I’m Tired … So Tired

Ah, the immortal words of Lili Von Shtupp. But it’s true: I’ve been dedicating half of my day to sleep, or at least to laying quietly in bed listening to Old Time Radio shows. The other half of the day is generally filled with books but there are also beaucoup de streaming stories to tempt me. I have noticed an internal regulator in my life that wavers between a low-grade panic when I’ve been ignoring my books and watching too much video and the opposite urge to take long breaks between novels and mainline a few episodes of the latest Netflix offering.

The trend I recommend today is to fill your reading lists with as many banned books as possible. Be transgressive!

How many of the titles from this month’s list might ruffle the feathers of the local gestapo school board (or big-bully governor) ???

1. The Turkish Gambit — Boris Akunin
2. Stanley and the Women — Kingsley Amis
3. Lionel Asbo: State of England — Martin Amis
4. Glory — NoViolet Bulawayo
5. The Cocktail Waitress — James M. Cain
6. Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind — Reed Farrel Coleman
7. A Darkness More Than Night — Michael Connelly
8. The End of the Story — Lydia Davis
9. The Glass Palace — Amitav Ghosh
10. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
11. Kindness Goes Unpunished — Craig Johnson
12. Three Ten To Yuma and Other Stories — Elmore Leonard
13. Priceless — Zygmunt Miloszewski
14. After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away — Joyce Carol Oates
15. The Guermantes Way — Marcel Proust
16. Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel — Gary Shteyngart
17. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Tobias Smollett
18. The History of Henry Esmond — W. M. Thackeray
19. The Use of Man — Aleksandar Tisma
20. A Little Life — Hanya Yanagihara