Read These Books

Many years ago I found myself scribbling loose notes whenever I ran across a book title that interested me. New title sources were all around me from literary reviews in periodicals I subscribed to, like NYRB and TLS, down to word on the street from both reliable and unreliable sources. I remember a friend jaw-boning me on the value of books by Glenn Beck. There they were, prominently displayed on her bookshelves (I didn’t have the heart to deny her love of the truth and I wondered how she had time to read them when she and her husband watched Fox News practically every waking minute of the day).

I started making my first plans for future reading on 3×5 cards. Eventually computers made the lists more useful but only because they were neater. My To-Be-Read lists are today out of hand and quite disparaging. Life goes on, we all get older, and they keep publishing more and more books. Sad.

January, the first month of yet-another new year, added another thirty or so books I  might hope to read … eventually:

01-01-19 – Falstaff — Robert Nye
01-02-19 – Picnic — William Inge
01-03-19 – Exactly — Simon Winchester
01-04-19 – The Western Wind — Samantha Harvey
01-05-19 – Henry V — William Shakespeare
01-06-19 – The Secret History of Las Vegas — Chris Abani
01-07-19 – On the Shoulders of Giants — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
01-08-19 – Hazards of Time Travel — Joyce Carol Oates
01-09-19 – Severance: A Novel — Ling Ma
01-10-19 – The Lights of Earth — Gina Berriault
01-11-19 – Anniversaries — Uwe Johnson
01-12-19 – Ghost Wall — Sarah Moss
01-13-19 – Come with Me — Helen Schulman
01-14-19 – On the Future: Prospects for Humanity — Sir Martin Rees
01-15-19 – Team Human — Douglas Rushkoff
01-16-19 – The Separation — Christopher Priest
01-17-19 – Dreams Before the Start of Time — Anne Charnock
01-18-19 – Thick and Other Essays — Tressie McMillan Cottom
01-19-19 – The Red Address Book — Sofia Lundberg
01-20-19 – North Station — Suah Bae
01-21-19 – Big Heat: Earth On the Brink — Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank
01-22-19 – I Hear Your Voice — Young-ha Kim
01-23-19 – The Age of Orphans — Laleh Khadivi
01-24-19 – No One Can Pronounce My Name — Rakesh Satyal
01-25-19 – Fever Dream — Samantha Schweblin
01-26-19 – House of Names: A Novel — Colm Toibin
01-27-19 – My Sister, the Serial Killer — Oyinkan Braithwait
01-28-19 – Family Happiness and Other Stories — Leo Tolstoy
01-29-19 – A Case of Two Cities — Qiu Xiaolong
01-30-19 – At the End of the Century — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
01-31-19 – Born To Be Postumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey — Mark Dory