Books I've Loved
What I'm Reading Now
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This isn't everything I'm reading--just stuff that is in one way or another worthy of mention.  Entries with stars are those that made my "Books I've Loved" list.

July 2008
Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuscinski
Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson
The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction

June 2008
Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island
The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto - Pico Iyer
Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer - Chuck Thompson
High Crimes: the Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed - Michael Kodas
Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City - Lillian Li
Not Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class - Nan Mooney
Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War - Rodric Braithwaite

May 2008
The Dingle Peninsula - Steve MacDonogh
Pint-Sized Ireland: In Search of the Perfect Guinness -Evan McHugh
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See

April 2008
Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing - James Waller
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka
Enrique's Journey - Sonia Nazario
The Best American Travel Writing 2006
Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff - Rosemary Mahoney

March 2008
In the City - Joan Silber
Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster - Dana Thomas
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home - Nando Parrado
The Great Wall: From Beginning to End - William Lindsday
About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times - Robert Solomon

February 2008
b-mother - Maureen O'Brien
The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College - Jacques Steinberg
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's - John Elder Robison
The Fourth Protocol - Frederick Forsyth
Dark Horse - Tami Hoag
The Language of Blood - Jane Jeong Trenka

January 2008
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia - Orlando Figes
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power - Rob Gifford
About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times - Robert Solomon
The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland - Jim DeFede
The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver

December 2007
Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World's Greatest Trips -National Geographic
Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal - Peter Thomson
The Camel Club - David Baldacci

November 2007
Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo - Jacqueline Bussie
Shadow of the Silk Road - Colin Thubron
World Without End - Ken Follet

October 2007
Hiroshima - John Hersey
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her -Melanie Rehak
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't - Robert Sutton
Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village - Margaret Paxson
Without Reservation : How a Controversial Indian Tribe Rose to Power and Built the World's Largest Casino - Jeff Benedict
Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel - Lara Vapnyar
A Year in Japan - Kate Williamson

September 2007
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 -Lawrence Wright
The Places in Between - Rory Stewart
The Glass Castle: A Memoir - Jeannette Walls
The Ten Thousand Things - Maria Dermout
The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan - Alan Booth
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil -Hannah Arendt
In Country - Bobbie Ann Mason *
Iceland: Land of the Sagas - Jon Krakauer
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead

August 2007
Adirondack Park: A Political History - Frank Graham
The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness - Paul Schneider
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth - Frank Owen
Call Me By Your Name - André Aciman
In the Woods - Tana French
Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World - Liza Mundy

July 2007
Stasiland - Anna Funder
Last Places: A Journey in the North - Lawrence Millman
Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra - Jordan Fisher Smith
Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform - Sharon Hays
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage - Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas
Without a Map - Meredith Hall
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

June 2007
Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - Danny Danziger
A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago

April 2007
The Machu Picchu Guidebook: A Self-Guided Tour - Ruth Wright
Somebody's Daughter - Marie Myung-Ok Lee
About Alice - Calvin Trillin
Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic - David Nadelberg
Incendiary - Chris Cleave
Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love - Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

February 2007
Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca - Benjamin Orlove
Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart
Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia - Louisa Waugh
What Is the What - Dave Eggers

January 2007
Them: A Memoir of Parents - Francine du Plessix Gray
The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
The Thrill of the Chaste - Dawn Eden
The People's Act of Love - James Meek
Waiting: A Novel - Ha Jin
Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa - Karin Muller

December 2006
Sharp Objects: A Novel - Gillian Flynn
Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art - Thomas Hoving
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky *
Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy - Viktor Frankl
Household Words - Joan Silber *

November 2006
Forbidden Nation: The History Of Taiwan - Jonathan Manthorpe
Alone on the Great Wall - William Lindesay
Chinese Business Etiquette: A Guide to Protocol, Manners, and Culture in the People's Republic of China - Scott Seligman

October 2006
Fifty Hikes in Central New York: Hikes and Backpacking Trips from the Western Adirondacks to the Finger Lakes - William Ehling
Waterfalls and Gorges of the Finger Lakes - Derek Doeffinger

September 2006
Letters on Life - Rainer Maria Rilke
Passionate Marriage - David Schnarch
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present - Peter Hessler

August 2006
The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception - Debora Spar
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade - Ann Fessler
Digging to America - Anne Tyler
Diane Arbus: A Biography - Patricia Bosworth
The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood - Sy Montgomery

