Klaus Varley Brings Semi-Literary Back - A Book List (Sort-of)

Since Bringing Literary Back was so darn popular, and like an ambition teenager, one of our goals here at The Brothel is to become more and more popular, below are a number of lists* serving various purposes, including, but not limited to, your amusement, your procrastination, your something, and for you to scoff at.

List 1: Books On My Shelf I Have Not Read but Would Honestly Like to Read (as opposed to those books on my shelf that I have not read and would not like to read and am not sure why I bought them or maybe they were a present. A bad present)

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Cock and Bull - Will Self
Trouble is my Business - Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
You Just Don't Understand - Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.
Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
Burr - Gore Vidal
Operating Instructions - Anne Lamott
Dune - Frank Herbert
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant
South by No North - Charles Bukowski
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

List 2: Books that I don't "pretend" to have read...let's just say "Books, that when brought up in a social setting elicit a, 'who wants another drink?' from yours truly." In fact, they're so famous I don't even feel the need to include the author's name. Just imagine each title followed by "you know who."

The Fountainhead
The Sound and the Fury
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Moby Dick (I may have read this as a kid, I can't remember. A good discussion this does not make. Who needs a drink?)
Crime and Punishment
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Road
The People's History of America
Any Book by Cormac McCarthy
Why do people keep bringing up Cormac McCarthy?! He's not that good...is he? Who needs a drink?

List 3: Books that after reading will make my life glorious. Or at least that's what I imagine they will do. At the VERY least after reading the books below, I could say at a party, "If you like Cormac McCarthy, you'll LOVE ____."

The Bible - God and his/her translators
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
The Complete Works of Lao Tzu - Lao Tzu
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

And...more? I'm never going to get to any of these by blogging about them.

"Who needs a drink?"

Much easier.

-KV


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*I will not know this number until I write the lists, at which time I might go back and change this introduction. However, if you are reading this, it must mean I have not deleted this section. Why not? So you know that every time someone starts a paragraph knowing too much about what will follow, they have actually already written what will follow and are pretending not to know. In other words, you will be reading the work of liars. But not here; not at The Brothel. Well, not here, on this piece. This piece just has long footnotes. Well, one long footnote. My bad.