I managed to see this list previously, but a week or so ago it turned up in the Toronto Star paper (on Sundays I get some key extracts from the NY Times, including the book reviews).
I'm not going to go through the whole list here, but it looks like I have read 15 of them. A handful of these I didn't care for all that much, particularly Ben Lerner's 10:04, Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children. I disliked Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo so much that I stopped after 30 pages or so. I did like a few of the ones I read (including Station Eleven and Erasure), but just generally I don't think I am that aligned with their editorial decisions.
That said, there are probably 5 that I expect to read in the next year or so:
Denis Johnson Train Dreams
Paul Beatty The Sellout
Lucia Berlin A Manual for Cleaning Women
Alice Munro Runaway (yes, I am still going to finish reading her work)
Tony Judt Postwar (I don't often read non-fiction, but this one does seem essential)
That would bring me to 20, and perhaps over the years I will get to 25 (another Munro and some late Philip Roth and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West), but I don't think I'm likely to get much further than that.
At this point in the post, I am just going back to talking about reading in general and not the Times's list...
I didn't make it to Stratford this weekend, but I will go next weekend and make a big dent in Powers's The Gold Bug Variations. The following week I will travel to Vancouver and I am planning on bringing DuPont's The American Fiancée and perhaps Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead as well.
In my main (non-special travel) reading, I'm making decent progress on Waugh's The Loved One. (I was thinking I might try to see the movie, but it is surprisingly hard to find in a library or to stream, which is weird, as I am completely convinced I had checked it out at one point. Maybe this was even in Vancouver, as their library seems to have it. So odd. In fact, there is only a very loose connection between the movie and the novel, so I can't get too hung up over this.)
I'll also be getting to Dawn Powell's The Golden Spur soon. After I read this, Angels on Toast and her story collection Sunday, Monday and Always, I will be able to cross her off my list. I'm reasonably close with William Maxwell as well, though I have more short stories to get through, and he has dropped a bit on the interim lists.
In terms of books I've thought about reading for a long time, I will be bringing up di Lampedusa's The Leopard (again one where I might watch the movie shortly afterwards) and also Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which I read many, many years ago. It's quite short, which is appealing these days...
I'm starting to think that as I finally return to my main reading list (after many, many detours), I want to add Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy and then for the following year Lessing's Martha Quest novels. I feel it's just time to tackle them. (While her best work was certainly in the 20th Century, I definitely think the Times's list needed to find a way to add something by Margaret Atwood, as I'm pretty sure it didn't.)
This reminds me that I have a hold on Atwood's newest poetry collection, Paper Boat, New and Selected Poems, 1968-2023, which comes out next month. It's not entirely clear whether this is closer to a Selected or a Collected, as well as how many new poems there are, at least since Dearly came out (in 2020, so not that long ago!). I have pretty much all her early poems, but I don't have Morning in the Burned House or Dearly, so I might be in the market for this. Curiously, there are 3 different covers. The US edition will look just like her stamp. If I do order it, I'll try to make sure to get the UK edition, which has the coolest cover. But I definitely need to see what's in there first, so I won't be pre-ordering this.
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