Update on the List

I am still chipping away at the List. I am up to 34 on one of the alternative lists (and I've doubled the original list), despite switching to "pleasure reading" the week and a half I was in Italy.

I have finished:
1984
To The Lighthouse
Howard's End
Neuromancer
The Call of the Wild
Atonement
The Sun Also Rises
The Old Man and the Sea

I could tell exactly where I put 1984 down the other two times I tried to read it - the long treatise on history/political theory. Ugh. I still had to wade through it, a decade later.

Thumbs up: Atonement, Howard's End (A Passage to India is next), and the Hemingway (more because it's an easy read than because it moved me, though the last quarter of The Sun Also Rises was surprisingly gripping).

One thing that's surprised me is how many of these books touch on controversial or taboo topics for their time: excessive alcohol consumption, sex out of wedlock, promiscuous sex, drugs, violence and death. I wonder if these themes are the reason these books were never required (or even suggested) reading during my high school years in small-city Virginia.