Have any of you ever read anything by Tim Sandlin? Years ago I picked up two of his books at a used book store — Skipped Parts and Sorrow Floats — because I liked the covers. (I hope it goes without saying that my copy of Skipped Parts has the same style cover as the one on Sorrow Floats; it was not that awful movie tie-in cover that drew me in.) And they have sat on my shelf ever since, except I once took Sorrow Floats on vacation and lost it in a suitcase for a while.

This morning I read four chapters of Sorrow Floats, and I love it. It’s quirky and funny and sad, already in just five chapters, and I want to read more. Only I just realized that Sorrow Floats is the second in a trilogy, so I have to read Skipped Parts first.

It looks like these two books got made into bad movies, and that Tim Sandlin was briefly buzz-worthy during the time when I was being a lawyer and not reading any fiction, and that his recent stuff has not been very well received. Anyone read any of these books? The descriptions are all saying Tom Robbins, but I did not get any Robbins vibe from the four chapters I’ve read so far. (That is a good thing, I think.)

This year I read 39 of the 75 books on my reading list, a statistic that becomes even less impressive when you realize how many of those were rereads. My excuse is my stupid M.A. exam, but at some point I am going to have to go back to reading books. Meanwhile, these are the books from the list that I started but just could not finish:

Alai, Red Poppies. This is a novel about Tibet, and I struggled with it for weeks before giving up. I felt completely distanced from all of the characters, and the prose was rough going as well. I might try again someday, or I might just decide that I am too stupid for this book.

Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. I gave up on this one because I hated it.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. I might try this one again someday, but I gave up on it because it was too twee.

William Faulkner, The Hamlet. I just started this one last night and I love it and I never want to read anything that isn’t Faulkner ever again.

Carlos Fuentes, The Years With Laura Díaz. I don’t remember why I quit this one; I think it was just too long and I got distracted and lost the thread. I will finish it eventually.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red. I have been struggling with this one for a couple of months. I really like it but the story is very intricate and I need to read it much faster than I have been, because I keep forgetting details and having to reread everything. I am about 100 pages in but I think I have read those hundred pages three times, all told.

The last three are the only ones I really care about finishing. I will see what I can do.

This time it is not one book that is sucking my will to read, but a whole pile of them. To wit:

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. I am reading this for the book club and I expected to really like it, but I do not. The prose is tiresome, the story feels trite, and Angela Davis’s ridiculous introduction gave me a headache.

The Turn of the Screw. One of my biggest regrets about grad school was that I never learned to like Henry James. I thought that maybe rereading this one, which I liked okay in high school, would help me along in that endeavor. Instead, it has just led me to think, “Good lord, Henry, just spit it out already,” more than ever.

The Professor and the Madman. Jeremy bought me this one, which I have wanted to read for a while. I will probably finish it eventually but it is not really grabbing me. Mostly, these old Victorian guys are just making me appreciate, for the very first time, why those French feminists get so pissed off about men and language.

I am feeling a little tired of books right now, and I feel more like either going for a bike ride or watching Survivor than sitting down and reading anything. It has been a bad summer, literature-wise.

It is because I am reading The Historian, which is 900 pages long and nowhere near as good as it’s cracked up to be. That book is killing me, although it is finally getting interesting. The writing is better than The Kite Runner but the plot isn’t as good as Anne Rice. I am sure I will have more to say later if the damn thing doesn’t kill me first.

Otherwise, I am reading about bank robbers as research for my own writing. Or my own career change, if the lawyer gig doesn’t work out.

The Da Vinci Code. I am listening to this as part of my effort to not be such a book snob. I don’t think it is going to work, because this book sucks.

And the saga of deciding what book to take on vacation continues. Usually I pack three or four (or five) novels, so that I have one for each plane ride and then several to choose from during the trip, in case I get bored or in case something turns out to suck. This year I am hampered by my weird and hopefully temporary distaste for anything too contemporary. Or maybe my post-exam stress syndrome is just manifesting itself in a bout of extreme pickiness. Either way, I have already rejected the following texts, based on the tried-and-true “read the first couple of chapters and see if it puts me to sleep” test:

• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. Probably I should just suck it up and take this one along, because I read well over fifty pages without any difficulty. And it’s George Eliot so I would probably warm up to it eventually. But it’s so twee. I don’t read Eliot for twee.
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. Too many made-up words. I just can’t do it, not when I’m already going to be trying to communicate in a language I don’t actually speak.
• George Sand, Horace. I thought this one might work because I had such good luck with Vanity Fair the last time I went on vacation. But Sand is not Thackeray. This still looks like a good read but it is not the right book for this trip.
• Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers. I really thought this would work. The Count of Monte Cristo is such a perfect vacation book! But the first chapter annoyed the hell out of me and I put it back on the shelf.
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette. Eh. I really want to read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but I was apparently lying a while ago when I said I’d ordered a paperback copy of the latter, because I don’t seem to have one.

