Three More Lists

Just a quick spin through this blog will make it evident that I am addicted to lists.  What can I say?  They do help me organize my reading, particularly for very long-term commitments, like going through all of Faulkner's novels, to say nothing of Mahfouz's.

Anyway, I have three more lists to add to the blog.

I just saw the Giller Longlist for 2019 was announced:

• Days by Moonlight by André Alexis
• Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
• Dual Citizens by Alix Olin
• Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
• Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
• The Innocents by Michael Crummey
• Greenwood by Michael Christie
• Lampedusa by Steven Price
• Late Breaking by K. D. Miller
• Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
• Dual Citizens by Alix Olin
• Reproduction by Ian Williams
• Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Apparently the winner will be announced in November.  What is somewhat unusual is that I have actually read 2 of the books on the list - Immigrant City and Late Breaking.  It usually takes me much longer to get around to reading current fiction (waiting to see how some of it shakes out, as it were).  I do have a library hold on Frying Plantain and will probably read (and review) that sometime in October.  I'm not in any hurry to read The Testaments, since I will want to reread The Handmaid's Tale first (and that will probably have to wait until after I've read Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy).  I don't have any burning desire to read any of the others, though I'll take another, closer look when the short list comes out.  It will be interesting if they automatically give the prize to Atwood or, conversely, feel that someone else needs a chance to win (though apparently she actually only won once before for Alias Grace).  Not to be too cynical about it, but my money's on Frying Plantains, since it ticks off so many boxes.

I just wrapped up Ibuse's Black Rain and saw there was a pretty decent list of Japanese fiction at the back, and I pulled out a few of particular interest.  Most of the following are only available in the Toronto Reference Library, so I'll probably be hitting up Robarts to see how many of them are in the stacks.  While most of these books are short (under 200 pages), I still don't want to spend half the day reading them at the Reference Library.

Japanese novels/short stories:

• Sōseki Natsume I Am a Cat
• Kawabata House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
• Yoshiyuki The Dark Room
• Matsumoto The Voice and Other Stories
• Maruya Rain in the Wind
• Tanizaki A Cat, A Man and Two Women

(Actually I Am a Cat is fairly long, but that's ok, as it is the one book on the list that I actually own.)

Finally, I have been feeling the need to go back and read some of the classic science pieces that an educated person from the 1960s-80s would have been aware of.  I'm not entirely sure why, but maybe I am working, emotionally, through an alternative history where there hadn't been such a groundswell of anti-intellectualism in American life, basically since the rise of Reagan.

There probably isn't a better figure than Loren Eiseley to represent a corrective to the mindless jingoism that surrounds us these days.  He often wrote about how mankind's proper place in the world (and the universe) was much smaller than the collective we imagined.  Some people were quite annoyed that in The Invisible Pyramid he quite severely downplayed the achievement of landing on the moon...  I can only imagine what he would have written regarding the fact that today our ecological footprint is almost double what the Earth can actually support.

While I was tempted to get the LOA 2-volume set, basically all his books of essays can be purchased much more reasonably as used stand-alone titles.  At some point, I probably will check the Volume 1 out to browse through the Uncollected Prose, particularly whatever is in The Lost Notebooks.  But I might as well start with what I have easily at hand:

• The Immense Journey (1957)
• The Firmament of Time (1960)
• O The Unexpected Universe (1969)
• O The Invisible Pyramid (1971)
• O The Night Country (1971)
• O The Star Thrower (1978)

I'm definitely torn on whether to just buy the first two, but I think I really ought to just borrow them from the library first.

At any rate, this should keep me pretty busy, on top of all the other reading (and quilting!) I have signed on for...