Books On The Shelf.

JULY 19—NINE HOURS. MORE THAN 400 PAGES REMAINING. I had to relinquish Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to its rightful owner before boarding a bus at 4 a.m., or else. To guarantee that I completed my mission, I chugged two Cokes at dinner and then a Red Bull back at home. Racing through the final chapters, aided both by my caffeinated veins and the charged storyline, I slammed the book shut triumphantly with several hours to spare.
I have had many electrifying reading experiences in the past two years, notably To Kill A Mockingbird, Into Thin Air, and The Remains of the Day. For all Peace Corps Volunteers, reading is a serious vocation. We forget the time on our hands by putting a book in them. At our regional hostels, our libraries are organized alphabetically and topically, but the most popular titles are either hoarded at volunteers’ posts or circulated according to the order on the book’s waiting list, which is quite long for Harry Potter.
Edification, not turn-paging thrills, is what I will gain from the book currently at my bedside. American Prometheus is all about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project.
I hope that by the end of the year I will have made a dent in the following, fourteen-book reading list:

FICTION
Spartina, by John Casey
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

NON-FICTION
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt
The Lady and the Monk, by Pico Iyer
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, by Herman Melville
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris
Roughing It, by Mark Twain
Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, by Rebecca Walker