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After heated discussions at home and over email, much searching, and proposal after counterproposal, I unveil The Reading List.

• The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
• Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogal (trans. C.J. Hogarth)
• Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, Lisa Miller
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
• Blue Angel, Francine Prose
• The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir
• Daemon, Daniel Saurez
• A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
• Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst
• Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
• Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

Thirteen books in all: a loose baggy monster* of nonfiction, literary fiction, suspense, science fiction/fantasy, and classics.  By my rough estimate, we have about 5000 pages to read, or, given thirty-five weeks, about 150 pages per week.

I also found the perfect notebooks for the bookclub today on my lunch break: two Mead spiral assignment notebooks, seven-and-one-half by five inches, with forty sheets each.  I’ve dated each sheet for a single week, and to make them more special, I’ll be doing some of my famous collaging.

Next: the syllabus!  And (ouch) the purchase.

*My professors used to refer to English I and II as “loose baggy monsters” because they were intended to cover…well, everything, with a reading list meant to satisfy everyone a little bit.  I have no idea if this phrase is in wider use.

When one is forced to face down the possibility–the inbound reality–of months apart from a loved one, one seeks ways to stay connected.  Letters long ruled as the king of connection; email is today’s parchment and plume, but we lose something in the transition from penmanship to pixels.  (Stay with me, I can alliterate all day.)  Care packages, while welcome, are a one-way communique.  (Rhyme!)  At pre-deployment briefs, would-be helpers offer discounted “flat daddies” that can be placed at the meal table to take the place of the missing three-dimensional version.

Mail at sea can be greatly delayed, along with care packages of hopefully well-preserved goodies; email can be shut down or lost for a variety of reasons; and I somehow think Ben would find a “flat daddy” more discomfiting than not.

My solution?

Ben and I are creating a bookclub for two.

I filled out this idea yesterday, while reading about “common reading” programs on college campuses, though some version of it has been percolating in my egghead for months.  The idea at university is that inbound freshman have at least one book in common–something to unite them and serve as a source of conversation.  My idea is that Ben and I, by reading the same books at the same time, will be carrying on a sort of psychic conversation through the nexus of the words we’re experiencing together.  Even if email goes down and it’s a month or more between mail deliveries, even if I can’t make an outgoing phone call or tweet a single word, in some way, we’ll be joined.

Of course, our very different tastes in reading makes picking books a fraught operation.  We want anywhere from eight to fifteen books; right now, we’ve agreed on four (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Daniel Saurez’s Daemon, and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land).  One of our “rules”–that anything we pick must be available on the Kindle due to my space limitations–has only compounded the problem.  We dropped the rule that all books must be new reads for both of us (which allowed two of our choices).  Most likely, it will take a few trips to the bookstore in the end, since we’ve pretty effectively shopped our own shelves at this point.

What else remains to make the bookclub a success?

-More books (obviously).

-A syllabus…I’ll take care of that!

-Notebooks.  We’ll each jot down a few thoughts on the books we read together, especially when our communication lines fail, so that we don’t forget the things we each want to discuss.

-A reining in of my book snobbishness, and a slowing down to savoring speed in Ben’s reading habits.  We’ll meet in the middle.

I plan to post the full list of books and syllabus as a guide for others who want to try this gambit to close the miles during long times apart.  Take that, sword.