I spent a lot of time watching Netflix movies & television shows. To try and not get too far behind, I have abandoned McElroy’s Women and Men to go back and finish reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This obviously resulted in many of the titles I had planned to consider reading still waiting on my virtual bookshelf. Should I pass all of them forward or should I select a bunch of new books? In keeping with my current direction, I have compromised and taken both options.
So here is my own personal reading pool for the month of August.
- Chromos — Felipe Alfau
- House of Meetings — Martin Amis *
- Modern Romance — Aziz Ansari *
- Mansfield Park — Jane Austen *
- Humboldt’s Gift — Saul Bellow *
- The Place of Dead Roads — William S. Burroughs
- The Ox-Bow Incident — Walter Van Tilburg Clark
- The Big Money — John Dos Passos
- Middle C — William H. Gass *
- The Odd Women — George Gissing *
- The Ambassadors — Henry James *
- The Interrogation — J. M. G. Le Clézio
- Jackie Brown — Elmore Leonard *
- Women and Men — Joseph McElroy
- Runaway Horses — Yukio Mishima *
- The Black Prince — Iris Murdoch *
- The Bathing Women — Tie Ning *
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert M. Pirsig *
- The Saint-Fiacre Affair — Georges Simenon *
- Momento Mori — Muriel Spark
- Tijuana Book of the Dead — Luis Alberto Urrea *
- A Brief History of Portable Literature — Enrique Vila-Matas *
- Hocus Pocus — Kurt Vonnegut *
- Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace *
- This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It — David Wong *
With a couple of titles I am in the midst of reading
- Lucky Jim — Kingsley Amis
- Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque — Joyce Carol Oates
As sad as it seems, I am still reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest and McElroy’s Women and Men. Several of the other titles I am still reading are actually highly episodic or short story collections so I expect to read them in spurts over the long haul.
