I aimed to spend the better part of this weekend reading. I am in the middle of far too many books right now… and bought three more on Thursday. My bookstore spoils:

I’m almost done with The Book of Lost Things - this was the one my friend Sara recommended to me, so I started reading it in the bookstore while being a patron of their cafe and drinking green tea.

Embarrassingly enough, I’ve never read Foucault’s Pendulum - my Eco reading has covered The Name of the Rose, The Island of the Day Before and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, but not that seminal work.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil just sounds really interesting. It “summarizes more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a “perfect storm” which leads good people to engage in evil actions.” Fun!

And I’m also in various stages of completion in these four titles. I’m farthest along in The Children’s Hospital because it is (not surprisingly) the quickest reading of the four.

Double-gunning Saramago might not have been the brightest idea since he’s not speedy reading, but he’s good - so it’s OK. And The Brothers Karamazov is just another one on my “classics I should’ve read list” that I finally got around to. Russian literature wasn’t a large part of my high school or college reading. My first exposure to Russian literature was Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in high school. I didn’t like that much at all back then. I should re-read it. My next experience was with Lolita which, while written by a Russian author, was written in English. Does that count as Russian lit?

And then I moved into the world of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy with Notes from the Underground and Anna Karenina, respectively. But that was years ago… so it seemed time.

And since I’ve liked “Bros K” thus far, I picked up Crime and Punishment while I was at it - the version by the same translators. I haven’t cracked that open yet. Same thing with Walden; I read excerpts in high school and college. In high school, it was during our “transcendentalism” unit, and in college, it was while I was reading “Leaves of Grass” in a modern poetry course. The professor wanted us to get a sense of prose transcendentalism as we read the verse, so we had bits of Thoreau and Emerson on our syllabus… but I like to have the bigger picture in place.

So you might say I have a bit of a book problem. But I guess as far as addictions and compulsions go, it could be far, far worse.