10 Books: I Am Off My Rocker For Not Having Read These Yet

It's one of those weekends where I have extended blessed reading time. I'm moving most ferociously through Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, and as the beginnings of a review are incubating in my mind, I'm also beginning to think about where I'll go next with my reading once I hit the back covers of a couple more in-process books. This question opened an onslaught: so many extraordinary books, some delectably sitting on my shelves, others not yet, that sweetly cry for attention. Oh, gilt-edged anxiety! Here are ten of the untold numbers of books that I have not yet read, but that sing to me.

• Karaoke Culture - Dubravka Ugresic
  Essays tilting toward culture, especially about how there is so much focus on making imitations of art rather than art itself: a societal shift that elevates virtual realities, covers, and fan fiction. Other essays discuss Austro-Hungarian fiction and her time being dubbed as one of the "five Croatian witches" for her anti-war stance. Translated from Croatian by David Williams. It just won the Jean Améry Award for Essay Writing and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award.
  
  
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan
  I've been on a science and space bender lately. (For example.) It would seem that this Sagan book I've long wanted would suit it well. Here, Sagan explores the difference between science and pseudo-science, and "argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions." Special attention to historical and cultural fallacies, like the titular demons, as well as UFOs, witches, and "channeling past lives." More recently, this might include creationism, climate change disbelievers, and, as one reader review mentioned, anti-vaccine backlash.
  
  
• Zoo City - Lauren Beukes
  Acclaimed science fiction from a Cape Town novelist who recently won the Arthur C. Clarke award. The story turns on a woman named Zinzi December with a sloth on her back, living in a slightly alternate South Africa. From The Guardian review: "Why a sloth? Could that be a reference to Zinzi's besetting sin, the moral laziness that is eating her hollow, as she sinks ever deeper into nasty petty crime, in a failed recovery from drug addiction and prison? Or could it be that Beukes just likes sloths?"
  
  
• Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything - David Bellos
  Not strictly focused on literary translations, Bellos's celebrated book looks at how understanding shifts and morphs over words and place. Adam Thirlwell (whose own book on translation I'm head over heels for) writes that Bellos's book is "dazzlingly inventive." He goes on: "Bellos’s deep philosophical enemy is what he calls 'nomenclaturism,' 'the notion that words are essentially names' — a notion that has been magnified in our modern era of writing: a conspiracy of lexicographers. It annoys him because this misconception is often used to support the idea that translation is impossible..."
  
  
• Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Saleh Salih
  A small novel with big impact: this is the most celebrated novel from Sudan's most celebrated fiction writer. Set in the 1960s, it's the story of two men who return to Sudan after studying in England with the hope of helping to build the post-colonial future of the nation. Laila Lalami wrote the forward to the NYRB Classics edition. Translated from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies, with help from Salih, who died in 2009. First line: "It was, gentlemen, after a long absence — seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe — that I returned to my people."
  
  
• The Resistance to Poetry - James Longenbach
  Slim book of essays by a brilliant mind, this one was all the rage in my MFA program, where Longenbach taught. His central notion is that poetry's rarefied place in our day-to-day life -- our resistance to it, that is -- serves poetry's larger purpose in elevating us into alternate planes where contradiction, heated language, and startling metaphor rule the day. The back of the paperback reads: "Poetry, argues James Longenbach, is its own best enemy." Resistance is the river of poetry's pleasure. At a scan, it seems the author does close readings of poetry by the likes of Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, Carl Phillips, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louise Gluck.
  
  
• Persuasion - Jane Austen
  I adore Pride and Prejudice, and fully love Northanger Abbey (two posts of note) and Sense and Sensibility (see also). Somehow, though, I have a hunch that it is Austen's final novel that I will love best. It appears to settle more squarely into the dark space of opportunities missed, and romantic hurt. Related: My review of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World.
  
  
• Berlin Cantata - Jeffrey Lewis
  A chorus of narrators creates a polyphony of a novel, set in that pivotal German city shortly after the Wall came down. One character, a Jewish-American woman, comes to Berlin to reclaim the house taken from her parents by Nazis and finds it occupied by members of the "old East German Writers Union." Nervous Breakdown interviewed Lewis, and said the book was "an astonishing story that raises unsettling questions about cultural and personal identity, desire across time, conspiracies of silence, exile and return, and problematizing the notion of home itself."
  
  
• Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
  To varying degrees, I love all the scorched-earth novels by Morrison that I've read. (See: review of Sula.) Why haven't I gotten to one of the great landmarks in the career of America's last Nobel laureate? It even has a local angle (for me): the novel, first published in 1977, features a man known as Milkman Dead, who is from the richest black family in a Michigan town. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction and was an Oprah pick. The New York Times Book Review said that the book "impresses itself upon us like a love affair." Which, you know, sounds pretty good to me.

• A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
  I mean, really.

Comments

[Chris]

Where are the James Patterson books?

[Alyssa Sorresso]

I always admire how much you read and it inspires me to read all the time. Your blog is a go-to for new recs!

[Anna Clark]

Oh gosh, I could sing a lot longer for so many other books yet unread. I brim with embarrassing gaps!

Don Quixote
Absalom, Absalom
Dune
The Tempest
Gilgamesh
Everything by Alexandre Dumas
Emma
Mansfield Park
Everything by Jules Verne (this, despite my 18 months dedicated to reading classic monster/adventure books)
Oliver Twist
Middlemarch
Leaves of Grass
The Martian Chronicles
Faranheit 451
The Watchmen
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman
Dead Souls
Jane Eyre
Paradise Lost
Candide
The Trial
Most of Henry James
Ulysses
The Souls of Black Folk
Utopia
Everything by Thomas Pynchon
Everything by Don Delillo
Everything by Philip Roth (but, whatever)
Everything by Graham Greene
Everything by Willa Cather
Everything by EM Forester
Everything by Saul Bellow
Everything, minus one, by William Styron
etc.

I don't know if James Patterson will make the final cut.

[Jane Hammons]

You could zip through Is That A Fish in Your Ear pretty quickly. I was a little disappointed in it overall. But there are 3-4 really good essays (chapters?) in it.

[Anna Clark]

Encouraging!