I decided it was finally time to retire this list, and merge it with this list (where I am perhaps 75% through it) and add in the books from the book club at work (which I'll at least try to get through) and books I've bought in the past year or so or indeed anything that takes my fancy. I think I mentioned already that Clarke's Lord Vishnu's Love Handles is calling to me for some reason. I have looked for it at the BMV near Eaton Centre and Circus Books and a couple of bookstores on Roncesvalles yesterday. Next Sat., I should be able to quickly stop in at BMV on Bloor and Seekers (and presumably the AGO and Bau-Xi and the galleries in 401 Richmond). Basically, the only books I am looking for at the moment at the Love Handles book, Craig Nova's The Good Son and if there is anything by Robert Coover (though I did order The Public Burning and I supposedly have ordered a copy of Street Cop, but the internet book store needs to confirm this will be shipped), which allows me to be super focused once I cross the store threshold. In other words, I am the guy looking at the shelves and running back out, not someone trapped in the bookstore line from hell (as in Tom Gauld's cartoon).
At some point in the spring, I will try to get to Peter De Vries Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (which I picked up because I grew up there) and then of course would also want to read Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Novel for good measure. I have both of the Didion books in her Modern Library collection, but will need to grab them from Robarts as this tome isn't conducive to reading on the train or at the gym...
Just a couple of amusing asides. It's weird that I seem to have read Hobson's November, but I don't recall it strongly, and then I wrapped it up (again?) on a recent trip to NYC (and left it at the youth hostel where I was staying), but I still don't have a very clear impression of it. I should probably skim just a few pages to make sure that was the Hobhouse I was reading. (I am sure I was reading a Hobhouse novel, as someone commented on it on the subway, saying that Hobhouse was out of fashion these days...) I may or may not still have my NYRB edition of Hobhouse's The Furies. I will see if I can track it down (likely downstairs in a box) by the time I get to her on the list. (I think I have time ;) .)
Speaking of transit book news, just the other day, I saw someone reading something intriguing on the streetcar, and when we went around the bend, I saw it was Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I just mentioned I will try to tackle this spring. Then that evening I saw someone with what I thought was a deluxe edition of Atwood's Oryx & Crake (and I took that as a sign), but in fact it was Yarros's Onyx Storm, which I have no intention of reading.
Still, I will see about finally getting to the MaddAdam Trilogy this late fall/winter and then Lessing's Children of Violence in 2026. These are probably stretch goals...
Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time
William Maxwell So Long, See You Tomorrow & Stories from LOA Vol. 2
Dawn Powell Angels on Toast
Dawn Powell Sunday, Monday and Always (Stories) Durrenmatt Once a GreekSkorvecky Two Murders in My Double Life
Gide Lafcadio's Adventures
T.C. Boyle Drop City & A Friend of the Earth
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Singh Delhi: A Novel
Gide The Immoralist & Straight is the Gate
Powers Wheat That Springeth Green & The Stories of J.F. Powers
Joy Williams State of Grace & Escapes & The Visiting Privilege (stories)
Lampedusa The Leopard
Mavis Gallant The Cost of Living (stories)
Tim O'Brien In the Lake of the Woods
Morrison The Bluest Eye & Song of Solomon
Bradley The Ministry of Time
Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth and It Can't Happen Here)
Maritta Wolff -- Whistle Stop, Night Shift, Sudden Rain, Buttonwood and The Big Nickelodeon
(intersperse Lewis with Wolff)
O'Nan Last Night at the Lobster
Russo Empire Falls
Mahfouz The Beggar
Faulkner The Wild Palms
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets & The Painter of Signs
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Carol Shields The Republic of Love & Happenstance
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Suárez Havana Year Zero
Conrad Victory & Chance
Welty Delta Wedding
Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities
Aeschylus The Oresteia
Murakami Killing Commendatore
Faulkner The Snopes Family (Hamlet, Town, Mansion)
Mieville The City and the City & Perdido Street Station
Malamud Pictures of Fidelman
This part of the list is basically books I've picked up in the past year (and are queue-jumpers)
Denis Johnson Angels
Dorothy Edwards Winter Sonata
Soseki The Three-Cornered World
Sorokin Blue Lard (NYRB) & The Queue (NYRB)
Platonov Chevengur (NYRB)
Sunil Gangopadhyay Days and Nights in the Forest
Warren Cool Water
Holmes Go
Plymell Benzedrine Highway
Sorokin Teluria & Red Pyramid (stories)
Heather O'Neill Daydreams of Angels & The Capitol of Dreams
Ethan Canin Carry Me Across the Water
Engel Sarah Bastard's Notebook
Jelloun The Last Friend
Baker The Fermata
Martin The Consolation of Nature
Erdrich The Sentence & Shadow Tag
George Orwell Decline of the English Murder
Engel Sarah Bastard's Notebook
Wells Love and Mr. Lewisham
Azuela The Underdogs
Matthiessen Far Tortuga
Skvorecky The Bride of Texas (maybe on my second long trip of the year?)
