed with myself, and I need to change that.

So I want to keep track of what I'm reading now, and talk about the books that I have read that were excellent enough to leave me aggrieved.