Goodreads

I know that a lot of people aren't crazy about Goodreads, but I love it, not least because it helps allay my fears about ever-more-intense cultural fragmentation. I find it genuinely comforting to know that a book I've read has been read by people I know, particularly since I live in a place where discussion of reading is exceedingly rare. Based on a quick survey of the site, I came up with this list of all the books that have a) been published in the last decade or so and b) have been been read by me and marked as "read" or "to-read" by at least four of my Goodread friends. Of the 16 books, 13 are novels, which is unsurprising. Of the three nonfiction books, one is about Iraq, and the other two are all or in part about food (and The Omnivore's Dilemma doesn't even appear here because I haven't read it yet). What will historians say about our preoccupation with the politics of food during wartime?

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (13 people, including myself)
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (8)
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (8)
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (7)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (7)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (6)
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (6)
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (6)
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (6)
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (6)
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (6)
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men (5)
Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants (5)
Arthur Phillips, Prague (5)
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco (5)
Richard Russo, Straight Man (5)

Some Boxes

People sometimes ask what I "am." Now I can just refer them to this blog post.



Green = Native Hawaiian
Red = Chinese (some combination of Han and Hakka)
Blue = Some combination of English and Scottish
Grey = German

Biography

I'm not a huge fan of biography, and in fact I've only read six (or rather, six and a half) biographies in the past decade. But recently, a friend's enthusiasm about Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy has got me thinking about the genre, and about what my sparse biographical reading list suggests about me:

Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (read in 2009)

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009)

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (2006)

Lewis Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2006)

Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (2004)

Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (2001, never finished)

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (2000)