Saturday, April 28, 2007

Summer Treats

Spring is in full force, in case you haven't noticed. All my windows are open. I can hear children screaming. Salsa blares; the rattles and chirps of birds make their way in too. My apartment smells like fresh laundry and various barbequed meats from yards down below. One of my students gave me a Japanese name. She translated the two syllables of my name, An-ka, into "Fragrance of Apricots." M. has informed me that cellphone radiation has killed 70% of the world's honeybees. Tomorrow I go to the Cherry Blossom Festival.

With that I bring you my ever-ambitious summer reading list! As I'll have a bit of extra time on my hands in July, I hope to actually write about some these books at that time. Also notice I will update the book lists in the sidebar to reflect what I've *actually* read recently (some of those books I finished long ago) and will perhaps finish some of the books that I've been chipping away at a glacial pace (is that a cliche now?).

Onward. The list over which I salivate:

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
Nana, par Emile Zola
Germinal, par Emile Zola
The Sound and the Fury, by William Falkner
The Decameron, by Boccaccio
Pierre et Jean, par Guy de Maupassant
Summer, by Edith Wharton
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Du cote de chez Swann, par Marcel Proust
The Golden Bowl, by Henry James
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos

I went on a shopping spree at Housing Works last month or so, and bought much of the above for $1 or 50 cents. Ah, I love that place.

2 comments:

Andy said...

It might be fungus, not cell phones, if that's any consolation.

Anca said...

Thanks, Andy, but it's not much consolation. I wasn't upset about the cell phones so much as the bees themselves and our crumbling biodiversity.