Autodidactos
Every now and then I am possessed by a mania, to shake things up a little. Usually prompted by the ticklish chill fingers of death on the nape of my neck. I become restless and certain. I stay up until three a.m. researching and scheming, unwilling to sleep, rubbing nervously at my face and eyebrows.

Sometimes it works out - I backpack across Europe, set sail for Antarctica, or buy the house. Sometimes it doesn't (too many to enumerate).

The bugs under my skin this week: buy and read a large chunk of the Everyman's Library. Hundreds of the greatest works of literature, both classic and contemporary. Aristotle, Epicurus, Orwell, and Atwood.

Turn off the computers, forsake Twitter and LiveJournal and CNN. Read. Read until it doesn't hurt to go 60 minutes without checking email. Read on my couch, in bed, in coffee shops, in the park. Buy enough books to last for years. Enough to require a new book case. Audacious, impulsive, optimistic.

I read a couple books each month, but nothing of real substance. A lot of Terry Pratchett. I no longer have any attention span. In high school I could read for eight hours at a stretch. Tom Clancy and Stephen King, sure, but it was easy - and King's pretty baroque at times. In my 20s I slurped up Camus, Dante, Homer, Milton, Lao Tzu. Beowulf and Faust. Steinbeck and Bukowski. Leonard Cohen. Norman Maclean. The New Testament. Ralph Ellison. Primo Levi. But I feel my brain calcifying. I'm becoming more neurotic and trivial. Now I can't even finish Bonk, a book about fucking.

Of course the reality is that a lot of Everyman's Library (and the Harvard Classics) is stultifying. I won't read Jane Austen. I won't read Dickens or Joyce. Life is short. Bring on Sedaris.

I mean, Don Quixote is over 1,000 pages!

So I picked 20 or so to start with, nearly all in hard-cover:

The Love Poems of John Donne (I'm a sucker for Donne)
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
The Annotated Alice - Lewis Carroll
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Collected Stories - Roald Dahl
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live - Joan Didion
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (replacing a long-lost copy; may never get around to re-reading it, yes)
The Maltese Falcon/The Thin Man/Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett (the latter is basically set in my hometown)
The Collected Works - Kahlil Gibran
The Stranger - Albert Camus (read most of his other stuff; honestly I prefer his essays to his fiction)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (might as well)
All the Pretty Horses/The Crossing/Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy (enjoyed The Road, so...)
The Complete Short Stories - Evelyn Waugh
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Essential Epicurus

If anyone has an opinion on these authors or books, I'd like to hear it. I'm open to other suggestions, but please only if you can say, "You must read this before you die." Of course, I put Douglas Adams in that category.

And yes, I realize this is the nerd equivalent of saying, "I'm gonna start lifting weights!"