I have recommended reading selections each month for the first half of the year and it’s time to go back through the lists and select a representation of recommendations that I’ll use to build my August reading list. I did this once before and it was effectively introduced me to some wonderful reading as well as keeping me honest and grounded in the books I recommend each month.
Here is the list for June 0f 2018. Now I must look back from January through Jun to create next month’s reading pool.
This is one of two months of the year when quarterly and bi-annual journals show up in my mailbox with a one-two punch of stimulating new reading. No sooner had I begun flipping through Tin House when another thick issue of Conjunctions opened up even more impediments to my often chaotic published reading lists. But I’m not complaining!
Newly published: Conjunctions:70, Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue
Start your summer reading with innovative new work by Diane Ackerman, Heather Altfeld, Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Mauro Javier Cardenas, J’Lyn Chapman, Julia Elliott, Andrew Ervin, William Gaddis, Peter Gizzi, Rae Gouirand, Robin Hemley, Troy Jollimore, Robert Karron, Madeline Kearin, Marshall Klimasewiski, Byron Landry, Nam Le, Maria Lioutaia, Andrew Mossin, Debra Nystrom, Toby Olson, Peter Orner, Richard Powers, Jessica Reed, Donald Revell, Elizabeth Robinson, Joanna Ruocco, Kyra Simone, Erin Singer, Maya Sonenberg, Donna Stonecipher, Arthur Sze, S. P. Tenhoff, Daniel Torday, and Frederic Tuten.
Summer is here. I’m healing well and only need to use a cane as an aide to my shaky balance. Otherwise I can do just about everything I did before my damaged vertebrae. My reading is getting stronger too. Other than my difficulties with tearing eyes and disappearing visual acuity, I am experiencing an increased appetite for newer novels. Unfortunately I sense that the overall quality of the books I am reading is somewhat reduced but in compensation, the fun factor is up a notch.
It’s here! Tin House #76: Summer Reading (Vol. 19, No. 4). Now that I’m getting back to normal (sorta), it’s comforting to have easy access to some great reading in one of my favorite literary journals.
That night, though, a bad thought came to her as she drowsed in the old rump-sprung armchair near the bed. Where did Mr. Cowper keep his money?
She couldn’t worry about it then, in the middle of the night. But she did. Next day as soon as she’d got him looked after she went into the other room of the two he’d sub-rented from her and Petey two weeks ago and looked around. She felt like a criminal, but she looked into his coat pockets, and at the pocketbook she found there, which had twelve dollars in it. She checked the little chest of drawers where he’d put his shirts and stuff. There was nothing else of his in the room but some books and papers on the worktable, and under the table the little humpback trunk that was all his luggage.
He’d locked it, but there was a trunk key lying out on the table with what had been in his pockets when he went up to the mine. She had to look.
—URSULA K. LE GUIN, “Pity and Shame”
