I've seem to be noticing lately all the good famous books that I have never read. It's so embarrassing to admit this, but off the top of my head, I've never read To Kill a Mockingbird, Slaughterhouse Five, The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby. I think I did read Gatsby maybe in high school but it was so boring and dull of an assignment that I have only the briefest of memories. I've also never seen the Robert Redord movie which seems somehow just as shocking.

I read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time this year after learning that she lived in my hometown for awhile (and worked at the air force base where my father worked). I loved her writing, in particular because I was so familiar with the places she mentioned and the old Florida setting. Mostly though, I just loved the story. I have no doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald is also a great American writer but why a bunch of kids in Florida were reading his stuff instead of Hurston's I will never know. Unless, of course, it was because she was a black woman. But that would be discrimination, right?

Did I mention how little I learned in high school?

I just finished Jim Lynch's fabulous The Highest Tide and I am both in love with his protagonist, Miles O'Malley, and also Rachel Carson. Weirdly enough I just read about Carson in the summer issue of The American Scholar and I was feeling guilty enough that I had never read Silent Spring. What kind of environmentalist does that make me? Now I know that I need to be reading The Sea Around Us as well, because I live on the Pacific and grew up on the Atlantic and I know beans about the oceans. It is crazy how much I don't know. I miss the Atlantic Ocean desperately, I might even be holding it against the Pacific that it doesn't produce the same beautiful shells and warm waves (my surfboard seems destined to forever languish in the storage space downstairs), but Lynch's wonderful story about the waters off Olympia, Washington have made me realize that I haven't really given this ocean a chance. It is different, but amazing in its own right. I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not wanting to run right out and start looking at tidal pools and mudflats. And you will probably be reaching for Carson's words as well. Lynch will be in my town tomorrow night for a reading and I'm looking forward to meeting him. Hopefully I will have a interview up in the next couple of months at Bookslut as well.

So Rachel Carson has just been added to my new list (you remember, I love lists!). Next year's project is to read twenty-five books that I should have read already. If I get through them quickly enough then I will go on to another twenty-five. I plan to mine all those award winning lists on the 'net and put it together, along with my own thoughts and ideas. It won't be all serious (believe me, I've read a ton of war books in my time and you can take only so many of them in a row), but I feel like I've been missing out on something important. I'm looking forward to finally catching up with the rest of the world.

As for my shelf sitters, I read NM Kelby's In the Company of Angels this week and it is gorgeous. As a lapsed Catholic, it was exactly the type of religious imagery that I love about the worship of God and as a historian, I really couldn't get enough of the WW2 period (particularly set in Belgium!) There is alot about this book to recommend it but I think what kept me turning the pages the most was the beauty of the words. Nicole is such an elegant writer, and this book is dazzling. I love her work and if you like quiet, thoughtful, heartbreaking beautiful prose, then you will love this too.

How in the hell am I ever going to be a good enough writer to be in the class of the ones I read?

The new issue of Bookslut is up and I just received the Fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. More on both later, but really - why aren't you reading them already?!