October was a messy month and I’m thinking that all the months from now on may be messy (although not every month will have a hurricane pointed right at me). At the start of October I convinced myself that there were no more books to suggest. In some ways this might be very true: it’s often leaked into my gray cells that I should just recommend reading Ulysses once a month and ignore all the other entertainments.
But that would immediately reduce the regular visitors to this website to just one or two. Even I seldom reread Ulysses more that two times in any given year and even the suggestion of once a month has me climbing my bookshelves for that new edition of Proust I bought a few years ago.
Or maybe my oft threatened move to eliminate all prose fiction from my reading and concentrate on epic or even romanic poetry. Will we wander, lonely as a cloud, or will the Stephen King Reading group find itself with an unsuspecting increase in their membership?
Since I regularly vacillate from wanting to read more contemporary novels to an urge to fill-in the gaps in my more classical library to needing the sublimity of Pope or Keats to a more fun approach to murder and mayhem … maybe I should just keep the reading as eclectic as it usually is.
These are the titles I suggested last month as possibly good reading:
10-01-18 – The Playboy of the Western World — J. M. Synge
10-02-18 – The Death of Expertise — Tom Nichols
10-03-18 – Democracy — Henry Adams
10-04-18 – Only To Sleep — Lawrence Osborne
10-05-18 – Ponti — Sharlene Teo
10-06-18 – The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker
10-07-18 – Transcription — Kate Atkinson
10-08-18 – The Shape of the Ruins — Juan Gabriel Vasquez
10-09-18 – Bitter Orange — Claire Fuller
10-10-18 – Fruit of the Drunken Tree — Ingrid Rojas Contreras
10-11-18 – Preserving Fire: Selected Prose — Philip Lamantia
10-12-18 – Crudo — Olivia Laing
10-13-18 – Waiting For Eden — Elliot Ackerman
10-14-18 – Last Girl — Nadia Murad
10-15-18 – American Prison — Shane Bauer
10-16-18 – Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats — T. S. Eliot
10-17-18 – Warlock — Oakley Hall
10-18-18 – Ohio — Stephen Markley
10-19-18 – Godsend— John Wray
10-20-18 – Melmoth — Sarah Perry
10-21-18 – The Library Book — Susan Orleans
10-22-18 – Chronicles: Volume One — Bob Dylan
10-23-18 – The Crying of Lot 49 — Thomas Pynchon
10-24-18 – Boomeri — Daniel Torday
10-25-18 – The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity — Kwame Anthony Appiah
10-26-18 – The Browns of California — Miriam Pawel
10-27-18 – The Black Echo — Michael Connelly
10-28-18 – The Knife of Never Letting Go — Patrick Ness
10-29-18 – Hiking With Nietzsche — John Kaag
10-30-18 – Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy — Benjamin Balint
10-31-18 – Rickshaw: The Novel Lo-t’o Hsiang Tzu — She Lao
A Celebration of Reading 
I do read Simenon. One of my many discoveries over the years thanks to you.
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