The Times Notable books list usually contains at least a few, some years many, books that I’ve read, but not this year. My time has been spent on old books and rereads and Breaking Bad, which I started watching at the beginning of the month and have almost finished. Writing and half-heartedly doing NaNoWriMo also took my free time, as did studying for the JLPT. No, that’s a lie, I haven’t studied at all, my desire to study Japanese is almost at zero right now. Anyway, there seven or eight books on that list that I’ve been planning to read (Zadie Smith and Junot Diaz, obviously), but not until next year, which sounds lovely and distant, but 2013 is a little over a month away.
I used to make an effort to balance recent books and classics, new and rereads, but over the past couple of years, I’ve really ignored contemporary books – it’s like literature stopped with Infinite Jest.
November reading list:
The Wine Dark Sea, Robert Aickman
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle (reread)
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and In Ghostly Japan, Lafcadio Hearn (reread)
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut (reread)
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich
What Maisie Knew, Henry James
Only seven books, and out of the seven, only three were new to me, and none of them are new. I started How Should a Person Be?, but was distracted by a seasonal desire for scary stories and put it down in favor of The Wine Dark Sea and In Ghostly Japan. I could finish reading it tonight, but I will probably go home, think about studying Japanese, turn on my computer to review flashcards, then watch more Breaking Bad while knitting and feeling slightly unhappy about failing the JLPT.
Strangely enough, my feelings about What Maisie Knew and Breaking Bad are the same – it’s not that great, but somehow compelling.