My Secret Destruction

What can destroy a person? For Samson, it was his hair. For Caesar, it was that fateful decision to cross the Rubicon. For Britney Spears, it was marrying and having kids with Cletus, the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

Today, I'm going to reveal what has the capacity to destroy me. I'll give you a hint: it's books. I love to read them, but it seems like even more than that, I love to find new ones that I think I should read, purchase them, and then quickly forget about them. It is as if my mind thinks that through the simple act of buying a book, I have the potential to receive the wisdom and knowledge that the book contains, and if I do not purchase them, I will UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES receive said knowledge.

I am enticed because by reading, I can not only reflect what I have read, but, in a sense, cause what I have read to reflect upon me. In short, I play the Narcissus to the books' clear pond.

However, though I always love books, I sometimes find that I am too busy for reading. Further, I find that I have a kind of feast or famine approach to reading, that is, sometimes I'll go from title to title faster than a fat man achieves the goal of heart disease, whereas sometimes months will go by without reading more than a magazine because I just don't want to commit to anything that can't be accomplished in two hours, i.e., most of the literary works I am interested in.

So, more for my own personal curiosity than anything else, I will be keeping track of the books that I read within by frequently updating this post for the year of 2007 just to see what I can assume numerically about my reading habits after 2007 ceases to be. Also, I will be including plays in the list, even though I'm sure that some people might consider that to be "cheating" and "beefing up one's book count the easy way."

It is to those people I say, "Come look at this pond."

1) Who Moved my Blackberry? by Lucy Kellaway **
2) Art by Yasmina Reza*
3) The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem
4) The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh*
5) A Midsummer Night's Dream by Billy-Boy Shakespeare*
6) Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman
7) Copenhagen by Michael Frayn*
8) Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan
9) JPod by Douglas Coupland
10) The Pleasure of my Company by Steve Martin
11) Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse
12) Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard*
13) True West by Sam Shepard*

Also, if you are interested in any of the books that I've read, and you don't have them, I can either loan them to you, or, if you'd like, you can get them through an affiliate program that I have with half.com, and I can make a couple bucks in the process. Please use the following link if you'd like to do that.

eBay's Half.com, buy more for less.

* Denotes a play
** Denotes a book started in 2006