This last month I took some time off to visit my daughter and her new (first) baby but I have tried to keep up with this site and to recommend possible reading selections almost every day. I have noted several recently published novels in my suggestions and, like most people, I will probably read them since I tend to follow certain authors, both for the value of their work and also to keep up on the zeitgeist of contemporary literature. I will read just about anything but there are a few authors relegated to my Ignore List … Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Ayn Rand to name a few. Are there any authors that you expect never to read in the future, either because of a lousy reading experience in the past or some other, highly personal reason?
09-01-14 – Ghana Must Go — Taiye Selasi
09-02-14 – The Great God Brown — Eugene O’Neill
09-03-14 – Capital in the Twenty-First Century —Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer
09-04-14 – Winesburg, Ohio — Sherwood Anderson
09-05-14 – Stone Mattress: Nine Tales — Margaret Atwood
09-06-14 – God’s Little Acre — Erskine Caldwell
09-07-14 – The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea — Yukio Mishima
09-08-14 – The Drowned and the Saved — Primo Levi
09-09-14 – Sentimental Education— Gustave Flaubert
09-10-14 – Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A novel — Haruki Murakami
09-11-14 – To the Point: A Dictionary of Concise Writing— Robert Hartwell Fiske
09-12-14 – Kill My Mother: A Graphic Novel — Jules Feiffer
09-13-14 – Bombay Ice — Leslie Forbes
09-14-14 – The Pilot — James Fenimore Cooper
09-15-14 – The Children Act — Ian McEwan
09-16-14 – Aunt Rachel’s Fur— Raymond Federman
09-17-14 – The Sound of Waves — Yukio Mishima
09-18-14 – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith — Josephine Saxton
09-19-14 – The New York Trilogy — Paul Auster
09-20-14 – Sula — Tony Morrison
09-21-14 – The Laughing Monsters: A Novel — Denis Johnson
09-22-14 – Maigret and the Hotel Majestic— Georges Simenon
09-23-14 – Ghostwritten — David Mitchell
09-24-14 – Cane — Jean Toomer
09-25-14 – Interpreter of Maladies — Jhumpa Lahiri
09-26-14 – Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human — Harold Bloom
09-27-14 – The Bone Clocks — David Mitchell
09-28-14 – Gaston – André Franquin
09-29-14 – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — Edward Albee
09-30-14 – Das Capital — Karl Marx
A Celebration of Reading 
I started some years ago a novel by Susan Sontang, and I don´t think I will read any more of her fiction in a long time.
Also, recently, I read like half of Breakfast of Champions, of Vonnegut, and threw it away. It falls short (big time) against Slaughterhouse Five. He just keeps whining and whining. I will be more cautions, when picking again one of his books.
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I find Sontag’s novels a little hairy: I suspect her brain is outdistancing her pen at times. However, I find her essays (especially the book-length essays) excellent. As far as Vonnegut goes, I have read a goodly number of his works, albeit many years ago. Recently I read Timequake, which he wrote before he died, and was highly disappointed. I think some people do not match up with Vonnegut’s politics and views on religion, in particular, so it might be difficult to accept all of his writing. I, however, find it quite good.
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