At Least I Get To Start This New Year

My New Year’s resolution is to pay more attention to my reading. I get too involved with Netflix series’ and click-bait showing me how they look today (compared to 1964?). But rest assured: I may be getting soft in my old age butI have yet to chase after photos of cute kittens or smart dogs.

One thing that I intend to make use of more and more is the text-to-speech function of reading applications such as Marvin. The technology is not great but it is more than adequate for most reading. Interestingly, although you might assume this digital translation would be disappointing for books written in less familiar languages such as Arabic, but many times the pronunciation is spot-on. English tends to run into problems with various homonyms and heteronyms (bow/bow, read/read, etc.). The tendency to try to pronounce some punctuation and abbreviates is also a bit aggravating, but you get used to it.

Because it’s not perfect, I highly recommend that you scan the text as well as listen to the text-to-speech conversion. There is nothing worse than falling asleep and then having to take half a day searching for where you lost track of the narrative.

Here is the January pool of possible new reading:

1. The Virgin of Flames — Chris Abani
2. The Monkey-Wrench Gang — Edward Albee
3. Taduno’s Song: A Novel — Odafe Atogun
4. God: A Human History — Resa Aslan
5. No God But God — Reza Aslan
6. Religion For Atheists — Alain de Botton
7. Streetwise — Mohamed Chaukri
8. Maigret At Fouquet’s — Robert J. Courtine
9. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages — Guy Deutscher
10. A Visit From the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan
11. The Calcutta Chromosome — Amitav Ghosh
12. The Atheist’s Bible — Joan Konner
13. Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel
14. The Children Act — Ian McEwan
15. Doctor Zhivago — Boris Pasternak
16. Houses — Borislav Pekic
17. Empire V — Victor Pelevin
18. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Landof the Free
19. The Ghost In the Shell — Tow Ubukata
20. Maigret and the Murder in a Minor Key — Murielle Wenger