Will I Read or Be Shameless?

It’s May and the weather is gorgeous here in South Carolina. If you stop by I’ll be out on the lanai reading either on my iPad or with my wonderful new full-page lighted magnifier. Of course it’s still important to watch out for alligators; however, my most recent experience was a four-footer on my welcome mat when I opened the front door one morning last week. I had to call the alligator wrangler just to safely walk my dogs.

But the real question this month is whether I will make a large dent in the reading list I have selected or whether I will continue to lose myself on Netflix in nine years of the British series, Shameless. I must confess that I was reasonably pleased with the American version of Shameless on Showtime, but not enough to watch it regularly. Now I have seen the British original and going back to the American remake is a big letdown. William H. Macy is good but the actor playing Frank Gallagher on the British series is fantastic (in his drunken slovenliness).

So what’ll it be: Shameless or the reading list? I’m into Year 3 on Shameless and here is my proposed reading list for May:

Chromos — Felipe Alfau
Lucky Jim — Kingsley Amis
Humboldt’s Gift — Saul Bellow *
Group Portrait with Lady — Heinrich Böll *
The Interrogation — J. M. G. Le Clézio *
The Big Money — John Dos Passos
Middle C — William H. Gass
She — H. Rider Haggard *
The Well of Loneliness — Radclyffe Hall
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages — Tom Holt *
Funny Girl — Nick Hornby *
Skullcrack City — Jeremy Robert Johnson *
The Melancholy of Resistance — Lásló Krasznahorkai *
Defiance — Carole Maso
Melmoth the Wanderer — Charles Maturin
Concrete Underground — Moxie Mezcal *
Runaway Horses — Yukio Mishima *
Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell *
The Uninnocent — Bradford Morrow *
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque — Joyce Carol Oates
Tunnel Vision — Sarah Paretsky *
The Last Days — Raymond Queneau
Momento Mori — Muriel Spark
Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace *
Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola *