mid-year review

I thought I'd do a little mid-year review of the books I've read to date.

Amazing: 2666 (Bolaño), Ghosts (Cesar Aira), Last Evenings on Earth (Bolaño), La casa verde (Mario Vargas Llosa), El juguete rabioso (Roberto Arlt), A Mercy (Toni Morisson), The Seven Madmen (Roberto Arlt), Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates), Los Rios Profundos (José Maria Arguedas), The Ministry of Special Cases (Nathan Englander)

Good: Distant Star (Bolaño), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Anne Tyler), The Wild Palms (William Faulkner), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell), By Night in Chile (Bolaño), Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, The Easter Parade (Richard Yates), Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño)

Trippy, Need to Reread: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became a Nun (Cesar Aira), The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), Los adioses (Onetti), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)

Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

Good Non-fiction: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Drew Gilpin Faust), True Crime: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics (Michael McCaughan), When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron), Deep Economy (Bill McKibben), The Meaning of Life (Terry Eagleton), Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Jon Lee Anderson), Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin), First Stop in the New World (David Lida)

Comics: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Alan Moore), The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller), Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (Scott McCloud), Fables Volume 1: Legends in Exile (Bill Willingham)

Ultimate Comfort Food: Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Comfort Food (Sort of Bad But You Enjoy it Tremendously Despite Yourself): Deaf Sentence (David Lodge), Pilgrims (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Okay, I Guess... Sort of Boring, Actually: Banker to the Poor (Muhammed Yunus), Home Truths (David Lodge), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)

Just plain bad: Thirteen Moons (Charles Frazier), Dry (Augusten Burroughs), The Price of Fire (Benjamin Dangl), The Last Full Measure (Jeff Shaara)

Re-read: Siddhartha (Herman Hesse), The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe (Anne Tyler), Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)

I Can't Believe It Took Me This Long to Re-read This After 6th Grade When I Obviously Didn't Get It. Amazing Read: Lolita (Nabokov)

Read in English after having first read it in Spanish. Amazing Read: Artificial Respiration (Ricardo Piglia), Don Quixote (Cervantes, Edith Grossman translation)

Read in the Boys & Girls Club during brief, rare intervals of desperately snatched peace: The Tales of Beedle the Bard (J.K. Rowling)

Couldn't/Didn't Finish: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Barefoot Gen (Keiji Nakazawa), Dreams from my Father (Barack Obama), The Means of Reproduction (Michelle Goldberg)

Yeesh.