2006: The Year of Books

Over the Christmas holiday, I read a few books that re-sparked my interest in reading--Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and Alan Alda's memoir, Never Stuff Your Dog. (By the way, I highly recommend each of these books). Ambitiously, I have amassed a towering stack of books to be read in the year 2006. The pile includes the following (thus far):

• Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen
• Our Endangered Values, by Jimmy Carter
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• Too Brief a Treat, edited by Gerald Clarke
• Capote, by Gerald Clarke (can you guess what movie I saw yesterday that piqued my interest in Capote?)
  
• Pure Drivel, by Steve Martin
• The Opposite of Fate, by Amy Tan
• Wrigley Blues, by William J. Wagner
• The Pleasure of My Company, by Steve Martin
• Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson
• Adventures of a Continental Drifter, by Elliott Hester
• Hard Laughter, by Anne Lamott
• Blue Shoe, by Anne Lamott
• Travels, by Michael Crichton
• The Autograph Man, by Zadie Smith
• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

If you are interested in tracking my progress or hearing my thoughts on these books, I have posted in the links column to the right a link to "My 2006 Reading List", which is my new backpackit page for tracking this.

UPDATE: Oops, the stack is even larger than I realized, and also includes:

• But Inside I'm Screaming, by Elizabeth Flock
• This Side of Married, by Rachel Pastan
• A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
• The Case for Faith, by Lee Strobel
• Eat, Drink, and be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D. (though I am not sure I can read a book whose title violates one of my personal grammatical pet peeves--the rule against using a comma immediately before an "and")
  
• The Portable Dorothy Parker
• The Wonder Spot, by Melissa Bank