Sorting Through 50 Fall Books

I have a few posts I hope to get through today, but let me start with one that I need to finish to straighten out my library account.  Just a few days ago CBC published a list of 50 books by Canadian authors coming out this fall.  I figure a few of them can be put on hold (though none seem listed on Overdrive/Libby yet), but the rest I'll have to circle back if I see them at the library and am in the right frame of mind or perhaps more likely when I find them remaindered at BMV and I bring them home.  I mean not that I need to add anything to my reading lists and piles, but some of these look pretty interesting.  I guess I'll group them into must-reads and might-reads.

Must Read:

Aliens on the Moon by Thomas King
Self Care by Russell Smith

Might Read:

You've Changed by Ian Williams
Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa
The Trial of Katterfelto by Michael Redhill
Big of You by Elise Levine
Suddenly Light by Nina Dunic
A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News by Cary Fagan

I may end up promoting Pick a Colour and possibly You've Changed, but otherwise I will try to show some restraint and get through everything else I need to read before even considering the might reads.  

I did wrap up Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman but didn't like it much at all.  I sort of liked early Richler more, even though Duddy Kravitz is incredibly crass, but his later novels (this and Barney's Version) just turn me off.  I suspect it is a combination of the main characters making terrible choices and that I am less and less comfortable reading dialogue in what seems very stereotypical English/Yiddish patterns.  I have the same issue with Howard Jacobson, whose work I don't enjoy either.

I have only a few more pages left in Slouching Towards Kalamazoo by Peter De Vries.  This was quite funny in places, though some of the repeated gags do get a little stale.  As I mentioned before, this uses Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter as a launching pad but goes in a very different direction.  One of the more amusing bits is the public debate between a minister (the narrator's father) and the town atheist.  By the end, they have each convinced the other and "switched sides."  Interestingly enough (to me), I was in such a debate in undergrad (in a class called "Ways of Thinking") where the point was to have a debate but to argue for (and from) the side you didn't agree with.  I ended up in a debate about religion and leaned heavily on C.S. Lewis (and does the atheist character in the novel, who becomes the narrator's step father!).  I do believe I made a more genuine and compelling case than my opponent whose heart wasn't really into it.  Nonetheless, I was not convinced that Lewis was right at the end!

I do think the next 4 or 5 books will be from the piles in the back study and then maybe I will feel things are just a bit more under control as these piles shrink.  Here's hoping!