#SOL17: Three Decades of Books

Catching Rob by surprise. 

Time is not a constant. Only love.

One thing Rob and I loved were sharing wonderful books. We did so often. We read the same books at different times in our lives and we also read some books together.  Here are 100+ books we read together across nearly three decades. I like to think Rob's spirit is elsewhere and he is reading. I've listed them in the order we read and indicated the year we read the book in ( ) as best I could remember.  The later books are recorded electronically so I was able to be a bit more precise. The very first book we read together is one I struggled with and one Rob had read and studied. The second book, Kundera's, is one Rob and I read and while doing so made notes to one another in the margin of the book and then one of my high schools students (also named Rob) read our copy and made notes to our notes.

And so on.

1. James Joyce's Ulysses (1988)
2. Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
3. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1989)
4. Molly Peacock's Take Heart (1989)
5. Li-Young Lee's The City in Which I Love You (1990)
6. Mary Oliver House of Light (1990)
7. Yasunari Kawabata's Palm of the Hand Stories (1990)
8. John Bradshaw's Homecoming (1990)
9. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990)
10. Thomas Pynchon Vineland (1990)
11. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991)
12. Barry Lopez's Crossing Open Ground (1991)
13. Don DeLillo's White Noise (1991)
14. Jimmy Santiago Baca's Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992)
15. Louise Glück's Ararat (1992) 
16. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992)
17. Allen Say's Grandfather's Journey (1993)
18. Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Address (1993)
19. Quincy Troupe's Weather Reports (1994)
20. Tim O'Brien's In The Lake of the Woods (1994)
21. Galway Kinnell's Imperfect Thirst (1994)
22. Cornel West's Race Matters (1994)
23. Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams (1994)
24. Billy Collin's The Art of Drowning (1995)
25. Julia Voznesenskaya's The Women's Decameron (1995)
26. Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (1995)
27. Richard Howard's The Best America Poetry (1995)
28. Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Dreams (1995)
29. Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1995)
30. Jorie Graham's The Dream of the Unified Field (1996)
31. Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level (1996)
32. Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night (1997)
33. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997)
34. Richard Power's Gain (1998)
35. William Least Heath Moon's Blue Highways (1998)
36. Bill Bryson 's A Walk in the Woods (1998)
37. Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998)
38. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1999)
39. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe (1999)
40. Richard Russo's Empire Falls (2001)
41. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001)
42. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001)
43. Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing (2002)
44. Wendell Berry's Citizen's Papers (2003)
45. Aminah Brenda & Lynn Robinson's A Street Called Home (2004)
46. Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2004)
47. Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider (2004)
48. Orson Scott Card Ender's Game (2004)
49. Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005)
50. Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005)
51. Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (2005)
52. Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (2005)
53. Gille Deleuze & Felix Guattari's  A Thousand Plateaus (2005)
54. William Pinar's What is Curriculum Theory? (2005)
55. Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006)
56. Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (2006)
57. Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence (2006)
58. Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006)
59. John McPhee's The Crofter and the Laird (2006)
60. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Vol. 1 (2006)
61. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (2006)
62. Richard Powers' The Echo Maker (2006)
63. Wendell Berry's Window Poems (2007)
64. Susan Sontag's On Photography (2007)
65. Zhongguo Yunnan 's Visual voices, 100 photographs of village China by the women of Yunnan Province (2007)
66. Edward Said's Orientalism (2007)
67. Wendell Berry's The Way of Ignorance (2007)
68. Denise Lervertov's The Poet in the World (2007)
69. Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways (2007)
70. Al Gore's The Assault of Reason (2007)
71. William Doll's Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture: A Conversation (2007)
72. Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger's Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger: The Stars (2007)
73. Toni Morrison's What Moves at the Margin (2008)
74. Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008)
75. Jim Hubbard's Shooting Back from the Reservation:A Photographic View of Life by Native American Teens (2008)
76. Ken Robinson's Out of Our Minds (2009)
77. Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2009)
78. David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (2009)
79. Muriel Rukeyser's The Speed of Darkness (2010)
80. Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (2010)
81. William Least Heath Moon's PrairyEarth: A Deep Map (2010)
82. Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (2011)
83. Toni Morrison's Home (2012)
84. Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013)
85. David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013)
86. David Company's Doug Rickard:A New American Picture (2013)
87. Keri Smith's How to Be an Explorer of the World (2013)
88. Peter Sloterdijk's Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) (2013)
89. Seamus Heaney's Human Chain (2013)
90. Jane Gangi's Genocide in Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur (2014)
91. Timothy Eagle's Adrain Chesser: the Return (2014)
92. Roger Ballen's Asylum of the Birds (2014)
93. Thomas Newkirk's Minds Made for Stories: How We Really Write Informational and Persuasive Texts (2014)
94. Neil Gaiman's Hansel and Gretel (2014)
95. Richard McGuire's Here (2014)
96. Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls (2014)
97. Ted Kooser's The Blizzard Voices (2015)
98. John Lewis's March: Book One (2015)
99. José Manuel Mateo's Migrant: The Journey of a Mexican Worker (2015)
100. Skilla Brown's Caminar (2015)
101. Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas (2015)
102. Alan Watts's The Way of Zen (2015)
103. Palle Yourgrau's Gödel Meets Einstein : Time Travel in the Gödel Universe (2015)
104. Zen Master Seung Sahn's Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn (2015)
105. Walter Benjamin's On Photography (2016) - We started this in January, 2016 and then life got too complicated.

The last book Rob bought to read (1.3.16) was R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. The last book he indicated he wanted (put in on a wish list, 1.20.16) was Tony Hiss's The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside. We had breakfast together that morning while Rob was still in the rehab.  He would be transported two days later to Morristown Hospital where he would remain through February 17th.