3rd Semester Reading List

Well, third semester's in the bag. Here's what I read:

1. A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories by Flannery O’ Connor
2. Collected Short Stories of (by) Anton Chekov
3. Letting Loose the Hounds: Stories by Brady Udall
4. The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek
5. Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin
6. The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Thom Jones
7. The Night in Question: Stories by Tobias Wolff
8. Collected Works (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness) by Richard Yates
9. The Night in Question: Stories by Tobias Wolff
10. Miracle Boy and Other Stories by Pinckney Benedict
11. first, body by Melanie Rae Thon
12. At the Jim Bridger by Ron Carlson
13. Airships by Barry Hannah
14. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
15. Give Us a Kiss by Daniel Woodrell
16. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
17. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson
18. In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien
19. The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak
20. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
21. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
22. All That Is by James Salter
23. If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien
24. Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam by Larry Heinemann
25. Dust to Dust: A Memoir by Benjamin Busch
26. The Long Walk by Brian Castner
27. Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay
28. Once a Warrior, Always a Warrior by Charles Hoge

Surprises:

first, body was recommended to me by my advisor. If you like'd Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, you'll like this. Both collection's character's dwell in the same dark places of society, but deserve to be heard, and heard with a sense of lyrical urgency.

The Pugilist at Rest. I can only describe this as being punched in the face and liking it. Shit, loving it.

The Sojourn--a 2011 National Book Award Finalist--is a spectacular (though often tragic) tale of a shepherd boy/man rising from Austria-Hungry in the midst of World War I, becoming a semi-famed sharpshooter then perilously falling from grace and struggling like everyone else to survive the "meat grinder," only to find that the months following the war could still be the hardest yet to live. Read it, you won't be sorry.