Every day when I add yet another title to my list of suggested reading, I imagine that I am seated at a rustic desk with an antique banker’s lamp casting a yellow glow over the pages of the book I am currently reading, and casting a long shadow across the floor imaging the unending stack of suggested reading teetering on the outside corner of my desk.
Of course the reality is the light of my iPad and a digital list of texts to be read in my Marvin application.
Oh, I actually have a short stack of real paper and ink books on the shelf alongside my desk but as my eyes dim, this stack is harder and harder to reduce. Still, I’m not giving up: my goal is at least one real book from my overloaded bookshelves each month .. more if I can handle it.
I’ve been pretty lucky finding digital editions of the kinds of books I most enjoy reading. In fact, I imagine that my bookshelves are being reduced more by my obtaining a digital edition than by my actually having read the book. Interestingly, my daughter (who shares my bookshelves) is bumping into with my habit of discarding or passing on any book I have already read. I take it off the shelf, read it, and then she puts it back on the shelf for her own future reading list.
This is the previous month’s suggested reading list. Remember, it’s based more on what intrigues me at the time than on any proven literary merit. Look it over: it still looks good to me.
07-01-17 – The Sellout: A Novel — Paul Beatty
07-02-17 – Notes of a Crocodile — Qiu Miaojin
07-03-17 – Les Belles Images — Simone de Beauvoir
07-04-17 – Bourne — Jeff VanderMeer
07-05-17 – The Gallery — John Horne Burns
07-06-17 – Men Without Women — Haruki Murakami
07-07-17 – Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst — Robert M. Sapolsky
07-08-17 – The Lacuna — Barbara Kingsolver
07-09-17 – Man and Superman — George Bernard Shaw
07-10-17 – The Year of the Runaways: A novel — Sunjeev Sahota
07-11-17 – On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House: A Novel — Peter Handke
07-12-17 – London — A. N. Wilson
07-13-17 – Enigma Variations: A Novel — André Aciman
07-14-17 – SoHo Sins — Richard Vine
07-15-17 – Temporary People — Deepak Unnikrishnan
07-16-17 – The Art of Literature — Arthur Schopenhauer
07-17-17 – Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi
07-18-17 – The End of Men — Hanna Rosen
07-19-17 – Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories — Ryu Murakami
07-20-17 – The Familiar, Volume 5, Redwood — Mark Z. Danielewski
07-22-17 – The Merchant of Venice — William Shakespeare
07-23-17 – American War — Omar El Akkad
07-24-17 – Vanishing Point: Poems — William Trowbridge
07-25-17 – Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? — Mumia Abu-Jamal
07-26-17 – A Small Revolution — Jimin Han
07-27-17 – The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale — Gerard Reve
07-28-17 – The Afterlife of Stars — Joseph Kertes
07-29-17 – Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination
— Brent Hayes Edwards
07-30-17 – The Idiot — Elif Batuman
07-31-17 – The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World — Brian Doyle
A Celebration of Reading 