Oh, yeah--I had a birthday too.

It's been over a week since I hurt my back and went to the emergency room.  I moved out of my apartment on Monday, though I could do very little to help with the move.  I got a new job on Wednesday.  I'm not taking anymore prescription medication.  And frankly, I don't remember much of last week.  Everything is kind of in a haze, but to be fair, I was pretty doped up on pain killers the entire time.  I would be right now if I still had some.  Well, I do, but you aren't supposed to take ketorolac (toradol) for more than five days in a row.  It's the hyrdocodone I'm out of.  I've been taking ibuprofen, which does not work nearly as well.
Let me just say, I'm ashamed of how little reading I've gotten done considering how much time I spent in bed last week.  I've been reading, on average, about twenty pages a day, I'd say.  It's hard to comprehend what you're reading when you're essentially high, especially when what you're reading is written in the Queen Anne style.  I was thinking that Henry Esmond seems really hard to follow compared to Thackeray's other works, but it's probably the drugs.  Maybe I'll reread it sometime when I'm not constantly impaired.
I've been downloading more music than anything else.  Probably because I wake up extremely early.  Before everyone else, so I just look up music and wander the internet.  Eisley has a new album out that's pretty amazing, and I'm been listening to a lot of MC Frontalot.  Nerdcore is the only hip hop I'll listen to.  I've downloaded about twenty-five albums in a week.  I have to say, just to get it off my chest, I've been listening to the new Hellogoodbye album quite a bit and it's rather good.  This maturer sound they've developed is refreshing.  It's poppy, but not in the dance punk style they used to have, which had long since grown stale.  It sounds more like The Format.  Hell, I even downloaded a William Shatner album.  I was surprised by how much I liked it.
All this staying up late and waking up early shit has got to stop.  Granted, two Saturdays ago--the day after my fall--I slept for nearly thirteen hours.  But I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and stayed up till around 1:30 AM, only to wake up four hours later in extreme pain.  It's been about the same routine since then.  No matter how good I feel during the day, I always wake up around 6:00 or 7:00 with my back feeling completely awful.  Right now is the worst my back's felt at night for a while, but that's probably because I haven't had a pain pill since 7:00 this morning.  Plus, I took a nap after work, and I always feel worse after sleeping.
This post seems in no way coherent to me.  That's the way I've been since the fall.  I have a hard time concentrating.  But maybe that's me blaming my accident for how I've always been.  I have had memory problems.  Not real issues.  Just not as quick on the draw as I usually am.  My wife says I should be back to speed in a little while.  Once I'm completely off of any medication, probably.  Hopefully in a weeks more time I'll stop pausing for two minutes trying to remember something I should have readily available in my mind, and stop filling my sentences with "uh's," "um's," and "I can't think of it right now's."  No brain damage or anything.  Don't worry about that.  I didn't hit my head when I fell, and my new job is at a hotel I worked at before and after three hours of refresher training I was running the shift on my own.  So, my mind is fine, just running a bit slow is all.
Hopefully this doesn't set me back on my reading list, esspecially considering I added a few books to it, I still plan on reading all five of Dickens' Christmas books in December, and I have another big move in five months.  We'll see.  I'm only on nine out of forty-one, and seven of those were in January.  I was hoping to have Henry Esmond done by the end of February, but "there's many a slip between the cup and lip" and all that.  I love that expression.

Books to Read in 2011

For the last two years--the years I've been keeping track--I've had a habit of reading thirty books (not including Charles Dickens' Christmas books, as I've pointed out before).  I'm hoping to change this in 2011.  For this year I've made a reading list of forty books, and I've already completed three books.  I had wanted to reread some books this year, but they just don't fit with my reading list.   Next year will be a year for rereading old favorites; this year is for reading books I've never read before.
Like I said, I've read three this year: St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz  and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz (he only wrote two books and I might as well get them both).  I have the next four planned out as well.  The Croquet Player by H.G. Wells, Pendennis by William Thackeray, Gargantua and Pentagruel by Francois Rabelais, and Robinson Crusoe.
Here's the complete list of books I intend to read this year.  I feel like posting it online will help me actually get through them.

Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray
The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Confessions by Saint Augustine
Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Gargantua and Pentagruel by Francois Rabelais
The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton
The Return of Don Quixote by G.K. Chesterton
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
1066 by David Howarth
The Moon & Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
The Egoist by George Meredith
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
The Travels of Marco Polo
Waverly by Walter Scott
The Croquet Player by H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells
Medieval Lives by Terry Jones & Alan Ereira
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Extended Reading List

I've found myself in a predicament, as of late.  I have two lists of books I want to read.  The first one is the list I posted earlier; the second is a list of Medieval and classical works as well as works expounding upon the former period.  One could say the first list is my casual reading list, though to a casual reader--by most definitions--it would look rather academic.  The second would clearly appear entirely academic, though it's becoming a bit of an obsession of mine.  I have before me an untouched wealth of knowledge, which, in the words of Seneca the Younger, "were born for us and prepared for us a way of life."
I have been gathering up Medieval texts over the passed few months--over the passed year, actually.  Of these, I've only read selections from The Golden Legend.  I intend for this to change in the coming year.  Of the books I intend to read next year, here is a list.  By making a list, I can use it as a reference, as well as make it more definitive.

Books about the Medieval Period include:

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis
Medieval Lives by Terry Jones, with Alan Ereira (The documentary was fantastic.)
Monarchy by David Starkey (Again, the documentary was fantastic.)

Actual Medieval (and going back to the Classical period and into the Renaissance) texts:

The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer
Ethics by Aristotle
The Mabinogion
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Confessions by Saint Augustine
City of God by Saint Augustine
Piers the Plowman
Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
Alfred the Great by John Asser 
The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Inner Life by Thomas a Kempis
Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (more thoroughly)
Utopia by Thomas Moore (again)
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

I'll be honest.  I don't think I can read all of those in one year, but I'm ambitious.  That's not including the books in my Amazon wishlist, like William of Newburgh's History of English Affairs or Lewis' Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.  I also want to find more books about Medieval literature and life.  That and hopefully I'll be able to find a cheap copy of some of Roger Bacon's works.  It may take some time, considering the other reading list I have, but I've become increasingly passionate about these studies.  I think the Medieval mindset contained something that we've lost in the last few hundred years that was beneficial, but for some reason we've been damning Medieval man as if he were lower than us.  It's chronological snobbery, as Lewis put it.

Reading list

I don't usually make a reading list, but for once in my life, I have a clear cut idea of what books I want to read.  I'm currently reading Caleb Williams by William Godwin.  This is my list of books to read after that. There will be some free space in between some of them which can be taken up by randomly selected books, but I will adhere to this basic list.


Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
Lolita by Vladamir Nobokav
The four Christmas books of Charles Dickens (as I do every December)
Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray
The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

These are books I've felt some sort of need to read more than others.  Some, like Tristam Shandy, I've been  wanting to read for a long while now.  It's not a long list, I'll admit, but what's most important is that they're books I want to read for no more reason than that I think I will enjoy them.

I don't understand summer reading lists.

It feels like I've been less productive since I got married. I realize I'm not. I spend my days almost the same as I did before I was married, but now I do it with someone else. Maybe it's that I feel obligated to spend all my free time with my wife. It has only been a little beyond three weeks, so I suppose it's normal to feel bad when I want to spend the day reading instead of hanging out with her. Eventually we'll get more comfortable with each other and be able to do things together but seperately.

It could also be that she monopolizes my laptop though. . .

Also, it's almost summer, and my body wants to leave my apartment, wants to romp and play. There's a state park near here that the wife and I intend to check out Monday or Tuesday. We also like to walk to the farmers market on Saturdays. I found out there's a Shakespeare festival in town this summer as well. I'm hoping to see The Tempest and The Merry Wifes of Windsor this July. If my days off weren't so damned awkward, I could say I'll see them for certain, but they're only performing on two of my days off the entire month.


I've begun a makeshift "reading list" this summer. The quotation marks and the word makeshift are to indicate that it is a list in the loosest meaning of the term. The original notion was to read short, easy novels and to see how many I could pound through in three months. I've done four since June began: The Last Unicorn, Slaughterhouse-five, The Great Gatsby, and Joey Comeau's collection of short stories, It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry. (I know most people either assume I re-read the top first three or are amazed I'd never read them before, but I was just finally getting around to it, okay?) The slump has already begun, however, as after The Great Gatsby I chose to read George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Not exactly a complex novel, but at 546 pages, it's not exactly a short one either. Just 400 more pages to go and then it's back to short, simple novels or collections of short stories. I thought about joining a book club, but I don't like being told what to read.

I don't understand summer reading lists for non-students, really. An average adult with a full-time job doesn't have more time during the summer months. If they have kids, they would probably have less time. Unless it's stictly a seasonal thing, reading "summer books." I can't quite think of what I'd consider a "summer book," though. Something like Pickwick, maybe? Something involving a romp. Something about people getting drunk and falling down.