Travis' Top Ten

The much awaited top tens lists must be produced. Here's mine. At first I was going to wing it (and tried a few hours ago) but Dad came home with my graduation gift - a new laptop - and in the meantime I flipped through the Nortons. Here it is. Note well: there is no hierarchy!

1) Edwin Spencer's The Faerie Queene (a blast from the anachronistic past)

2) William Carlos Williams (his collections entilted Paterson and Spring and All)

3) Willa Cather's New Mexico novels (Song of the Lark and Death Comes for the Archbishop, I want to do something similar, that is, write about my home state and am thus compelled to read everything about it)

4) John Berryman (Homage to Miss Bradstreet. Em, I remember you liking this too. Darcy? Brooks, shame on you)

5) Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (every high schooler recalls this one, except for us pasty ex-homeschoolers)

6) Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (I must fulfill my destiny of being a somebody-maybe-a-good-American-author if Dr. Hake and Brooks' predictions are in harmony with matters)

7) Yeats. All things Yeats! Become intimate with Yeats.

8) William Wordworth's The Preludes

9) T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets (My apetite was whetted in Lit. class via "Little Gidding especially)

10) Philip Larkin's poetry (I like his laconic and Hardyesque style)


Okay. At the moment I am about to start Joyce's Dubliners, a book by David Sedaris, and Plath's Ariel. I am currently reading Proust's The Swann's Way (book one of Time Lost) and Ted Hughes' The Iron Wolf, which I picked up at the Strand in NYC with Brooks my fellow "book faggot." I want to dabble in some Heidegger too. I eagerly anticipate the other book lists. Love to everybody.