Summer Reading

Books are great. Let me be more specific. Literature can sometimes be great. My regular readers may have noted I read quite a bit, what with it being par for my course of study. But even when I have to do it, I still enjoy it. Most of the time, anyway. This summer, I still have required reading for school, but I'm actually really excited by it all. I started the first two at the same time this week, and I'm already halfway through number two. Anyway, here's a list:

1) Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays (ed Mark Thornton Burnett) - Shakespeare's contemporary only wrote seven plays, but shades of his writing is seen in the former's work. Many Early Modern specialists think his is interesting enough to study because of this.

2) Ruth Klüger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered - Not the happiest of subjects to immerse oneself in during summer, but I'm actually really enjoying it. Unsentimental, but honest and as justifiably angry as it should be.

3) Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Meta-fiction at its best.

4) André Gide, The Immoralist - French and gay writer comes up with a novel about a man who decides to ignore all moral codes? Right up my street, then.

5) Stephen Vincent Benét, By the Waters of Babylon - The last of my required reading, it's about thirty pages long, so I'm hoping to get it done in a day.

6) JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - Say what you like, I like reading them. Also, with the film coming out, I can't bring myself to watch it before reading the original, so I know which bits they've left out and/or changed.

7) John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces - On the suggestion of a friend, I thought I'd pick up this little gem. It's won prizes, dontchaknow!

And a whole host of unfinished novels, plays and poetry books I bought over the course of the year.

What's the next level up from bookworm? Reviews as and when.