I've tracked down most of the books that are swiftly coming up on the list at the bottom of this post, but I only could locate Farrell's Troubles out of his loose Empire Trilogy. I knew I had a copy of The Singapore Grip, as I actually had two different editions(!) but only kept one. I'm not entirely sure I did own a copy of The Siege of Krishnapur, though I thought it likely. I'm not as sure about Koestler's Darkness at Noon. I most likely owned a copy at some point, but I may have purged it in a move. Or it is in deep storage... At any rate, I spent close to a week checking the bookcases on all three floors of the house. I then stopped by BMV on my way to Tarragon (to see another incarnation of Entrances and Exits!). They had Darkness at Noon but in hardback for an inflated price. They didn't have any books by Farrell at all. I'll keep looking for the Koestler the next time I'm at Circus Books, as well as at the library book sale.
However, the Farrell kept nagging at me. I finally dug through one of the overflow boxes in my study and turned up the NYRB edition of The Singapore Grip. Yea! This just left The Siege of Krishnapur. After reading a very positive review in the Guardian and learning that Hillary mantel rated it highly, I did some poking around. It turns out that the Folio Society did a nice version of it (with an introduction by Mantel); I found a fairly cheap edition from a UK bookseller and ordered it.** I can rearrange my reading list a bit if it is delayed in the mail.
One of the few remaining questions is what to do when I hit Gogol's Dead Souls. I have two versions at home: one translated by George Reavey (Norton) and one by Bernard Guerney (Yale). Nabokov felt that the Guerney translation was one of the best. The Yale edition, however, only covers Part One with 15 pages of excerpts from Part Two. The Reavey includes all of Part Two. In addition, the inexhaustible Pevear and Volokhonsky tackled Dead Souls back in the 90s, and there is another new translation from Donald Rayfield (NYRB) that tries to synthesize Part Two into a coherent whole from all available sources. While NYRB is going to be the easiest way to get this translation, there is a hard-cover version from Garnett Press that includes 96(!) illustrations from Marc Chagall (from a different, earlier translation). Robarts (or rather Pratt) has a copy of this, and I'll have to see if the fuss is worth it. One time I read three translations of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita back to back to back, though I dropped the Glenny quickly (as it was based on the censored version of the novel). Am I really willing to read four dueling translations, even knowing this will drop down to three after Part One? I guess I am at least willing to consider the idea.
While this isn't literary in the same way, I've been looking over a lot of photo books. Fortunately, many are at the library. I really enjoyed New York in Color by Ernest Haas.
Also, William Eggleston's work is new to me. I managed to borrow most of his books from the various libraries. In fact, Before Color was lost, but it has just turned up and is on its way to the hold shelf for me to pick up. Finally, I've enjoyed Sebastião Salgado's work ever since I saw a major retrospective of his work in New York.† His work is usually published by Taschen in these enormous coffee table books. I did find it amusing though a little confusing that Migrations (Aperture), perhaps his single greatest work, is also published by Taschen as Exodus.
To add even more to the confusion, Taschen publishes two versions of Genesis. One is a massive 500 page tome, and the other is a smaller-format book of only 200 pages. I would definitely have opted for the smaller version if it was complete, but it is more like a best of Genesis. To be honest, I don't really have much room on the shelves for either version, so it is probably a moot point. I've now borrowed pretty much everything by Salgado, aside from Gold, which I just put on hold. Unfortunately, neither TPL nor Robarts appears to have Salgado's Africa, so I'll have to decide whether it is really worth the investment. As it happens, it seems the AGO Library does have a copy, so I may be able to flip through it (but not borrow it) and then make up my mind.
* As far as I can tell, Bissoondath has "retired" from writing, so after I read his short story collection and 3 remaining novels, that should be it. In contrast, Guy Vanderhaeghe published a short story collection -- Daddy Lenin -- in 2016 and has very recently published a novel, August Into Winter, though it sounds like a bit too much of the old ultra-violence for me, so I'll probably skip it. I'm also not at all interested in his cowboy trilogy. I thought I only had to read Homesick and then the very short short collection The Trouble With Heroes and I would essentially be done with Vanderhaeghe (for the time being at least). However, it turns out he has also written two plays (fortunately these are at Robarts). Incredibly enough, Dancock's Dance was put on as an interactive play at Campbell House in 2017, though I certainly don't recall hearing about it. I would most likely have gone.
** Though I just found out I need to pay another $5 in postage. It's a pretty massive book, so I guess that's reasonable.
† Indeed, this might even have been the touring show of Migrations that Aperture put on in 2000-1. It looks like I missed out on Genesis, which was at the ROM in 2013, so right before we moved to Toronto.
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