Lightman Mr g
Huxley The Devils of Loudun
Larbaud Barnabooth His Notebook (tipped to this by Perec)
Brink Rights of Desire
Connolly This is It
Vassanji Everything There Is
Drabble The Dark Flood Rises
Kingsolver Prodigal Summer & Animal Dreams
A. Roy The Folded Earth
Marcial Gala Call Me Cassandra
Janet Hobhouse The Furies & Dancing in the Dark & Nellie without Hugo
Allende Island Beneath the Sea
Vargas Llosa Way to Paradise & The Neighborhood
Talib Smokescreen
Zsuzsi Gartner The Beguiling
Zevin Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
This is the start of the long-tail list:
Melville Pierre
Kierkegaard Either/Or
P. Roth -- Zuckerman Bound, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost
Richard Yates Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
John O'Hara Waiting for Winter
Richard Yates Revolutionary Road
John O'Hara Appointment in Samarra
Craig Nova Incandescence & The Good Son
Ribeyro Marginal Voices
Will Clarke Lord Vishnu's Love Handles A Spy Novel
Waugh Vile Bodies
Cyprian Ekwensi People of the City & Jagua Nana
Ondjaki Transparent City
Victor Serge Conquered City
Vladimir Voinovich A Displaced Person & Monumental Propaganda
Fuentes Where the Air is Clear
Walker Percy The Last Gentleman & The Second Coming
Vargas Llosa The Time of the Hero
Lethem Feral DetectiveCraig Nova The Informer (not really that good)
Robert Cohen Inspired SleepChan Koonchung (Guanzhong) The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver
Elizabeth Bowen The Heat of the DayMieko Kawakami Ms. Ice SandwichHideo Furukawa Slow Boat
Fontane Before the Storm (try to arrange to read Dec. 2025)
Tolstoy War and Peace
Vasily Grossman Stalingrad & Life and Fate
Marra A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Vikram Chandra Love and Longing in Bombay
Victor Serge Midnight in the Century
Don DeLillo End Zone
Pym Jane and Prudence
Forster Howard's End & A Room with a View
Skvorecky Miss Silver's Past & The Swell SeasonTanizaki A Cat, A Man and Two WomenBellow Ravelstein
Roth The Human Stain
Ghosh The Calcutta Chromosome
Khushwant Singh Delhi
Dickens Pictures from Italy & American Notes
Herzen Letters from France and Italy
Bely Petersburg
Victor Serge Unforgiving Years
Kundera The Festival of Insignificance & Ignorance
Soyinka The Interpreters
Kawabata Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Meera Syal Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Pyong-Mo Ku The Old Woman with the Knife
Fitzgerald This Side of ParadiseHemingway A Farewell to Arms
Fitzgerald The Beautiful and Damned
Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
Dos Passos Adventures of a Young Man
Fitzgerald Tender Is the Night
Hemingway A Moveable Feast
Fitzgerald The Last Tycoon
Gloria Naylor Mama Day
Fuentes A Change of Skin
Naipaul Miguel Street
Sontag Against Interpretation
Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem & The White Album
Fuentes Aura
Russell Smith Muriella Pent
Bove QuicksandDesani All About H. Hatterr
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Chekhov 7 Short Novels
Turgenev Smoke
Turgenev Virgin Soil
Huxley Mortal Coils (stories)
Gissing New Grub Street
Neruda Isla Negra
Fuentes Terra Nostra
Steinbeck To a God Unknown
Cesare Pavese Selected Works
P. Roth American Pastoral
Atwood MaddAdam & The Year of the Flood & Oryx & Crake
Kafu American Stories
J. Roth Radetzky March & The Emperor's Tomb
Walser The Tanners
Pym Less Than Angels
Elizabeth Bowen Eva Trout
McKay Home to Harlem
Don DeLillo Great Jones Street
R. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the Assassinations
Fisher The Conjure Man Dies
Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber
Taylor The Wedding Group
Zaher The Coin
Green Blindness
Perec A Void
Victor Serge The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Kim Thúy Ru
Malamud The Fixer
DeLillo Ratner's Star
Skvorecky The Miracle Game & Dvorak in Love
P. Roth Nemeses (Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, Nemesis)
Selvon Moses Migrating
Green Living
Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow (& V?)