July 2006
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World - Ted Fishman
The Last Season - Eric Blehm
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster - Svetlana Alexievich and Keith Gessen
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story - Ken Dornstein

May 2006
The Foundation Pit - Andrey Platonov
Waiting to Forget - Margaret Moorman

April 2006
Doing Business in Asia: A Cultural Perspective - Robert Burns
Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love - Linda Carroll

March 2006
The Lost Daughters of China - Karin Evans
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan - Georges Simenon

February 2006
Envy - Yuri Olesha
Moravagine - Blaise Cendrars

December 2005
The Towers of Trebizond - Rose MacAulay *
Elephant House: Or, The Home of Edward Gorey - Edward Gorey, John Updike, Kevin McDermott
Unmarried to Each Other: The Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple - Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller

November 2005
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder *
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker - ed. David Remnick
A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya - Anna Politkovskaya
Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War - Anthony Shadid

October 2005
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain
Dracula - Bram Stoker *
Moscow to the End of the Line - Venedikt Erofeev *
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players - Stefan Fatsis
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears - Nick Jans
The Dreams - Naguib Mahfouz
Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most - Gwendolyn Bounds

September 2005
Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago
I Can't Believe She Did That!: Why Women Betray Other Women at Work - Nan Mooney
Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk
Natasha, And Other Stories - David Bezmozgis
Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business - Dolly Parton
Don't Point That Thing at Me - Kyril Bonfiglioli

August 2005
Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution - Peter Baker, Susan Glasser
Selected Stories - Andre Dubus
Collected Stories - John O'Hara
The History of Love: A Novel - Nicole Krauss *
The Hot Zone - Richard Preston
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell

July 2005
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers - Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom - ed. Daniel Jones

June 2005
The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan - Steven Gaines
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer * (with ambivalence)
Slave - Mende Nazer

May 2005
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara - David Kertzer
Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans - Jane Taylor
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street - Naguib Mahfouz (still reading) *

April 2005
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller
The Holy Qur'an - translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali
Luxor and the Valley of the Kings - Alesandro Bongioanni
In a Desert Land: Photographs of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan - Neil Folberg
Egyptian Treasures from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo - Francesco Tiradritti

March 2005
Sinai, Great and Terrible - Burton Bernstein
The Nile: A Traveller's Anthology - Deborah Manley
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street - Naguib Mahfouz

February 2005
Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet - Nicholas Reeves
Tutankhamun: The Untold Story - Thomas Hoving
Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh - Joyce Tyldesley
Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie
Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York - Randy Kennedy
The KGB Bar Reader - Ken Foster, ed.

January 2005
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi
The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler
Sahara - Michael Palin
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness - Kay Redfield Jamison
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai *
True Cross - T.R. Pearson

December 2004
How to Breathe Underwater: Stories - Julie Orringer
There Are Jews in my House (Stories) - Lara Vapnyar
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World - A. J. Jacobs
The Working Poor: Invisible in America - David Shipler
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. - Catherine Millet (terrible - don't read it)

November 2004
The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy

October 2004
Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands - Roy Robson
D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage - Brenda Maddox
The Kiss - Kathryn Harrison
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Native Son - Richard Wright *

September 2004
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul *
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Dreams Of My Russian Summers - Andrei Makine
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
McTeague - Frank Norris

August 2004
BUtterfield 8 - John O'Hara
A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes *
Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History - Erik Larson
Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families - Philip Gourevitch

July 2004
Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara *
The Magus - John Fowles
Coney Island: Lost and Found - Charles Denson

June 2004
My Life - Bill Clinton
Faust - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Mariette in Ecstasy - Ron Hansen *
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal - Eric Schlosser

May 2004
Speaking With The Angel (stories) - ed. Nick Hornby

April 2004
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America's Soul - Wendy Murray Zoba
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History - John Barry
My Racing Heart: The Passionate World of Thoroughbreds and the Track - Nan Mooney
If On A Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm *
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
A Short History of A Small Place - T.R. Pearson

March 2004
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers - Leonard Koren
Culture Shock! Nepal - ed. J. Burbank
Travelers' Tales: Nepal - ed. Rajendra Khadka
The Bass Saxophone - Josef Skvorecky
The Valleys of the Assassins, and Other Persian Travels - Freya Stark

February 2004
Passionate Nomad : The Life of Freya Stark - Jane Geniesse
Chechnya Diary - Thomas Goltz
Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend - Arianna Huffington
Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars - Nicholas Griffin
Lenin's Embalmers - Ilya Zbarsky
Writing - Marguerite Duras
The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays From A Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
Are You There Alone? The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates - Suzanne O'Malley

