Year of Roth

year-of-roth.md

Philip Roth has stopped writing novels. Having read all of the novels he's written I'm sad that I'll never read another one for the first time so the next best thing is reading them again. I invite you all to join me in reading a selection of these novels throughout 2013: The Year of Roth.

In order to keep the reading list manageable I've culled the complete bibliography, cutting off both ends (including all the late short books) and removing a few others. As much as some folks love The Great American Novel it's unquestionably minor Roth and I could do without reading it again. I've omitted The Plot Against America because it's long and a downer to have to end on. Feel free to pick it up on 1/1/2014.

Following is a list of included books with start dates:

Portnoy's Complaint	Jan 1
The Breast	Jan 28
My Life as a Man	Feb 4
The Professor of Desire	Mar 1
The Ghost Writer	Mar 25
Zuckerman Unbound	Apr 3
The Anatomy Lesson	Apr 24
The Prague Orgy	May 19
The Counterlife	May 27
Deception	Jun 24
Operation Shylock	Jul 15
Sabbath's Theater	Aug 19
American Pastoral	Sep 23
I Married a Communist	Nov 1
The Human Stain	Dec 1

Reading Schedule Methodology

I used Amazon's page count for the books (yes they're all available in Kindle format) to arrive at a list that would require about 85 pages a week of reading. Keep in mind that Kindle pages are shorter than those in most print editions. My main worry is that the time allotted for reading some books may be too long but I guess that will just give us more time to discuss.

Why?

I like the idea of some other people sharing in the experience of reading these great books at the same time. My experience of Infinite Summer – a group read of Inifinite Jest a couple of years ago – was that having a commity reading along made it more fun that picking up such a big work on my own. I hope that having a few people along for the ride of Year of Roth will make reading all these books even more enjoyable than the last time I read them separately.