This, the first month of the year, I have dedicated to going back into older reading lists and hauling out a few titles that are in danger of growing moss before I actually get to read them. My first make-up list was all single titles and even then was only a small dent in my unread pile of best intentions but I felt I was really neglecting a few authors so I gave up a little extra space to try and catch up on the works of Iris Murdoch (an excellent author).
Most of the other titles I selected should be recognizable since many of them flew high on my reading lists month after month and some year and year.
Although I am beginning to realize that there just isn’t going to be enough time to read all the classics and the great books I have missed to date, I’m still peppering my reading with a little fluff, a touch of mystery, and a transgressive title or two. I may regret going off into the sunset not having read the complete works of Charles Dickens or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy but I’ll just have to blame it on Finnegans Wake for permanently twisting my mind.
So here is the make-up list to start out 2017:
- Taduno’s Song: A Novel — Odafe Atogun
- A Good Man In Africa — William Boyd
- The Names — Don DeLillo
- Before We Visit the Goddess — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Fat City — Leonard Gardener
- Middle C — William H. Gass
- The Hungry Tide — Amitav Ghosh
- Straight Is the Gate — Andre Gide
- Princess Bari — Sok-yong Hwang
- Snakepit: A Novel — Moses Isegawa
- Rock n Roll Babes From Outer Space — Linda Jaivin
- The Accident — Ismail Kadare
- A Separate Peace — John Knowles
- Martin Eden — Jack London
- The Infatuations — Javier Marias
- The Black Prince — Iris Murdoch
- Bruno’s Dream — Iris Murdoch
- The Green Knight — Iris Murdoch
- The Fishermen: A Novel — Chigozie Obioma
- Doomed — Chuck Palahniuk
- Towns Without Rivers — Michael Parker
- Maigret and the Old Lady — Georges Simenon
- A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy — Laurence Sterne
- The Ogre — Michel Tournier
- La Curée — Émile Zola
A Celebration of Reading 
“The Accident — Ismail Kadare”
I’ve read about four of his books and the only bad one was The Accident. It was truly frustrating and never went anywhere.
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I too have read about four novels by Kadare and although I find his work from good to excellent, I obviously accept that they can’t all be gems. I’ll still have to read The Accident to judge for myself but I wonder what the problem was for you: no plot, confusing structure, insufficient backstory, unsuccessful experimentation, or just a sloppy job often associated with the phrase “bend over and take the cash.”
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