Forty Mike Shaynes Equals Two George Eliots

Looking back over last month’s collection of suggested reading I am struck by the high number of titles I want to see on in personal reading pool without too much delay. This brings up a perpetual problem in my reading plans.

There are, perhaps, four major themes in my reading which are currently demanding to receive the greatest part of my attention. Right now I am happily reading one detective story after another, always with a sense of fun and entertainment, but never without a sense of sacrificing the last months and years left to me to less than enlightening literature. So maybe I need to concentrate on classical novels for a while: all those Victorians that once were societies entertainments but now are fodder for university study.

And what is more impressive, reading a wheelbarrow full of genre fiction and Red Book fluff, or persevering through half-a-foot thick tomes that many readers might take the entire summer to read and most would never even attempt.

Thick books, thin books, bestsellers, musty Victorians, EngLangLit, CompLit, electronic books, paper & ink books, hardboiled, poetry—on any day I might yearn to read any of these and more.

But I think my idea of concentrating on a single type of reading each month is a good plan. First, it allows be to really scratch my literary itches and second, it overloads my intellect (or lack thereof) with too much of a certain kind of reading thus making a change possible and satisfying. So this month I will read detective stories for the most part and then I will be begging for some challenging classical literature or maybe just a few big fat books.

Last month’s reading suggestions were:

06-01-19 – Toddler Hunting: And Other Stories — Taeko Kono
06-02-19 – Wood and Stone: A Romance — John Cowper Powys
06-03-19 – The Overstory — Richard Powers
06-04-19 – Dangerous Household Items — David Orr
06-05-19 – Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle — Peter Coyote
06-06-19 – Lit Up — David Denby
06-07-19 – Minutes of Glory — Ngugi wa Thiong’o
06-08-19 – A Wonderful Stroke of Luck — Ann Beattie
06-09-19 – Colonel Jack — Daniel Defoe
06-10-19 – Machines Like Me — Ian McEwan
06-11-19 – Becoming Human — Michael Tomasello
06-12-19 – Come Rain or Come Shine — Katsuo Ishiguro
06-13-19 – Penance — Kanae Minato
06-14-19 – Census: A Novel — Jesse Ball
06-15-19 – White — Brett Easton Ellis
06-16-19 – Malice — Keigo Higashino
06-17-19 – Ice Station Zebra — Alistair MacLean
06-18-19 – Upheaval — Jared Diamond
06-19-19 – The Act of Creation — Arthur Koestler
06-20-19 – Zone of Interest — Martin Amis
06-21-19 – Shamanspace — Steve Aylett
06-22-19 – The Binding — Bridget Collins
06-23-19 – The Windup Girl — Paola Bacigalupi
06-24-19 – Miracle Creek — Angie Kim
06-25-19 – Domina — L. S. Hilton
06-26-19 – At the Mountains of Madness — H. P. Lovecraft
06-27-19 – Life Will Be the Death of Me — Chelsea Handler
06-28-19 – The Ten Types of Human by Dexter Dias
06-29-19 – Lives of the Eminent Philosophers — Pamela Mensch & James Miller
06-30-19 – The Library of the Lost: In Search of Forgotten Authors — Roger Dobson & Mark Valentine

The four types of reading I mentioned: Contemporary Novels, Classical Novels, Genre Novels, Essays and Poetry. Is that five?