Stacking Up the Titles

I was recently congratulated for having completed my monthly reading pool. Books, though, are like enchanted brooms and no matter how many I read, these is always a tide of new reading threatening to wash me away.

Besides, my current quest to read beaucoup de genre novels, especially detective and mystery fiction, results in five or six completions in the same time it might take me to read one George Eliot or Charles Dickens.

This month I’ve toyed with the idea to read a select few big, fat books, or once again race through a couple dozen more direct entertainments. I opted for the long list of fun reading with one or two more challenging titles thrown in for sustained interest. Next month, however, I’m contemplating two-out-of-three falls with the likes of A Man Without Qualities and Clarissa Harlowe.

So for October I present the following reading list. It should be fun.

1. Beasts Head for Home: A Novel — Kōbō Abe
2. Motherland Hotel — Yusuf Atilgan
3. The Swimming-Pool Library — Alan Hollinghurst
4. Until Proven Guilty — J. A. Jance
5. Cold Dish — Craig Johnson
6. Number One Chinese Restaurant — Lillian Li
7. The Neon Jungle — John D. MacDonald
8. Pusher — Ed McBain
9. Machines Like Me — Ian McEwan
10. Forbidden Colors — Yukio Mishima
11. The Natashas — Yelena Moskovich
12. Edwin of the Iron Shoes — Marcia Muller
13. Passport To Peril — Robert B. Parker
14. Laguna Heat — T. Jefferson Parker
15. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia — Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
16. Angels On Toast — Dawn Powell
17. Wolf Solent — John Cowper Powys
18. The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside — Kazufumi Shiraishi
19. The Mine — Antti Tuomainen
20. Strega — Andrew Vachss