What’s on my bookcase?

Books on my closest shelf, in order of appearance:

Tim Ferriss.

He’s first because I bought his book, Tools of titans, most recently. Probably a result of podcasting too much and enjoying the edge of experimental and dreaming that life is an experiment, although if it is, not many of us are brave enough to play the mad professor. But he is. Human guinea pig, by his own definition. I see hints of myself and everyone I’ve admired in him. Have yet to get twenty pages into the book despite buying it a week ago.

Milan Kundera.

Kundera came into my life shortly after Hemingway’s reign. I mean, I was a Betty-Friedan-Henry-Grady-Weaver-Jim-Morrison teenage feminist who loved and adored Hemingway until my story as a woman wasn’t there. I started reading darker things, like the Black Book of Communism and Archipelago. Then I read Kundera and found a profoundly human story. no answers just questions and endless questions, which pushed the literary boundaries at the same time as I was pushing sexual boundaries.

P.S. If you ever hear me mention Kundera when I’m drinking, cut me off. IMMEDIATELY. It will lead to fisticuffs. Proven fact.

Steinbeck.

Loved you when I was twelve. Love you still.

T.C. Boyle.

Enjoyable from start to finish. I haven’t found the root of him yet, but I promise, if you read him, you will be touched. If you read him aloud to a lover you will be torn up from the insides, flayed, and left utterly wanting on the dry earth of everything that could be but never was.

Then Hawthorne, Goethe, Ibsen and Kafta.

Yeah, We’ll skip it. I’m too serious for Kafa. I confuse his satire with humor and it ultimately drives me to despair.

Moving on….More Hemingway. And more. And a spell book of occult remedies? And Ayn Rand. And then John Updike.

D.H. Lawrence.

Despite writing a poem about self-pity, I haven’t been able to rise above that level through his poetry. Great emotionalism though. Honestly, I suck at interpreting poetry. 

And then…

More Kundera: Testaments Betrayed. Why isn’t this with his other work? Don’t remember.

I actually had a dream where I was seated in a bar, talking to Kundera, plastered as hell, and we got in a fistfight with Hemingway. This is why I shouldn’t read before bed. Or discuss literature after whiskey.

And then there’s a “She Comes First” book about sex…

Don’t judge. She should totally come first. 

And a photo album I haven’t added a picture to since 2004.

That’s what’s in the bookcase near my desk.

Now you know a lot about me. Probably too much.

Just don’t ask about that other bookcase by the bed…