michael-dean-k/

I finally got around to building my fiction syllabus. In pursuit of the question, "how should an essay writer read?", I'm mapping out all the different ways I want to educate myself. One of them, reading and analyzing essays, is obvious and underway, the bulk of Essay Architecture. But the 2nd focus was focused on nonfiction curators, historians, and biographers—I already shared that list. Now this 3rd focus is fiction.

This list started with some big bad novels, like Moby Dick, Middlemarch, and Infinite Jest. Realistically, if I were to pursue any one of those, they'd likely suck the oxygen away from anything else I'm reading. My current approach to read something like 10 books per month, not in full, but 1-3 chapters from each, coordinated among each other. I could possibly read something like Infinite Jest over 6 months, but I imagine I would lose a lot from going in and out, and often lose context of what I read last month. Maybe there's a way where, for one month a year, I block out the whole month to read something very long. For now, going to skip that (I can experiment with long books after this already ambitious system proves it can sustain for 1-2 years).

And so this limited my fiction criteria to things I could knock out in a few days. Decided to run with short novels and novellas (100-200 words) and also short-story collections (where I'd select a few that can be read in a similar span). I like this approach because it gives me a wide range of different voices and approaches to world-building, character building, etc. Where the essay is anchored in the questioning of the author, and nonfiction is anchored in ideas, fiction is anchored in the confluence of people and place, and the implicit virtues you parse out from the circumstance.

You can get the whole reading list on syllabus for $208.

• Atwood, Stone Mattress, 2014 (Alphinland, Revenant, Dark Lady, The Dead Hand Loves You = 130p) $9
• Balle, On the Calculation of Volume Part I, 2024 (160p) $10
• Borges, Ficciones, 1944 (The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Imortal, Death and the Compass = 64p) $8
• Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories, 1995 (Bloodchild, Speech Sounds, The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Amnesty = 115p) $9
• Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, 2002 (A Boring Story, The Darling, The Man in a Case, Gooseberries = 86p) $11
• Chiang, Stories of Your Life, 2002 (Story of Your Life, Understand, Hell Is the Absence of God = 100p) $9
• Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009 (Break It Down, Story, The Thirteenth Woman, Kafka Cooks Dinner, Varieties of Disturbance, We Miss You & selected shorts = 80p) $15
• Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, 1843 (90p) $6
• Dostoyevsky, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground, The Peasant Marey, A Gentle Creature, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man = 176p) $7
• Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1744 (130p) $3
• Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 1938 (Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Indian Camp, Big Two-Hearted River, Old Man at the Bridge, A Day's Wait, Now I Lay Me, The Gambler the Nun and the Radio, Cross-Country Snow (104p) $17
• Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922 (150p) $4
• Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759 (120p) $5
• Joyce, Dubliners, 1914 ("The Dead", "Araby" "The Sisters" "A Painful Case" "Eveline" "Counterparts" "A Little Cloud" "Clay") " (111p) $1
• Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915 (75p) $9
• Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 1958 (110p) $10
• Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real, 2012 (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The Wife's Story, Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight, Nine Lives, Vaster Than Empires and More Slow = 150p) $10
• Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001 (The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Family Furnishings, = 68pp) $7
• Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 1965 (The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Flowering Judas, Theft, Noon Wine, Pale Horse Pale Rider = 135p) $16
• Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illyich and Other Stories, 1866 (The Death of Ivan Illyich, Father Sergius, Alyosha the Pot, Hadji Murat = 232) $14
• Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House, 1968 (Harrison Bergeron, Welcome to the Monkey House, Long Walk to Forever, Miss Temptation, All the Kings Horses, Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog, New Dictionary, More Stately Mansions, Report on the Barnhouse Effect, The Euphio Question, Unready to Wear, The Kid Nobody Could Handle, EPICAC, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow = 168p) $6
• Wallace, Oblivion (Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer, The Soul is Not a Smithy = 105p) $10
• Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 (190p) $6
• Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 (190p) $7

I asked Claude about the running themes: awakening late in life, the divided/counterfeit self, free will, the dignity of ordinary people, the sacredness of attention, and memento mori as a clarifying lens. Many are anchored in a single day. Some try to synthesize virtues, others accept a messy plurality. I also asked "how might I change after reading this?" and it replied: "you'll re-weigh the ordinary day"; you'll get a sharper instrument for self-deception"; "you'll relocate ethics from achievement to attention and kindness"; "mortality becomes a working tool, not a fear."