Is that Burton I See Before Me?

I cannot lift my left arm, my neck creaks at odd angles, my eyes are foggy and tearing, my right hand shakes, and my feet are swollen. Perfect! So I’ll be ready to sit all day at my desk reading.

This may be the last month I select a specific reading list. There are too many long and difficult books to read and too many “entertainments” calling out to me: Richardson, Rabelais, Connelly, Gardner … and add to that the mind-numbing effects of the NFL and the Cooking Channel.

Fact is, I’m thinking of reading Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy which I’ve traditionally projected as the last book I would ever read.

But for now, I have these fascinating titles selected for this last month of the year:

1. The Pregnant Widow — Martin Amis
2. 2666 — Roberto Bolaño
3. Running with Scissors — Augusten Burroughs
4. Dusklands — J. M. Coetzee
5. The Closers — Michael Connelly
6. Going For a Beer — Robert Coover
7. Varieties of Disturbance: Stories – Lydia Davis
8. The Stone Monkey — Jeffrey Deaver
9. Widows — Ariel Dorfman
10. The Singapore Grip – J. G. Farrell
11. The Evening and the Morning — Ken Follett
12. Junkyard Dogs — Craig Johnson
13. The Iliad of Homer — Richard Lattimore
14. The Neighborhood — Mario Vargas Llosa
15. Robert B. Parker’s Stone’s Throw — Mike Lupica
16. The Ballad of the Sad Café: And Other Stories — Carson McCullers
17. Pursuit: A Novel of Suspense — Joyce Carol Oates
18. The Affirmation — Christopher Priest
19. The Fugitive — Marcel Proust
20. In the First Circle – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn