Last Chance To Remember 2020

As the shit-show wound down I continued reading and even had time to suggest a few titles that intrigued me.

I noticed that despite suggesting about 30 new titles each month I tend to read only about twenty percent in the short term. Although, who knows what I might discover if I went back to 2011 or whenever I started making daily recommendations? But let’s not forget that my selections are for titles I hear or read about, not necessarily titles I have access to. Let’s face it, books cost money and I often have to make the difficult choice between a new book (digital) and calling Door Dash to get my sashimi delivered fresh.

Truth be told, I have plenty enough to keep me reading for decades: the shelves are full of paper & ink books and the iDevices have become obscene gluttons for digital texts. If anything I should stop all future acquisitions and concentrate on reducing my existing hoard of literature and popular entertainments.

But I’ll miss so much!

Arthur Schopenhauer once approached this dilemma in his philosophy concluding: “To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.”

Here’s what I suggested as the horror of 2020 began to reveal a narrow beam of hope:

12-01-20 – Our Riches — Kaouther Adimi
12-02-20 – How To Pronounce Knife — Souvankham Thammavongsa
12-03-20 – Little Eyes — Samanta Schweblin
12-04-20 – Hotel Almighty — Sarah J. Sloat
12-05 20 – Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries About Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion — Ingrid Newkirk
12-06-20 – No Signal Area — Robert Perisic
12-07-20 – A Luminous Republic — Andrés Barba
12-08-20 – The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, From One to Infinity — Steven Henry Strogatz
12-09-20 – The Big Nowhere — James Ellroy
12-10-20 – Black Shack Alley — Joseph Zobel
12-11-20 – Enter the Aardvark — Jessica Anthony
12-12-20 – Figure It Out — Wayne Koestenbaum
12-13-20 – To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History — Edmund Wilson
12-14-20 – Stray — Stephanie Danier
12-15-20 – And Their Children After Them — Nicolas Mathieu
12-16-20 – Science Fictions — Stuart Ritchie
12-17-20 – The Spire — William Golding
12-18-20 – Espedair Street — Iain Banks
12-19-20 – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists — Robert Tressell
12-20-20 – Walking On the Ceiling — Aysegül Savas
12-21-20 – Eat a Peach — David Chang
12-22-20 – Penance — Kanae Minato
12-23-20 – Orange World: And Other Stories — Karen Russell
12-24-20 – Ultimate Price: The Value We Place On Life — Howard S. Friedman
12-25-20 – Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight To Fit In — Phuc Tran
12-26-20 – Fifty Words For Rain — Asha Lemmie
12-27-20 – And Then They Stopped Talking To Me — Judith Warner
12-28-20 – Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization — Scott Barry Kaufman
12-29-20 – Notes From the Fog: Stories — Ben Marcus
12-30-20 – Gingerbread — Helen Oyeyemi
12-31-20 – Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science — Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits