Archive for

The Books I Read

When I began training over two years ago, I started to keep a list of the books I was reading.  I thought it would be interesting to look back on what I had read after I had finished my service.  Now that my service is winding down and I’m in my last week in Burkina, I have decided to share this list.  It can be said that I spent the bulk of my service reading books that I had always wanted to read and books that I was told I should read.  As a result, there is enormous diversity to what I put in front of my eyes:  from Steinbeck’s East of Eden to Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, from Fey’s Bossypants to Joyce’s Ulysses.

I was initially reluctant to share this list because I did not want to imply that I spent my time idle and solitary.  However, I eventually decided it might be fun to put up the full list, for no reason other than the general public might be interested in what exactly I was reading in the evenings when there was no electricity or internet to occupy me.

And so, without further ado, here are the books I read—in the order that I read them:

1. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
2. Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski
3. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
4. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
5. Matryona’s House and Other Stories, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
6. Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart, Tim Butcher
7. The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
8. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
9. Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Food Security and Globalization, C. Ford Runge, Benjamin Senauer, Philip G. Pardey, Mark W. Rosegrant
10. The River Between, Ngugi wa Thiong’o
11. The Qur’an, translated by Tarif Khalidi
12. Endurance:  Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing
13. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
14. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman
15. Othello, William Shakespeare
16. My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
17. The Constant Gardener, John le Carré
18. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway
19. The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff
20. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid:  A Memoir, Bill Bryson
21. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
22. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
23. The Iliad, Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
24. The Odyssey, Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
25. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
26. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
27. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
28. The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
29. Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Annie Proulx
30. Coming Up for Air, George Orwell
31. Table of Contents, John McPhee
32. The Prince’s Speech on the Future of Food, HRH the Prince of Wales
33. The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller
34. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
35. Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods, Nina Federoff and Nancy Marie Brown
36. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
37. Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
38. The Extra Man, Jonathan Ames
39. Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
40. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
41. And on Piano…Nicky Hopkins, Julian Dawson
42. Bossypants, Tina Fey
43. A Collection of Essays, George Orwell
44. A Death In Belmont, Sebastian Junger
45. Ulysses, James Joyce
46. Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder
47. Hiroshima, John Hersey
48. The Dragon’s Trail: The Biography of Raphael’s Masterpiece, Joanna Pitman
49. Twenty Prose Poems, Charles Baudelaire
50. What Is the What, Dave Eggers
51. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
52. The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, Calestous Juma
53. Candide, Voltaire
54. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
55. Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey, 1937-1947, Edmund Keeley
56. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
57. If I forget Thee, Jerusalem, William Faulkner
58. All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
59. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
60. The Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran
61. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
62. Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
63. Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells
64. Birds without Wings, Louis de Bernières
65. All the Pretty Horses, Cormack McCarthy
66. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
67. The Restless Atom: The Awakening of Nuclear Physics, Alfred Romer
68. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
69. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
70. The Adolescent, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
71. Life & Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
72. One Flew Over the Cucoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
73. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris
74. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
75. Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
76. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
78. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
79. Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson
80. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
81. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild
82. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
83. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, Cormack McCarthy
84. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
85. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
86. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
87. The Gospel of Matthew, Saint Matthew
88. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy
89. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

And that’s all she wrote.

J