"How did we get here? I used to know you so well..."

Describe the plot of the next book you want to read, even if the book doesn't exist yet.

Oh books. No fun books for my brain right now. My only books are ones I don't really like. Such as "The World of Athens: Religion, Politics and Gender in Fifth Century Athens". Slain.

The second half of this question also makes me slightly terrified because it's....like, my job. If I could explain the bronchial network of plots in my mind, I would already be published. But there are books out there that aren't written yet that I would like to read, that I might even like to write.

Matt and I have decided that we are going to accomplish a "100 Books to Read Before you Die" list or some variant thereof. I've never read War and Peace. Matt is shocked (and slightly offended) that I've never read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius yet. Matt's never read "The Things They Carried". We haven't agreed on a list yet. I don't want to read through Esquire's "75 Books Ever Man Should Read" because it's slightly...partisan. Not that I have a problem with "dude books" but I feel the list was not representative. And I don't want to read Norman Mailer.

I almost gave into the "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" to-do but I read the intro to the first book and I realize why it's so popular. It's a Dan Brown book. No disrespect, that man's made himself a comfy living but it's a similar kind of book. Action packed and accessible.

But there are a lot of books that seem to overlap these 'read it before you make a fool of yourself publicly' lists. But many of them not a lot of people have read. They are just those books that aren't lazy day, read them and fall asleep wearing your bathing suit books. My stage play teacher told me "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" is such a book.

The books that make it on to lists like that are books that get into your brain. They get into your eyes and what you see. They get into your speak and how you talk.

I want to read either "Orlando" or "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf. After I watched "The Hours" I became inordinately obsessed with Virginia Woolf. I think she is powerful. In Orlando, a young man is metamorphosed into a woman and lives indefinitely through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In my year at Mt. Royal we studied just a small portion of Orlando. It's totally weird and but it's supposed to be Woolf's most accessible novel. Not that I'm concerned with accessibility (see above).

And there's a movie with Tilda Swinton!

P.S ~ Did you know I've never read "Life of Pi"?!