Wrapped up in Books

I have a miniscule two months left here in Korea and so the preparations to depart have begun. Actually the talk of preparing to depart has begun but I must start somewhere.

Before I deal with the unpleasant tasks associated with departing my apartment (ie packing, disguising all the mold that's growing on our walls), I have decided that my first goal will be to catch up on my reading. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I have a pretty decent collection of books but only about half of them have been enjoyed (not that I enjoyed Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, mind you, but I did manage to get through all 120 boring pages of it - I think I'll be taking that one into What the Book just before I leave). The rest have sat in limbo on my book shelf, some for the bulk of my time here. A few I've started but put aside in favour of other books or my pursuit of sloth.

But what to read first? I could go in chronological order but that leaves all the the stuff I'm interested in reading to the end. Reverse-chronological, then, might seem ideal but I don't want to leave the possible duds for last either. And alphabetical order simply won't do at all - I keep my books filed from A to Z but I don't want to have to read them that way too.

There is nothing else for it then but to have a random draw. Here are the results of yesterday's draft:

1. Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red
2. Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men
3. Grham Greene's Complete Short Stories*
4. Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
5. Walter Benjamin's Reflections
6. Raymond Williams' Television
7. W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction
8. Patrick Suskind's Perfume
9. D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
10. V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas

(* denotes a title I've already started but abandonned along the way)

There are also a pair of bonus titles thrown in for good measure just in case I manage to read them all. One is Kristina's copy of Blindness by Jose Saramago and The Thousand and One Nights (aka The Arabian Nights) that she gave me for Christmas but I've been thinking about putting off until my trip to Southeast Asia in March.

I will update future blog postings with my progress - and possibly a the odd review of my reading as well.



Living abroad has meant a life outside of quotation marks

- Geoff Dyer, Unpacking My Library (probably misquoted)