Will February Bring Literary Goodness

The first month of the new year is over and despite my being a little older, a bit more decrepit, and my books still being stored in packing boxes waiting for the new room with the wonderful bookshelves, I was fortunate to read some rather good books.

Specifically I’d like to give a nod to these excellent titles:

• Fat City by Leonard Gardener
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
• Naphtalene by Alia Mamdouh
• It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

The reading pool for this month is a combination of several new and hopefully comendable titles, a few older titles that I so far have failed to read, and in this case, two authors represented by three or four works to allow for possible deeper study.

There are definitely a few titles on this list that have me excited about the February reading. Do you see anything you might be excited about? Here is the list:

1. How German Is It? — Walter Abish
2. Mefisto — John Banville
3. Under Fire — Henri Barbusse
4. The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes
5. Concrete — Thomas Bernhard
6. I Hate Martin Amis et al. — Peter Barry
7. The Way of Muri — Ilya Boyashov
8. When the Killing’s Done — T. C. Boyle
9. Jimmy Jazz — Roddy Doyle
10. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius — Dave Eggers
11. The Magic Kingdom — Stanley Elkin
12. Promise At Dawn — Roman Gary
13. Second Person Singular — Sayed Kashua
14. The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing
15. Empire V: The Prince of Hamlet — Victor Pelevin
16. Clouds of Witness — Dorothy L. Sayers
17. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook — Gary Shteyngart
18. The Illogic of Kassel — Enrique Vila-Matas
19. A Memoir of Misfortune — Su Xiaokang

William Gibson

• Pattern Recognition — William Gibson
• Spook Country — William Gibson
• Zero History — William Gibson

Philip Roth

• The Counterlife — Philip Roth
• When She Was Good — Philip Roth
• Deception: A Novel — Philip Roth