Books Mentioned In July

Every month I select a daily title that I have read and recommend or perhaps I have spent good money on and hope it lives up to the acclaim or maybe I heard it was worth reading and am passing on the suggestion. You might have noticed that, aside from a reasonably good foundation in the less contemporary and more classical literature, I tend to turn toward the decidedly transgressive examples of literature. Furthermore, I do not consider my home country as anything more special than the literatures of peoples and countries all around the world. Ezra Pound spoke of the central value of translations in literature but I still wish I could read more books in the original languages.

The July List

07-01-13 – My Struggle — Karl Ove Knausgaard
07-02-13 – Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
07-03-13 – Whatever — Michel Houellebecq
07-04-13 – Old Goriot — Honoré de Balzac
07-05-13 – A Doll’s House— Henrik Ibsen
07-06-13 – The Lover — Marguerite Duras
07-07-13 – The Whispering Muse — Sjón
07-08-13 – Ageless Erotica — Joan Price, ed.
07-09-13 – The Road to Los Angeles — John Fante
07-10-13 – Children of the Alley — Naguib Mahfouz
07-11-13 – The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes
07-12-13 – Native Speaker — Chang-rae Lee
07-13-13 – The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen
07-14-13 – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
07-15-13 – The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — Mordecai Richler
07-16-13 – The Book Shop — Penelope Fitzgerald
07-17-13 – Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov
07-18-13 – An Artist of the Floating World — Katsuo Ishiguro
07-19-13 – Johnnie Got His Gun — Dalton Trumbull
07-20-13 – Dublinesque — Enrique Vila-Matas
07-21-13 – 1984 — George Orwell
07-22-13 – The Postman Always Rings Twice — James M. Cain
07-23-13 – Vain Art of the Fugue — Dumitru Tsepeneag
07-24-13 – The Hotel New Hampshire — John Irving
07-25-13 – The Mystery of the Sardine — Stephan Themerson
07-26-13 – The Transylvania Trilogy — Miklós Bánffy
07-27-13 – Confessions of an English Opium Eater — Thomas DeQuincy
07-28-13 – Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
07-29-13 – Valerie and Her Week of Wonders — Vitezslav Nezval
07-30-13 – Clarissa — Samuel Richardson
07-31-13 – Götz and Meyer — David Albahari

Blue = I Actually Read This One

Another comment:  thank goodness for electronic readers! If I didn’t have my iPad to make the fonts large enough to see clearly I might have to slow down my reading career even sooner than old-age is gradually forcing me to. But I expect I have a few hundred books left before I have to give up reading and I need to chose carefully. Should I try that new experimental novel with all the tricks played with the printed text and one or two bodily fluids evoked on every page, or should I find a good classic novel that has withstood the test of time?

Now that the years are winding down I appreciate comments like that of Arthur Schopenhauer:

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.