#Challenge My own personal goal!

- All right…it is time to get serious about my bookshelf!
- This week I read a wonderful novella (short nonfiction) by Oscar Wilde (see review).
- The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde for decades.
- The books is so old the price was 23 Guilders
- …now we use Euros for decades!
These are the books I have found:
- Thurber Writings and Drawings (70 essays)
- Essays of E.B. White (26 essays)
- Seven Plays Sam Shepard (5 plays)
- Baldwin Collected Essays (47 essays)
- Collected Poems W.B. Yeats
- John Updike The Early Stories 1953-1975 (100 short stories)
- The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde – (9 plays)
- The Collected Plays of Edward Albee (7 plays)
- Collected Auden
- Then the War and Selected Poems by Carl Philips
- Collected Poems by Donald Justice
- Collected Poems by Anthony Hecht
- Selection of Short Poems – Robinson Jeffers
UPDATES: 2024
#20BooksOfSummer
- W.H. Auden
- READ: “The Letter” (1927) (04.06.2024)
- Theme: cycle of life a represented through a failed love….very little emotion.
- Scientific words: circuit (closed path capable of being followed by an electrical current) – shunting (low resistance connection (electricity) – arc (electric) strong current can “jump a gap” between two electordes.
- Pastoral words: bird – storm – swallow – spring’s green – Autumn – seasons.
- Choosing some words (…just paraphrasing):
- Your letter comes…I was deceived.
- I move with a different love.
- I do not question a nod, stony smile of this ‘country god’…that never was more reticient.
- (ex-lover?) “…always afraid to say more than it meant.”
#20BooksOfSummer
- John Updike The Early Stories 1953-1975 (100 short stories)
- READ: “ The Persistence of Desire” (04.06.2024)
- My first impression: lackluster, unexciting
- …there’s no a hook!
- First sentence is too long and the
- first paragraph is filled with bleak vocabulary:
- “briming void”, “disconsolate youth”.
- Old lovers meet again in a Pennsylvania hometown doctor’s waiting room.
- She has clearly moved on
- ….but he is still a lustful juvenile only
- …now with a wife and children in Massachusetts.
- There is no epiphany, no big payoff
- ..just an embarassing middle age man
- …still groping women.
- #Awful…waste of my reading time.
#20BooksOfSummer
- Four plays by William Inge
- READ: Picnic (1953) by William Inge (03.06.2024) – REVIEW

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good luck on your challenge. I do have a few books that would apply. I may follow you on your idea
Oh, I’m afraid my “book stack” has only increased this year: 4 plays by William Inge, Collected Auden, Then the War and Selected Poems by Carl Philips, Collected Poems by Donald Justice, Collected Poems by Anthony Hecht and The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (editor: Helen Vendler). So I’m back to square one!
I have at least 15 unfinished collections of stories. I also have a book of essays by E.B. White to read. Maybe I have read one or two of them.
I have the E.B. White essays too! Oh, and short stories I haven’t evern checked my Kindle! I do have a mega paperback John Updike stories… :)