Where Did June Go?

June was a terrible month for reading around my house. First, I did become much too involved in television series on Netflix (especially the UK version of Shameless) and then I spent a week out of town visiting my little grand-daughter (she’s on the verge of taking those first few unassisted steps) and also spending some time with my daughter and her hard-working husband.

One thing productive we did while I was visiting was to sign-up for a new cell phone family plan that included me which (of course) instantly dragged the old man into the digital age with a new Smartphone. Up until this last weekend I was perfectly happy with my bullet-proof flip phone (especially since I tended to clock only four or five minutes a month) but my daughter started complaining that she couldn’t send me texts and as far a photos of the baby … forgiddaboutit. But when I discovered all the great things I could do with a Smartphone even if I didn’t need to make phone calls I began to see the future and it looked a lot like an iPhone.

Now when I roam away from home, I will not only have a cell phone but also a link to my databases, a large number of digital books for my reading pleasure and cerebral enhancement, but also a camera, a video camera, and even a way to pay for that Americano down at Starbucks.

So July is the first month I will have yet another device to read on, even if the iPhone 6 Plus is a little tighter than my iPad.

When I was making up the July Reading Pool I probably should have just made a few changes to the June list which didn’t get as much attention as I had first intended; but in accordance with my new plan to turn over the books on the list a bit faster, I have made a number of additions and subtractions that should go a long way to making the list somewhat more interesting than seeing the same titles month after month without ever being read.

So here is the July reading list:

1. Chromos — Felipe Alfau
2. Mansfield Park — Jane Austen *
3. Humboldt’s Gift — Saul Bellow *
4. Group Portrait with Lady — Heinrich Böll *
5. The Place of Dead Roads — William S. Burroughs
6. North — Louis-Ferdinand Céline *
7. The Big Money — John Dos Passos
8. Middle C — William H. Gass *
9. The Odd Woman — George Gissing *
10. Gasa-Gasa Girl — Naomi Hirahara *
11. The Old Capital —Yasunari Kawabata
12. The Ambassadors — Henry James *
13. Jackie Brown — Elmore Leonard *
14. Women and Men — Joseph McElroy
15. Runaway Horses — Yukio Mishima *
16. The Black Prince — Iris Murdoch *
17. Laughter in the Dark — Vladimir Nabokov *
18. The Bathing Women — Tie Ning *
19. Punkzilla — Adam Rapp *
20. City of Night — John Rechy *
21. Whose Body — Dorothy L. Sayers *
22. Momento Mori — Muriel Spark
23. Hotel Europa — Dumitru Tsepeneag
24. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace *
25. Fear — Stephan Zweig *

And the in-progress titles:

• Lucky Jim — Kingsley Amis
• Mona Lisa Overdrive — William Gibson *
• Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque — Joyce Carol Oates