I admit it. I’ve never read any Virginia Woolf up until now. Professor Damrosch, who teaches my Major British Writers class that I am taking at Harvard, has put To the Lighthouse on the syllabus for tomorrow’s class, so I’m reading Woolf for the first time finally. I think I’ve always been a bit scared of reading her, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s her reputation as one of the preeminent woman writers, her style and life so thoroughly examined and well-documented. Woolf, the personality, seems so high-minded that I imagine her thinking I was beneath her notice. I feel like I need Fernham here to read along with me and explain passages.
But I forged ahead and now I’m reading To the Lighthouse and it’s wonderful! It’s full of inner thoughts and there’s a rhythm to reading this book that I can’t get on the subway to and from work. No, this will require sitting down tonight to finish the whole book I think. I’m excited to go to class tomorrow and listen to Damrosch’s insightful comments. After all, I now think Middlemarch, which we finished with in class a few weeks ago, perhaps one of the best books I’ve ever read.

• Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• General Non-Fiction: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
• Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate
• History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
• Poetry: Native Guard by Natasha Tretheway
• Drama: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

The LitBlog Coop announces its spring 2007 Read This! pick today: Alan DeNiro’s debut short story collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. Carolyn, the nominator, has a nice post about why she picked this book. I really liked this book when I read it last summer, so I was pleased to see it nominated.

No wait, that should read The Millions Interviewed. C. Max Magee, creator of The Millions has been interviewed by the literary community at LitMinds. In today’s post about Vonnegut, he admits that he once used to be a completist, that if he found a book he liked, he would read that author’s entire canon. I used to be the same way! Now I know why I read him everyday—we’re kindred spirits. Well, okay, maybe not spirits. We’re kindred readers.

As has been widely reported, Kurt Vonnegut died last night in Manhattan. Ed has a comprehensive list of links to interviews, reviews, etc.

Thanks to Bookslut for this link to a post by a woman who fainted the other day while reading Chuck Palaniuk’s short story “Guts” in his story collection Haunted. Man, if only I had the power to make you puke….

I’ve started a list of all the books I’ve read so far this year. You can see it at the top of the left column on this page. I read a lot more than I mention here. I find that I’m often not moved enough to write anything about a book whether it’s good or bad. It takes a certain spark for me to want to write something. Does that make sense?

I’ll keep updating my list. The list itself is up to date now, but I need to go back and add comments to many of the titles.