The following are still under consideration:

• George MacDonald, Lilith. A surprising front-runner, considering how much I hated Phantastes. But I read the latter for my least favorite class ever, and that might have colored my view. Anyway, this is the one that has grabbed me the most. If I go with this choice I will probably need to scrap my one-book rule and take another.
• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo. Yes, I was just deriding her yesterday, but this passed the first chapter test.
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. This was really my first choice, because it fits with my recent Jane Austen kick. But this novel has three drawbacks for a vacation read: one, it is really too short. Two, I have read it before. And three, I didn’t really like it the first time.
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit. Also short and also one that I have read before, but I remember almost nothing about it except what one can gather from reading the Rings trilogy.
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This would be the Hail Mary pass of vacation books. I don’t want to take this one because it is huge and yet will take me no time at all to finish. I’ve already read it once, but I have completely forgotten most of it. I should probably reread it before the next book comes out, but I’d really rather listen to it than read it. Mostly I just don’t want to be the dumb American reading Harry Potter on the beach.
• Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco . Jeremy wants me to read this and if I don’t take it along, he is going to mock me and nag me all through the trip and I will probably kill him. But if I were in the mood to read a contemporary novel, I would have to read The Years With Laura Díaz or even the not very contemporary The Brothers Karamazov for the book club. Anyway, it is my vacation and I am not in the mood for post-colonial craziness.

I will probably go with Lilith and Northanger Abbey. But maybe I’ll bring Ann Radcliffe along just in case.

Prince Caspian. Lynn Redgrave is a wonderful reader, maybe the best I’ve heard. This is an excellent audiobook.

While I am still deciding what paperback to take on my vacation, I am not fucking around with the audiobooks. My iPod Shuffle is going to be filled with as many of the Narnia books as I can fit.

I am listening to these in their original order, but not because I am some kind of purist who is having a fit because the publisher is messing with my childhood. I originally read these books entirely out of order: my mother picked up The Horse and His Boy for me during my horse-crazy years, when I would read anything about horses but nothing whatsoever about magic and fantasy and strange lands. After that I read the others as I could get them from the library, and I think that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe may have been the last one I read.

A few years ago I read a one-volume Chronicles of Narnia in the new order, and I thought it worked quite well. The story of the witch and the wardrobe always seems more compelling to me if you already know the original history.

The Mill on the Floss. At the moment I don’t know whether I am actually reading this or just thinking about it. I am about to leave for vacation, and I want to take exactly one meaty novel with me because I am packing light and carrying only a small knapsack. I am about forty pages into this and I could certainly stick it out during vacation, but so far it is a little cloying. I am test driving The Three Musketeers this weekend and I might take that instead.

Frankenstein. I think I am almost done with this one so I will write more about it after I finish. I am enjoying it a lot — it is not at all what I expected. Mary Shelley reminds me a lot of some of the darker American transcendentalist writers although there are obviously many distinctions. This novel is much sadder than I expected it to be, even though I know the story from filmed versions.

I can’t recommend the audiobook even though it’s a good reading, because it is so poorly edited that entire passages wind up being repeated.

Persuasion. I appear to be working my way through all of Jane Austen’s novels this summer, instead of reading all the things I am supposed to be reading. I think this one is a better novel than Mansfield Park, but I really hate Anne Elliot. I know that makes me a bad person, probably just as bad as her hateful sister or her stupid father, but I hate her. I find her less bearable than Fanny Price, because Fanny actually does stand up for herself sometimes, or at least she stands up for what she thinks is right. Anne is such a doormat even by comparison to Fanny.

The Haunting of Hill House. Wow. After three false starts with audio books that just weren’t grabbing me, this one is such a relief. That amazing opening paragraph is even better read aloud by a good reader, and this reader is very, very good.

Mansfield Park. Everyone tells me I will hate this one, but I don’t so far. I sort of hate Fanny, but not as much as I expected to hate her.

The Years With Laura Díaz. I am reading this for the book club, but I am way behind because it is turning out to be a really difficult read for me. It’s not hard to understand; I am just having trouble reading it in chunks longer than thirty pages or so. I am also feeling a little skeptical about the translation.

The Portable Greek Reader. I am having trouble sticking with any new books, especially fiction, so I am reading this for now. I expect that these Greeks are going to kill me, plus these are old translations and some of the exerpts seem fairly random and abrupt, but wow, is Auden’s introduction a good read.

… I will have either passed my master’s exam, or I will be … well, never mind. In eight hours I will have passed my master’s exam. Let’s just leave it at that, for good luck.

Of course I won’t know if I’ve passed for another month or so, but in eight hours it will be over. What this means for you is that I will stop talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne and move on to something interesting. Let the cheering commence.