Scarlett Thomas PopCo & The End of Mr Y & Our Tragic Universe
Pym A Glass of Blessings
Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer
Christopher Isherwood Berlin Stories
Joseph Roth The White Cities/Report from Paris
Ghosh The Glass Palace
Craig Nova The Congressman's Daughter & Tornado Alley
de Tocqueville Democracy in America
Trollope The Three Clerks
Achebe A Man of the People
Achebe Anthills of the Savannah
Hoban Riddley Walker
Tunney Flan
Powys Wolf Soylent
Drew Hayden Taylor Take Us to Your Leader
Lem Tales of Pirx the Pilot
Lem More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (a lot of Lem worth reading, but I might circle back first to Pirx and then Ijon Tichy (The Star Diaries, Memoirs of a space traveler and The Futurological Congress))
Victor Pelevin Omon Ra
Hardy Return of the Native
Steinbeck Tortilla Flat
Murdoch The Sea The Sea
Pynchon Against the Day
DeLillo Players/Running Dog
Murakami Norwegian Wood
Austen Emma
Guillaume Morissette New Tab
Gornick Louisa Meets Bear
DeLillo Amazons
Findley Dinner Along the Amazon
Churchill Cloud 9
Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Lessing The Golden Notebook
Craig Nova The Book of Dreams
Jean Rhys Quartet & After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Didion Democracy
Malamud The Tenants
Forrest Meteor in the Madhouse
Barley The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Trollope Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices
Anna Seghers Transit (NYRB)
Bove Night Departure & No Place
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (uncut version)
Faulkner Sanctuary & Requiem for a Nun
Green Party Going
Woolf Mrs. Dalloway/Mrs. Dalloway's Party
Austen Persuasion
Isak Dinesen Ehrengard
Nabokov The Enchanter
Elias Canetti Memoirs (The Tongue Set Free/The Torch in My Ear/The Play of the Eye)
Balzac The Human Comedy/Pere Goriot
Davies The Salterton Trilogy
Trollope He Knew He Was Right
Bissoondath Doing the Heart Good
Rhys Good Morning, Midnight
Engel Lunatic Villas
Mann Buddenbrooks
Blish Cities in Flight
Welty Delta Wedding
Zola The Fortune of the Rougons
Téa Obreht The Tiger's Wife
Ian Williams Reproduction
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Lessing's Children of Violence (Martha Quest; A Proper Marriage; A Ripple from the Storm; Landlocked; The Four-Gated City)
Muriel Spark The Mandelbaum Gate
Eric Kraft's Peter Leroy series (Little Follies; Where Do You Stop?; Herb ’n’ Lorna; Reservations Recommended; What a Piece of Work I Am; At Home with the Glynns; Leaving Small’s Hotel; Inflating a Dog; Passionate Spectator; Flying; Persistence; Albertine's Overcoat (aka Peerless Television Service and Repair))
(Saramago detour -- a few of these are listed higher up)
Saramago Skylight
R. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the AssassinationsSaramago BlindnessPerec A Void
DeLillo The Names
Saramago All the Names
Cunningham The Hours
Plato The Republic (special focus on Book VII)
Saramago The Cave
Plato The SymposiumMuriel Spark SymposiumSaramago Seeing
Norfolk The Pope's Rhinoceros
Saramago The Elephant's Journey
Murakami The Elephant Vanishes
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Faulkner The Wild Palms (linked through the palm trees of 'Miami Vice')
(I've already moved just a few up to the tail end of the main list)
Undetermined position, or the very long tail, which include books that I purged (unread) but are available in Toronto libraries
Terry Darlington Narrow Dog to Carcassonne
Mulisch The Discovery of Heaven
Husain Basti
Albert Cossery A Splendid Conspiracy (UT)
Albert Cossery Laziness in the Fertile Valley (UT)
Laura Lush Fault Line
Andrew Crumey Sputnik Caledonia
Amy Waldman The Submission
4 poets : Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, Onjana Yawnghwe
Tash Aw Five Star Billionaire
Machado de Assis A Chapter of Hats: Stories
Machado de Assis The Devil's Church and Other Stories (UT)
Machado de Assis Esau and Jacob (UT)
Joseph Roth Right and Left (UT)
Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
Cesare Pavese The Political Prisoner (UT)
Trichter Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Ben Winters The Last Policeman & Countdown City & World of Trouble
Frederick Busch The Mutual Friend (UT)
Frederick Busch Closing Arguments
Ken Kalfus The Commissariat of Enlightenment
Ken Kalfus A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Chloe Aridjis Book of Clouds
Sunjeev Sahota Ours Are the Streets (UT)
Rebecca Lee City Is A Rising Tide
Alex Shakar The Savage Girl
Jansson The True Deceiver
M. John Harrison Nova Swing
Richard Ford The Sportswriter (indeed the entire Bascombe trilogy and coda)
Bishop-Stall Ghosted
John Connolly The Book of Lost Things
Rowan Somerville The End of Sleep
Kenny Fries The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (UT)
Hisham Matar Anatomy of A Disappearance
Sergio de la Pava A Naked Singularity
Samuel Delany Babel-17
Samuel Delany Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Samuel Delany Nova ?
David Deutsch The Fabric of Reality
David Deutsch The Beginning of Infinity Explanations That Transform the World
Stephen Graham Cities Under Siege The New Military Urbanism
Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot
Michael J. Meyer The Last Days of Old Beijing
Jennifer Egan The Invisible Circus
Joe LeSueur Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara
Clark Blaise The Meagre Tarmac Stories
Josephine Johnson Now in November (TPL - reference only...)
Martin Flavin Journey in the Dark (UT-Downsview)
Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination Essays on Literature and Society (NYRB edition)
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s By Wilson, Edmund (UT)
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s By Wilson, Edmund (UT)
Edmund Wilson Memoirs of Hecate County
The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs By Bierce, Ambrose (UT)
Roald Nasgaard The Mystic North
Michael North Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (UT)
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