May Reading

Here it is May and I have enjoyed some excellent reading already this year. I like this new process of just selecting twenty new titles to read without worrying if they are old suggestions resurfacing or if they are totally new and untried novels that hopefully will continue to energize my reading.

This month I have found room for at least a half-dozen ink and paper books. I find reading while sitting out in the sunshine is easier with a book that with an electronic device. Then when I crawl into bed I can read electronically in the dark. I have even discovered an easy and quite effective way to have the electronic device read the text to me so that not only do I not need a reading light but I don’t even need to keep my eyes open.

The text-to-speech programs and algorithms nowadays are pretty good. They still have flaws and when you read a lot of comparative literature it’s often humorous how the programs interpret the likes of Arabic or Portuguese names. Still, whether straight reading with a sufficiently large font or even relying on a computerized voice, I find the digital reader is taking over my library and interestingly allowing my occasional reading of a “real” book to be a new pleasant experience.

Here are the reading selections for May 2017.

1. Anthills of the Savannah — Chinua Achebe
2. The Japanese Lover — Isabel Allende
3. The Western Lands — William S. Burroughs
4. Odysseus Abroad: A novel — Amit Chaudhuri
5. To the White Sea — James Dickey
6. The Big Money — John Dos Passos
7. Mauve — Simon Garfield
8. The Man Who Folded Himself — David Gerrold
9. Wool — Hugh Howey
10. Monkey: A Journey To the West — David Kherdian
11. Black Spring — Henry Miller
12. Sylvie — Gérard de Nerval
13. A Widow’s Story: A Memoir — Joyce Carol Oates
14. Doomed — Chuck Palahniuk
15. When She Was Good — Philip Roth
16. Haroun and the Sea of Stories: A Novel — Salman Rushdie
17. Xala — Ousmane Sembène
18. The Widow — Georges Simenon
19. Radish — Mo Yan
20. The Easter Parade — Richard Yates