I'm still plugging away at my list. I mentioned before that I was taking a break before starting in on The Horse's Mouth. I managed to finish both The Age of Innocence (not really sold on the ending) and High Fidelity today. (I probably could have biked in today but wimped out, so I had some reading time on the train.) I'd say there is a reasonable chance I will get though The Horse's Mouth in the next week or so (if I can get past the domestic abuse angle...). An interesting side note is that all three novels were made into pretty decent movies, as well as Wise Blood, which is fairly high on the revised reading list, but I still may not get around to it for a while. I might show High Fidelity to my son; I don't think he'd really appreciate the others.
At any rate, I'm waiting on a copy of Crime and Punishment to show up in the mail. That will likely be the next thing I read after The Horse's Mouth, followed by The Man Who Was Thursday (even though I don't like the ending) and then Arlt's The Seven Madmen (where many critics say there is a very strong connection to Crime and Punishment).
I've been tempted by immigration literature lately (perhaps because I am weeks away from becoming a citizen myself), and I'll probably reread Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin. I vaguely remember reading this and The Emigrants back in my 20s! I'll skim through The Pleasures of Exile also, which is Lamming's personal critical response to the portrayal of Blackness in literature (Caliban, Queequeg from Moby Dick, etc.). Right before the pandemic hit, I was going to pick up Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners from the Pape Library, but I never got around to it. It seems to have vanished from their shelves, but I can request a different copy. If I like that, I may read a few of his other novels as they are generally pretty short, which is quite appealing to me now.
After that I'll mostly be reading books that are destined for the Little Free Library. Interestingly, it is really crammed full these days...
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