Reading List

My sister called me today to develop a reading list for our holiday vacation. She is eighteen, and thinks she's much much cooler than me when it comes to music (she isn't) and rejects most of my music suggestions, but she still comes to me for books. I'm basically responsible for picking up the slack of my high school's English program when it comes to my younger brother and sister. They read what I tell them to read.

Before talking to me, my sister had already decided to read Pale Fire by Nobakov and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami, both of which I was pushing on her for a while. I suggested adding Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

And then I threw in Black Hole by Charles Burns, which is honestly the most bleak and depressing graphic novel I've ever ever read. It's about an STD that makes people turn into monsters kind of, grow tails or extra mouths on their neck or extra eyes or weird skin. That kind of thing. Because I think it's good to make sure my sister fears sex before she goes off to college and gets tempted to slut it up.