A History of Books Not Read

The last few days I have been reviewing lists of books to hopefully generate a fun and educational reading list (at my age I go for fun more and more). At the same time I was slowly perusing old file folders on the computer for dead, forgotten files I could delete and save space on my two 6-TB hard drives (as if I needed it) and I uncovered a couple of lists of the books I had listed to be read but the month went by and I still hadn’t read them.

Two spreadsheets showed all of the scheduled but unread books for the years 2017 and 2018. With these documents I could generate my monthly reading lists for more than a year and still enjoy well diversified and reasonably exciting selections.

But there are also several shorter lists and of titles (or longer lists where I obviously merged several smaller lists) which with a little editing for books I did eventually read’, I would have a wealth of fun and interesting reading to cover the next several years without ever going to the bookshelves or scanning the literary journals.

I am certainly blessed. But could I survive not knowing what the Times thought I should be reading?

April’s reading pool is already set and here it is:

1. The Decagon House Murders — Yukito Ayatsuji & Soji Shimada
2. Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin — Alan Bennett
3. The Brief History of the Dead — Kevin Brockmeier
4. Last Days of Pompeii — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
5. Ratner’s Star — Don DeLillo
6. The Years — Annie Ernaux
7. Running From the Devil — Jamie Freveletti
8. Crossing — Andrew Xia Fukuda
9. Will Warburton — George Gissing
10. Alan Quatermain — H. Rider Haggard
11. Growth of the Soil — Knut Hamsun
12. The Ghost in the Machine — Arthur Koestler
13. The Rain Ascends — Joy Kogawa
14. The Frolic of the Beasts — Yukio Mishima
15. Diary of a Fat Girl — Moira Mugwani
16. Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff — Sean Penn
17. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading —Nina Sankovi
18. The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics — Leonard Susskind & George Hrabovsky
19. Throwaway Daughter — Ting-xing Ye
20. I’ll Sell You a Dog — Juan Pablo Villalobos

Comments? Anything here you might want to add to your personal reading list?