It's Monday! What are you Reading?

I'm conforming to social protocol amongst the reader's blogging community hosted by Sheila at Book Journey so let's see how this goes. I managed to read three books last week, which is pretty darn impressive considering my inherent laziness: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem,  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find (and other stories). Solaris was a little disappointing and I am now curious to watch both film versions by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh to see how each director interpreted the novel since in my mind, much of the narrative seems impossible to film effectively. Thankfully, Burgess' novel redeemed an otherwise rocky start to the reading week and is now quite possibly the best novel that I have read all year. O'Connors work was enjoyable for the most part despite being slightly underwhelming as a whole. I recently started with Willa Cather's My Antonia, which continues my foray into early American literature focusing on rural communities such as the deep south in O'Connor's stories and now the prairie state of Nebraska with Cather's novel. My initial impression so far is lukewarm at best and I am hoping that the novel picks up with some interesting story developments. Even though Cather is able to paint a vivid picturesque portrait of the prairies, endless poetic descriptions of the physical environment tends to get tiresome after a while.

I'd also like to take the opportunity to indulge in a little self-flagellation and congratulate myself for reading 32 novels so far this year with 27 of them read since the beginning of April. Woot! Woot! Not bad for someone who never took an avid interest in literature until now. My goal is to read 75 books this year and I am looking for recommendations from you kind folks for my Literature Frenzy Challenge so feel free to suggest me some good stuff to read in the comment section. Just for fun, here is my top 5 books read in 2011 so far:

1. The End of the Affair
2. A Clockwork Orange
3. A Scanner Darkly
4. The Stars My Destination
5. Of Mice and Men

That's all for now, toodles!