Bluejake

I'm back in New York City after a week in LA and enjoying the return of warm weather. The trees in the playground across the street are starting to bloom, and I'm feeling my creative juices start to flow. On account of the collapse of OVEN, I've found myself with a great deal of free time. Of course, I'm looking for various Information Architecture and User Interface projects, and thinking about starting the search for a full time job. For the first time in a few months I've found myself with time to do all the things I've been meaning to do: hit the gym three times a week, skate the SoHo-116th Street route a few times, and really concentrate on learning the guitar (this week's challenge: Good Riddance).

When I travel I like to take a book along- it's practically the only time I get to read. On the way to LA and back I finished The Big Con, a great book about confidence men written by David Maurer in the late 1920s. Right now I'm working on The Long Goodbye, a Raymond Chandler mystery that I became acquainted with through the Robert Altman adaption starring Elliott Gould. I loved the movie, but I've got to say- the book beats it hands down. It might even beat out The Big Sleep, which, when I read it in college, I thought was the greatest mystery I'd ever read.

I've been making reading a priority lately. It's pathetic, but left to my own devices, I tend to watch way too much TV (Law & Order, The Simpsons, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and read way too many magazines and newspapers (The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, Wired, Scientific American, Discover). To combat this tendency, I promised myself when I graduated from school that I'd read twelve books every year. Come May, four years have gone by, and as you'll see from the list below, The Long Goodbye will only be book number forty-five. Luckily, with all the free time on my hands, I should be able to make the deadline. I've only counted novels or non-fiction read first page to last- no short stories or books of poems. The previous forty-five books, listed in the order I read them starting May 1998:

1. Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez
2. The Stranger, Camus
3. Mao II, Delillo
4. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera
5. Empire of Signs, Barthes
6. The Ice Storm, Moody
7. The Name of the Rose, Eco
8. Seven Nights, Borges
9. The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton
10. The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh
11. Laughable Loves, Kundera
12. Galatea 2.2, Powers
13. The Names, Delillo
14. The Intuitionist, C. Whitehead
(1 year)
15. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Powers
16. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
17. Siddhartha, Hesse
18. White Noise, Delillo
(four month break from reading- August 1999 - December 1999)
19. The Razor's Edge, Somerset Maugham
20. Lord Jim, Conrad
21. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith
22. The Good Soldier, Ford
23. Brighton Rock, Greene
24. Tough Jews, Cohen
25. The Professor and the Madman, Winchester
(two years)
26. In Cold Blood, Capote
27. Exodus, Uris
28. Visual Explanations, Tufte
29. A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway
30. Envisioning Information, Tufte
31. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte
32. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway
33. The Waterworks, Doctorow
(three years)
34. Invisible Cities, Calvino
35. Our Man in Havana, Green
36. The Secret Agent, Conrad
37. The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory, Borges
38. The Heart of the Matter, Greene
39. Liar's Poker, Lewis
40. The Great Crash 1929, Galbraith
41. The Money Culture, Lewis
42. The End of the Affair, Greene
43. The Gangs of New York, Asbury
44. The Big Con, Maurer

Books