A Carefully Chosen List of Random Reading

Another month and another thirty or so books that have been recommended or at least suggested for those well-thought-out reading lists. Actually, I was surprised that I uncovered so many interesting books: so many that I have several waiting for posting in June (and quite a few that I’m looking forward to reading as soon as possible).

A recent post referred to on this weblog suggested that best of lists are possibly sinful but I hope that everyone realizes that suggested reading is not a best-of event. I suppose it would be sublimely glorious if each of us read books from the top down—the best novel first followed by the second-best novel until years and years later you had only Stephen King left to read—and were protected from frivolous fiction or books of dubious value. But life is not like that. You must read the good with the bad, otherwise you will never hone your little gray cells to learn and appreciate the good stuff.

Besides, all classics and no popular fiction does tend to make the reader a dull [insert gender of your choice].

So which of the suggested books have you contemplated adding (without sin) to your reading list?

05-01-15 – Labyrinth of Reflections — Sergei Lukyanenko
05-02-15 – The New Road to Serfdom — Daniel Hannah
05-03-15 – The Black Spider — Jeremias Gotthelf
05-04-15 – Autobiography of a Corpse — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
05-05-15 – High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread — Joyce Carol Oates
05-06-15 – Lust For Life — Irving Stone
05-07-15 – Over Sea, Under Stone — Susan Cooper
05-08-15 – The Book of Sand — Jorge Luis Borges
05-09-15 – The Roominghouse Madrigals — Charles Bukowski
05-10-15 – The Looking Glass War — John le Carré
05-11-15 – The Devil’s Promise — David Stuart Davies
05-12-15 – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency — Douglas Adams
05-13-15 – Come Nineveh, Come Tyre — Alan Drury
05-14-15 – The Marxist History of the World — Neil Faulkner
05-15-15 – Case of the Vanishing Beauty — Richard S. Prather
05-16-15 – Leaving Berlin: A Novel — Joseph Kanon
05-17-15 – Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania — Erik Larson
05-18-15 – Seveneves — Neal Stephenson
05-19-15 – The Familiar Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May — Mark Z. Danielewski
05-20-15 – Insect Dreams — Marc Estrin
05-21-15 – Dept. of Speculation — Jenny Offill
05-22-15 – Panic In a Suitcase — Yelena Akhtiorskaya
05-23-15 – Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty — Vikram Chandra
05-24-15 – Little Failure: A Memoir — Gary Shteyngart
05-25-15 – Family Life — Akhil Sharma
05-26-15 – Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle — Amos Tutola
05-27-15 – Das Capital Book 1 — Karl Marx
05-28-15 – Les Trois Don Juan — Guillaume Apollinaire
05-29-15 – Chicago Poems — Carl Sandburg
05-30-15 – The Moslem Wife and Other Stories — Mavis Gallant
05-31-15 – The Virgin In the Ice — Ellis Peters

I’m going to start with Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle by Amos Tutola, then go searching for the new Danielewski and maybe have a little fun with Richard Prather.