My Reading Is Floundering in a Sea of Netflix

books 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.