June Reading Selections & Ukuleles

Deciding what to stack on the corner of your desk for possible reading during the month of June is too much of a Sophie’s Choice, but it has to be done. I will admit that the stack is much smaller nowadays, not because I’m reading less (although I used to select forty titles for each month) but because so many upcoming titles are just entries in a digital list and waiting for me to read them on my iPad.

I might not read as much this month since it’s getting hotter out on the lanai and I tend to fall asleep in the lounge chair where I read in the bedroom (with the overhead fan swirling and a hot dog-body draped across my lap). Also, old age has forced me to downsize my musical urges: I have given away the dreadnaught, hidden the guitar, gifted the mandolin, and now I am intending to fool around on my newly purchased ukulele: I figured, four strings of soft nylon might work with my gnarled old hands, at least for a while (then I pass it on to my son-in-law to go with the guitars and mandolins).

Take a peek on YouTube at the videos filed under ‘ukulele’ and you might be amazed (see my post with Jake Shimabukuro) … this is not Arthur Godfrey’s ukulele any more.

But let’s look at that reading pool for June. Anything that excites you? I am still reading Giles Goat Boy and Royal Family from last month and have dipped into The Stone Raft and The Big Money: I need to get serious and finish those texts so I can snap up a few of the new additions. I’m especially desirous of reading Stanley Elkin: I have many of his books but haven’t even read one … and this is doubly bothersome since Stanley was teaching at Washington University when I went to graduate school … and I have never read anything he wrote (how embarrassing). But the list … comment freely!

Possible Reading Selections for June 2014

1. The Green Man — Kingsley Amis *
2. Giles Goat-Boy — John Barth *
3. Swamp Foetus — Poppy Z. Brite *
4. Such — Christine Brooke-Rose *
5. World War Z — Max Brooks *
6. The Riddle of the Sands — Erskine Childers *
7. The Nigger of the Narcissus — Joseph Conrad *
8. Nervous Conditions — Tsitsi Dangarembga
9. The Big Money — John Dos Passos
10. A Bad Man — Stanley Elkin *
11. Glamorama — Brett Easton Ellis *
12. Return To Manure — Raymond Federman
13. Skios: A Novel — Michael Frayn *
14. Summer of the Big Bachi— Naomi Hirahara *
15. My Struggle (Book 1) — Ove Knausgaard *
16. The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing
17. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter — Mario Vargas Llosa
18. Martin Eden — Jack London *
19. The Infatuations — Javier Marías *
20. Runaway Horses — Yukio Mishima *
21. Gone With the Wind — Margaret Mitchell *
22. Despair — Vladimir Nabokov
23. Revenge — Yoko Ogawa *
24. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — Rainer Maria Rilke
25. The Stone Raft — José Saramago
26. Pedigree — Georges Simenon *
27. A Grain of Wheat — Ngugi wa Thiong’o *
28. Royal Family — William Vollmann
29. Salamander — Thomas Wharton *
30. Cries In the Drizzle — Mo Yan *