Doug's List

Day 96 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Douglas Post, a playwright, is, naturally, reading a lot of plays! Also nonfiction, literary classics, and personal ads.

Doug spent 5 weeks in England this winter for the world premiere of Bloodshot, his one-man mystery play, commissioned and performed by Simon Slater, and well received at the Nuffield Theatre at Southampton. Doug’s play will now go on a British tour.

While he was there Doug read the plays Enron by Lucy Prebble, The Line by Timberlake Wertenbaker, and The Pitman Painters by Lee Hall. “The first,” Doug reports, “is about the rise and fall of the American energy conglomerate. The second and third are about painters and their wares. I also read About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work by Jim Hunter, which is exactly as it sounds, and National Service by Richard Eyre, which is Mr. Eyre’s diary of the ten years he spent as Artistic Director of the National Theatre.”

Doug continued his theatre reading when he got back to the States: “I reread Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, which I had seen performed with actors, dancers, and a large orchestra at the National, and Professional Foul, which is a teleplay and highly political. Actually, both scripts are political, which is unusual for this writer. I then found myself rereading Arthur Miller’s After the Fall and Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. Both works were condemned in their time, but are now largely considered to be classics.”

Now he’s reading some fiction—The Ghost Writer, by Robert Harris. When I first saw the title, I flashed on Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, which I have read, but it’s a different Ghost Writer, and I see that’s a popular title indeed, and titles can’t be copyrighted.

A guy with a great CD collection, Doug is also reading some music history, The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records by Ashley Kahn. “I haven’t read anything else by Mr. Harris, but have read two other works by Mr. Kahn. One was about the making of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the other was about John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. For the record, pun intended, Mr. Kahn is a wonderful writer. As is Mr. Harris.”

For those of you who are too young, a record is a round thing. You put a needle on it, spin it around, and music comes out. Trust me, Doug is funnier than I am. I just think I’m funny.

For instance, “For fun, I’ve been reading They Call Me Naughty Lola aloud to my wife and family," says Doug. "This is a collection of personal ads from the London Review of Books. Hysterical stuff.” But he’s not kidding. He really is reading that book aloud to his family!

Doug has also “started putting together this summer’s list of ‘Ten Books That I Should Have Read In School.’ Last summer, I got through seven. Wish me luck.”

Here’s Doug’s List:

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Big Money by John Dos Passos
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Doug says, “I only got through D.H. Lawrence and so will start with Sinclair Lewis this summer. However, I did read Robert Fagles's translation of The Iliad this winter, so I think that counts for something.”

That does count for something! Let’s wish him luck.

And what are 10 Books YOU Should Have Read in School?