READ THIS!

I took a few minutes today to devise a reading list. If history repeats itself - and I'm sure it will - I'll barrel through a few of these buggers and leave the rest to clog up my bookshelf like long hair in a bathtub drain. Here are the contenders:

MARCH, GERALDINE BROOKS

This very recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction speculates what happens to Mr. March (the patriarch of the Louisa May Alcott's Little Women clan) during the Civil War.

THE AMALGAMATION POLKA, STEPHEN WRIGHT

Yet another Civil War yarn. Critics say it's stylistically reminiscent of Voltaire's Candide. If nothing else, it has a fabulous title.

THE CANTOR'S DAUGHTER, SCOTT NADELSON

This is a new collection of short stories by Portland author and all-around good guy Scott Nadelson. Scott's previous collection, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, was an award winning knockout. The Cantor's Daughter won't be in bookstores till June, but you can fetch yourself a copy now at www.hawthornebooks.com.

ABOUT GRACE, ANTHONY DOERR

Doerr graduated a year ahead of me at Bowdoin, but I never met him. I love The Shell Collector, his debut book that contains the O. Henry Award-winning story "The Hunter's Wife." About Grace is his first novel, and it's rumored to be slow-moving but gorgeously written.

DORA: AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA, SIGMUND FREUD

Judging by the recent cover story on Freud in Newsweek, there's some kind of psychoanalytic renaissance going on that I didn't know about. I've decided to hop aboard the train and read Dora, a study in aberrant female behavior that my friend Liza really dug when she read it for a college seminar called Unspeakable Sexualities.