Bedside Books—The Stuff I Don’t Have to Read

6 September 2008

• Jack Cashill, What’s the Matter with California? Cultural Rumbles from the Golden State and Why the Rest of Us Should Be Shaking (social commentary; geography; humor—finished 7 September 2008)
• Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (social commentary)
• Lex Williford and Michael Martone, eds., The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction—50 American Stories Since 1970, 2nd ed. (short stories)
• Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book—The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (nonfiction; a repeat read)
• Felix Markham, Napolean (biography)
• John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (novel)
• Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris—Confessions of a Common Reader (personal essays)
• Stendahl, Love (personal essays)
• Doug Phillips, ed., The Letters and Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt for His Sons (letters)
• David Bailey Harned, Patience—How We Wait Upon the World (devotional)

7 September 2008

• Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance: The Passion for Life (psychology)
• L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall (1941; speculative fiction)
• Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), The Sacrament of the Moment (inspirational)

14 September 2008

• Michael Dirda, Bound to Please—An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books (essays)

1 October 2008

• Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man (speculative fiction; first Hugo Award winner, 1953)