Literary High Horse

This post is going to be obnoxious, annoying, and (above all) mainly for me.

The past few days, I've been constructing a carefully balanced summer reading list.

It has to be perfect, you know. All the books have to have artistic merit.  Not the mass-produced "Danielle Steele" kind of merit, but the kind of understated eloquence that makes me angry and awed at the same time.  Novels that have some kind of social or literary value that do more than let me passively thumb through its pages, 50 at a time à la Dan Brown.

It's not a list that has to have wow-factor among the intelligentsia, but that can't hurt too.

I mean, let's be real.  I'm not against reading the pop fiction that Harold Bloom or the staff at the New Yorker would blast.  I just finished watching The Da Vinci Code on my computer while eating a bowl of Special K and I loved every second of it. And I'm probably going to get around to reading some fantastic Michael Crichton this summer too (but won't admit to it).

But I want my official "summer reading list" to be time-withstanding, challenging, shocking works of fiction and non-fiction that I can read while sitting at a Parisian café for hours on a lazy afternoon.

In no particular order (except the first, which I just finished):

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Blood Meridien, Cormac McCarthy
(edit: changed to The Road because the bookstore I went to didn't have the other one.)
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Entre les murs, François Bégaudeau
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Emma, Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ok so. I've been making my list secretly over the past week from reading critical "Best Of" lists (Sons and Lovers, As I Lay Dying, and Blood Meridien came from those), noticing friends' favorite novels (One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lolita came up several times), walking through random French used book stores (Entre les murs and, almost embarrassingly, Emma) and filling gaps in my previous readings that I'm ashamed to admit (The Great Gatsby). The Eggers book that I just finished is a spill-over from last summer that I've been meaning to read and could not pass up when I saw it in the airport on the way to London.  I've decided to read Márquez and Beckett in English because I really don't think I'd be able to capture the authors' nuances and what-not in the original language. I'm reading Bégaudeau in French only because I already bought it, and it's not really that literary in any case (it's a social commentary on the deterioration of the French language in schools in inner-city Paris).  And I added Beckett yesterday after I watched a classical piece from the "absurdist theater" era performed yesterday and loved it (La Cantatrice Chauve, Eugène Ionesco, for anyone that cares).

Of course, I'm absolutely open to modifications, criticisms, and suggestions to my list. I value your opinion! Unless it includes Nicholas Sparks, Stephen King, or, I swear to God, John Grisham.

Aaaand I'm off my high horse. For now.