January 2004
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (parts of this get a *)
The Conquest of Everest - John Hunt
Many People Come, Looking, Looking - Galen Rowell
The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes: Notes from Nepal - Barbara Scot
Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer (second reading)
Tiger for Breakfast: The Story of Boris of Kathmandu - Michel Peissel
Arresting God in Kathmandu - Samrat Upadhyay
Annapurna - Maurice Herzog
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas - Elaine Pagels

December 2003
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiesen
Angelhead: My Brother's Descent Into Madness - Greg Bottoms
Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier
Til We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis

November 2003
The House on Garibaldi Street - Isser Harel
Spycatcher: The Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer - Peter Wright
To the Great Ocean: The Taming of Siberia and the Building of the Trans-Siberian Railway - Harmon Tupper

October 2003
Collected Poems - Conrad Aiken
Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Vol. 5 of 5) - Joseph Frank
Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes
Wintering - Kate Moses

September 2003
The Oresteia - Aeschylus *
Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde *
Black Earth City: When Russia Ran Wild (and So Did We) - Charlotte Hobson
Leap of Faith - Queen Noor of Jordan
The Best American Travel Writing 2002
I Served the King of England - Bohumil Hrabal

August 2003
Atonement - Ian McEwan *
Time Within Time: Diaries 1970-1986 - Andrey Tarkovsky
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith - Jon Krakauer
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance - Laurie Garrett
Gulag: A History - Anne Applebaum
Lonely Planet On The Edge
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend
Hope Against Hope - Nadezhda Mandlestam

July 2003
The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
Russia: A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution - Nikos Kazantzakis
The Gospel in Dostoevsky - ed. Malcolm Muggeridge
Modern Critical Interpretations: Crime and Punishment - ed. Harold Bloom
Modern Critical Interpretations: The Brothers Karamazov - ed. Harold Bloom
A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance - Jane Juska
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion - Mircea Eliade
Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (Vol. 1 of 5) - Joseph Frank
In the Himalayas: Journeys Through Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan - Jeremy Bernstein
The Kingdom of This World - Alejo Carpentier
A Death in The Family - James Agee *
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence

June 2003
Buddhist Ethics - Hammalawa Saddhatissa
A Serious Way of Wondering - Reynolds Price
In the Forest - Edna O'Brien
Nietzsche - Ronald Hayman
Losing My Virginity: How I've survived, had fun, and made a fortune doing business my way - Richard Branson
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel - Rolf Potts
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri *

May 2003
Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh
The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation - Frederica Mathewes-Green
The Best American Non-Required Reading 2002 - ed. Dave Eggers
Three Gospels - Reynolds Price
The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov
Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem - Simon Singh
We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

April 2003
How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman
The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander *
City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World - Witold Rybczynski
The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
Danziger's Britain - Nick Danziger
Babi Yar - Anatoli Kuznetsov

March 2003
Extra Virgin: A Young Woman Discovers the Italian Riviera - Annie Hawes
The Ghost That Haunted Itself - Jan-Andrew Henderson
The Story of Scotland - Nigel Tranter
Outlander - Diana Gabaldon
Blindness - Jose Saramago *

February 2003
The Threatening Storm - Kenneth Pollack
Killing the Second Dog - Marek Hlasko
The Best American Travel Writing 2000
Nowhere Man - Aleksandar Hemon
Balthus: A Biography - Nicholas Fox Weber
The Monsters of Loch Ness - Roy Mackal
Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs

January 2003
Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey
Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It - Geoff Dyer

December 2002
By the Shore - Galaxy Craze
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

November 2002
The Cyclist - Viken Berberian
The Horned Man - James Lasdun
The Feast of Love- Charles Baxter
Heavy Sand - Anatoly Rybakov *
 
October 2002
Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States - Rickie Solinger

September 2002
Inside 9/11 - Editors of Der Spiegel
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail - Bill Bryson
Walking Home: A Woman's Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail - Kelly Winters
Lost!: A Ranger's Journal of Search and Rescue - Ronald Schmidt
Life of Pi - Yann Martel *

August 2002
Prague - Arthur Phillips
Collected Plays - Henrik Ibsen *
Watermark - Joseph Brodsky *
Conversations With Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey Through the Twentieth Century - Solomon Volkov

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