In May of 2001, the moment I finished graduate school, I sat down at my bubbly, baby-blue iMac and composed meself a reading list.  The impetus for doing so was this: with the exception of a class focusing on "The Novel" (Capital N [in which we read heavy-hitters like Moby Dick and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (whose author's first name my professor insisted on pronouncing "Toe-Mas" [which, ok, to be fair, I know is how it should be pronounced if we were in Switzerland or Austria or one of those coldly clean and snowy places, but in this case the whole thing just made us all wince)])], I'd been drowning in Literary Theory for over two years.  And where's the personal freedom and profound fun in that?  

And anyway so back to the list.

Of the 80 texts on that original inventory, I plowed  through perhaps sixty-five or so with surprising and atypical Ross and Rollian resolution.  This process occurred over several years, mind you.  People would tell me I simply needed to read something (that book with all the Oprah-generated flap around it, forget its name, springs to mind) and I'd be all like 'Oh hells no! I've got a date with Death in the Afternoon.'  People would try to push their books on me, stubbornly and insistently and with a sinister smile, in the manner of those offramp hoboes who just generally want you to feel shitty for not cracking a window and tossing them a five spot.  But Ross and Roll was resolute.  I would not budge or cave.  John Irving's new work was nothing to me.  

Some of the books that filled out that 2001 list were of course memorable and great and life-altering, and others...well...not so much.  For every Gravity's Rainbow or Goldbug Variations, there was something limp and lifeless like Paul Auster's Timbuktu (and I'm an Auster fan, but the whole canine narrator deal just did me in.) 

But the memories of reading these books (where I was headed, whom I was going to see, which of my kids had or had not been born) and the satisfaction of crossing titles out was in almost every case more vivid than the action and characters within the novels themselves.  For instance, I remember far less about the vitriol, malevolence, and vicious misanthropy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf than I do about eating lunch with an old friend from my LMU M.A. days, on Larchmont, the day after I stayed up late reading the play.  (I.e. I can't recall specifics of the play, but as those nouns attest to, I must've gotten some sort of general feel for the Albee work; at the same time I know that the greens in my salad that day were those maroon-tipped, kinda pokey greens). 

And while I absolutely loved all the fun and filth in Ulysses (and I annotated that book like crazy as it fell apart in my hands, first cover then pages then whole sections, eventually ending up as a rubber-banded pile of yellowish sheets of paper), I can't relate specific episodes in the book like some crazed Joyce fans can.  What I can do is tell you that Ulysses will always be for me  
far more about my 48-hour whirlwind trip to London to visit my friend Keith than a Homeric day in Dublin: for me Ulysses equates to talking to a Welsh woman about the Avian Flu (big news that year) on a Delta flight while sitting in first class and sipping a beer and watching crazy thunderstorms out the plane's windows as we took off from Cincinatti.  Ulysses will forever remind me of sweating bullets and getting grilled by the dude at Gatwick Airport's Customs gate and experiencing the ironic, surreal sensation of feeling more and more like a liar the more I told the truth (visiting for 48 hours, don't know where my buddy works, American company, light baggage, yessir I know you are not obligated to let me in the country, etc.)

And but back to the new list.

So I don't know if this is some weird mojo, some numerological tom-foolery, but my latest list is copmposed of, GET THIS: 80 books, as well!  Just like the old list.  It kinda feels like Groundhog Life: I make new lists, and I read and read and read (not admitting to myself that I've bought shitpiles of books through the years) and I feel I'm making all kinds of crazy headway and LO, there I am, here I am, back with my unchanging, unalterable list of 80 books.

And so I embrace it.  Bring it...