Bingeing On Books Or Netflix

Ah, November! Last month ended with four or five novels being read but with no opportunity to finish them on time. Add to that a couple of novels I really wanted to read and never got to them. I know that selecting a reading pool of 25 books for the month guarantees a reading shortfall even if I do read eight of ten books, but most of time I just move the unread titles ahead and don’t think much about it. This last month I ended with a definite feeling of disappointment at my results.

However, I can easily point to the cause of my shortfall: Netflix!

Between Netflix and HBO and any other sources of movies and series on the internet, I could easily fill up all of my spare time and been reasonably entertained. Nowadays the most serious challenge to my reading is a new series on Netflix or HBO. Somewhere between Westworld and Kimmy Schmidt.

Still, I have a challenging pool of reading for November:

1. Taduno’s Song: A Novel — Odafe Atogun
2. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl — Mona Awad
3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — Jean-Dominique Bauby
4. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine — Alina Bronsky
5. The Librarian — Mikhail Elizarov
6. Now Wait For Last Year — Philip K. Dick
7. Fat City — Leonard Gardener
8. Travesty — John Hawkes
9. Rock n Roll Babes From Outer Space — Linda Jaivin
10. We Live Inside You — Jeremy Robert Johnson
11. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ: A Novel — José Saramago
12. The Committee — Sun’Allah Ibrahim
13. The Ogre — Michel Tournier
14. The Illogic of Kassel — Enrique Vila-Matas
15. I Hotel — Karen Tei Yamashita
16. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections — Slavoj Zizek

Saul Bellow

1. Humboldt’s Gift
2. Dangling Man
3. More Die of Heartbreak

Ismail Kadare

1. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
2. The Accident
3. The Ghost Rider

David Mitchell

1. The Bone Clocks
2. Cloud Atlas
3. Slade House