Paul's Book List

Here is my book list starting at the beginning. At least 75% of these I read in the first year before I got too busy with work (and TV). Going over this list, I remember what else I was doing while reading a certain book or I tie a memory of a person to a book. I read Underworld during my first weeks of training when I didn't have anything better to do than read an obscenely long book. Sputnik Sweetheart I read on the plane going home for Christmas the first year. I know that Nicole gave me Three Cups of Tea and Danny loaned me Amerika.

I realized when I started to keep this list that a lot of the books I read were about people in unfamiliar places or circumstances. I'm not sure if it was totally a coincidence, but it was comforting to know that I wasn't the first to deal with being a foreigner and that people had survived much worse.

Like Holly, I'm really glad that I had a time that was relatively free of modern distractions that I could use to read. Some of my best reading got done in the hammock when the electricity was out. I'm not going to count the pages (because I'm lazy and have limited internet time), but with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, I'd say well over 4,000 pages were about wizards, vampires, and elves, and I'm not at all ashamed about reading about wizards and elves.

1. A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami
2. Underworld, Don DeLillo
3. Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder
4. Empire Falls, Richard Russo
5. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
6. To Bury Our Fathers, Sergio Ramirez
7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
8. Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
10. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
11. Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami
12. American Gods, Neil Gaiman
13. Interview with a Vampire, Anne Rice
14. The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien
15. The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien
16. Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters & Seymour, an Introduction, J.D. Salinger
17. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
18. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Nifenegger
19. Einstein: His Life and Universe
20. Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
21. Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins
22. Naked, David Sedaris
23. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, James L. Swanson
24. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
25. My Car in Managua, Forrest D. Colburn
26. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
27. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
28. Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami
29. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
30. The Death of Ben Linder, Joan Kruckewitt
31. The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl
32. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Suskind
33. The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield
34. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman
35. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
36. A Million Little Pieces, James Frey
37. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
38. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
39. Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
40. The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, George Packer
41. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. After Dark, Haruki Murakami
43. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
44. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
45. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Ben Fountain
46. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
47. The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
48. Haunted, Chuck Palaniuk
49. Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Aron Ralston
50. Law School Confidential, Robert Miller
51. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
52. The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende
53. A Dog Year, Jon Katz
54. Lamb, Christopher Moore
55. River Town, Peter Hessler
56. Dry, Augusten Burroughs
57. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
58. Marley and Me, John Grogan
59. Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared, Franz Kafka
60. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
61. The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
62. Straight Man, Richard Russo
63. Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler
64. Survival of the Sickest, Sharon Moalem
65. Oh the Glory of It All, Sean Wilsey
66. What is the What, Dave Eggers
67. The four Twilight books, Stephanie Meyer
68. Sex Lives of Cannibals, J. Maarten Troost
69. Getting Stoned with Savages, J. Maarten Troost

I'm sure that there are at least a couple of books that I'm forgetting about, and I have another 3 that I've been reading on and off for way too long. We just gave away our TV, so maybe in the 12 days we have left I can finish another couple of books.