I read so many different titles last month that adding a list of suggested reading seems like overkill. Then again, I have myself read few of the suggested books so maybe I should take my own suggestions.
Right now, however, I am torn between three basic avenues of reading: first I am having a lot of fun reading all that genre fiction I have eschewed through the years, specifically detective and mystery stories; second, as my remaining years beckon, I find there are so many classical or otherwise challenging books I have yet to read; and finally there are just so many books and stories out there that I know I will never come close to catching up and promise me get a taste of an almost limitless variety of literature—a veritable smorgasbord of reading.
This is the July pool and I see several titles I intend to add to my reading list, hopefully before the end of the year. You?
09-01-19 – Steampunk: Poe — Zdenko Basic
09-02-19 – One Toss of the Dice — R. Howard Bloch
09-03-19 – The Book of Useless Information — Noel Botham
09-04-19 – A Tomb for Anatole — Paul Auster
09-05-19 – The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore — Kim Fu
09-06-19 – A Place for Us: A Novel — Fatima Farheen Mirza
09-07-19 – Empty Hearts — Juli Zeli
09-08-19 – A Girl Returned — Donatella di Pietrantonio
09-09-19 – Shogun — James Clavell
09-10-19 – The Substitution Order — Martin Clark
09-11-19 – The Nickel Boys — Colson Whitehead
09-12-19 – Wilder Girls — Rory Power
09-13-19 – Three Women — Lisa Taddeo
09-14-19 – Killing Orders — Sara Paretsky
09-15-19 – Signs Preceding the End of the World — Yuri Herrera
09-16-19 – The Knife — Jo Nesbo
09-17-19 – Leaving the Witness — Amber Scorah
09-18-19 – FKA USA: A Novel — Reed King
09-19-19 – The Snakes — Sadie Jones
09-20-19 – Never a Lovely So Real — Colin Asher
09-21-19 – Whisper Network — Chandler Baker
09-22-19 – Love on the Dole — Walter Greenwood
09-23-19 – Terry Southern: Magic Christian — Thomas Milan Konda
09-24-19 – Our Mathematical Universe — Max Tegmark
09-25-19 – Deep River — Karl Marlantes
09-26-19 – The Sound of Things Falling — Juan Gabriel Vasquez
09-27-19 – Susperia de Profundis — Thomas de Quincy
09-28-19 – Lady In the Lake — Laura Lippman
09-29-19 – Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation — Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
09-30-19 – Circus: or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel — Wayne Koestenbaum
09-31-19 – The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American — Andrew L. Seidel
A Celebration of Reading 
There certainly is lot of it going around. I’ve read that one and some of the same ilk. They do have some interesting parts, but most I’ve read seem to degenerate into YA fiction or maybe even younger.
I think can still recall the first SF book I read. I remember it was short stories and probably by Asimov – maybe I, Robot. It would have been when I was around 7th grade or so. I remember that because I of the school I was in at the time. Junior High, so circa ’56 or ’57. I was hooked immediately. My main reading through junior high and high school was SF and Gothics (Eden, Whitney, etc.) with a few main stream stuff thrown in that my mother got through a book of the month club.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was early-on heavily involved in the more classical stories that might be considered science fiction, horror, or thriller. I read quite a bit of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Arthur C. Clarke in Junior High in the Fifties but I was also into combat and other extreme macho fiction such as Battle Cry and The Naked and the Dead.
In high school and college I was involved in studying classical literature and poetry (Dickens was the genre fiction of the day). I don’t think I read any science fiction or detective fictions for the next twenty-five years.
Now I’m all over the place (although I will continue to avoid Stephen King). Maybe my oxygen machine is set too high?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Clarke I read way back when, but didn’t read any Wells or Verne until well into my adult years.
As an aside, the word ‘combat’ reminded me of the old tv series with Rick Jason and Vic Morrow. One of the few tv series which I loved then and still do – it’s really stood the test of time (aka my aging) for me.
LOL, Stephen King. One of my all time favorite books is Salem’s Lot. I read most of his early books, but then didn’t care for several in a row and didn’t even try any of his series like Dark Tower, Green Mile, etc. Misery was the last one of his I liked for a couple of decades.
I came back to him with 11/22/63 which I really enjoyed and so now read the occasional one.
LikeLike
Detective and mystery series have been my main reading for several decades. I do read a few mystery/thriller books that aren’t part of a series, but what I really enjoy are the continuing characters. Other genres come and go, but this one always sticks around for me. I see one of Paretsky’s V.I. books on your list – an early one.
A sample of the next ones on my list include:
The View from the Lighthouse (Miracles of Marble Cove #1) by Melody Carlson
A Matter of Trust (Mystery and the Minister’s Wife #15) by Diane Noble
Breakdown (V.I. Warshawski #15) by Sara Paretsky
Someone Always Knows (Sharon McCone #31) by Marcia Muller
House of the Four Winds (Dickson McCunn #3) by John Buchan
Sulfur Springs (Cork O’Connor #16) by William Kent Krueger
Dead in the Water (Stone Barrington #3) by Stuart Woods
Murder in the Bowery (Gaslight Mysteries #20) by Victoria Thompson
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #4) by Ransom Riggs
As you can see there is only one classic among them – the John Buchan book and it’s probably not really ‘classic’ by your definition. And well over half are from mystery series.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My time for genre fiction was back in the 1980s. First the Office Assistant at work convinced me I was missing out on all that good science fiction. I got a list of the most classical or popular SciFi, read most of them, and since my local public library had a SciFi section, read a lot of decent to awful books. Then I realized that Science Fiction was for the most part exceedingly boring.
About that time I got remarried to a librarian with a detective fiction fetish. She was never without a mystery novel in her bag. So I was introduced to the various detective series. At that time John D. MacDonald was winding up and Robert B. Parker was just starting out. I read them all but mostly as recommended to me (I think Simenon was my only self-assigned author). Therefore I missed many many detective series before the urge to read them left me. I did, however, keep up on the authors I had been reading.
My current foray into detective and mystery fiction has been fun but uneven. I think one major factor for my current interest is all the, especially British, mystery series on Netflix and the like. Better than a movie and maybe as good as a book are the multi-part mystery series like Prime Suspect or Bosch.
I haven’t been rigid in my reading but I hope to continue working-in a goodly number from the mystery and detective genres in my future reading lists.
LikeLiked by 2 people
My SF reading was late 50s through early 70s. So much of it seemed to go downhill for my taste after that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Interesting. My first Science Fiction book was Childhood’s End; I must have read it in 1958. When I was a wee bairn all those BEMs and Space Ships were an adventure. One of my favorite movies was The Crawling Eye (but don’t tell my mother I was watching Zacherle after everyone went to bed on Saturday night).
Do you see all this “hip” techno-fantasy writing (Ready Player One) as the new SciFi?
LikeLiked by 1 person