A Year of Reading

What goes into an Oxford education? Well, for one thing, a lot of reading.

And, if there's one thing I knew I would be doing a lot of once I got here -- yep, you guessed it, reading. While I had gotten used to doing a lot of reading at Stanford, this past year has indeed piled on the books at a rapid pace. Some of my momentum slipped for a while in January and February, but I've since gotten back to normal, and one of my favorite things to do is look back on the books I've read and the new ideas they've brought into my life.

Now, I did do a LOT of reading of literary theory and critical secondary texts this year, especially for my papers and my thesis, which I'm not going to list here (it'd be too much to type out, for one thing!). That's probably the bulk of the reading I've done while engaging in serious literary scholarship here. But, those texts aside, here are most of the primary texts I've read over the past year, either for fun or for schoolwork:

Michaelmas Term 2013:

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1902)

Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)

Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)

Another Country, James Baldwin (1962)

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett (1955)

Blasted, Sarah Kane (1995)

Look Back in Anger, John Osborne (1956)

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (1999)

Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

Collected Poems, W.B. Yeats (1912)

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)

Hilary Term 2014:

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Summertime, J.M. Coetzee (2009)

Saturday, Ian McEwan (2005)

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo (2003)

NW, Zadie Smith (2012)

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson (2011)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson (1986)

The Accidental, Ali Smith (2005)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid (2006)

Falling Man, Don DeLillo (2007)

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (1996)

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace (2005)

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max (2012)

The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot (1922)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Trinity Term 2014: 

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers (1951)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940)

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner (1936)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1994)

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson (2013)

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell (2013)

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

The Hours, Michael Cunningham (2002)

White Teeth, Zadie Smith (2000)

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid (2013)

And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini (2013)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)


Once again, Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity are the names of Oxford's three terms, and I've divided my reading load roughly into those three terms/parts of the year, even though I did a lot of that reading over the academic breaks. Can't wait to see what great new books the next year brings into my life. I'm currently diving into summer by wrapping up Bill Bryson's fun and mind-blowingly fascinating A Short History of Nearly Everything, and am planning on reading Eleanor Catton's Man Booker-winning novel The Luminaries next. My summer reading list is exploding, but any can't-miss recs -- send 'em my way!