Reading Plans

A Forward Look:  Summer Reading

Last November I listed the books I planned to read over the Winter months.  I believe Winter may have ended, it was almost 80 degrees yesterday, and it is time to look backward and forward over my reading list.  It is difficult to predict everything I am going to read beyond the current week or two, but I did a pretty good job in November.  Of the top ten books I planned to read I read all but three.  Of those three I read most of two of them;  both were longish biographies and I may finish them someday.  In the meantime I read two of the books that were on my supplemental list and several others that were not on my tbr radar in November.  It is now the first week of May and I have some ideas about the Summer that will surely change over the next few months, but in spite of that I will attempt a list of planned books to read over the coming months.


1. The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy:  I am still reading Tolstoy after a winter filled with his stories long and short.

2. The Martian by Andy Weir:  This is for my SF book group and since the Martian is really an American stuck on Mars  I'm pretty sure I am going to enjoy it.

3. The Nibelungenlied:  This is an epic by anonymous about heroes (see the note about Thomas Carlyle below) and I was inspired to read it by the review at The Consolation of Reading.

4. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe:  These are both for our Thursday evening book group.

5. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka:  I discovered this book listening to NPR and I should have read it last summer, so it is now on this year's list.

6. Mussorgsky and His Circle by Stephen Walsh:  I love music and this book should expand my familiarity with all the Russian composers of the nineteenth century who aren't named Tchaikovsky.

7. Snopes by William Faulkner.  I plan to reread this for a class at the University of Chicago.  I can't wait to revisit Eula Snopes and her clan.

8. Paradise Lost by John Milton:  This is scheduled for our study group discussion in August.  I am just finishing Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (read for the same group)  and expect to publish my comments about it in the near future.

9. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan:  I recently acquired the paperback edition of this Booker Prize winner and hope that it is as good as his Gould's Book of Fish.  It may help me stay cool during the heat of the Summer.

10. The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann:   Along with Tolstoy I have been reading many of Mann's short novels and stories and this is a final dolop for early Summer. 

Some other tbr books that are not in the top ten may include:  A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan,  Tristana by Benito Perez Galdos, Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder, and  Europa by Tim Parks.