Just in case you are following along the house in Gibsons saga – subjects were removed last night by the original buyers six hours before the deadline and my duplex is now officially sold. Yes! Official transfer of possession happens February 28th, and before then I’ve got at least one dump run and one sallyann run to do, not to mention a tenant to evict (he knows it’s coming, there’s two and a half months notice going on), but once it’s over the headache of that house is too!
I’m in the middle of a book glut at the moment, having received several books on order at the library simultaneous to some other books on order from the internet plus receiving an early christmas present and secure in the knowledge that more books are on the way as christmas gifts. This means that I have about 25 books in the to-read stack at the moment, and every one of them is exciting to me.
A smattering of the books currently stacked around the bed “to read” (I’m at work and purely doing this from memory, I’m sure there are double this number of titles in the stacks):
- Lolita – Vladamir Nabakov (reading this outloud with Brian)
- Love in Infant Monkeys – Lydia Millet (started this morning)
- The Scapegoat – Daphne Du Maurier
- Cutting for Stone – Abraham Vergehese
- Reason, Faith and Revolution – Terry Eagleton
- Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
- The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Short Stories – Dashiell Hammet
- The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Books: A Memoir – Larry McMurty
- Matchless – Gregory Maguire
- Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
- Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis – Lydia Davis
Nothing too dense, nothing too heavy – a lovely and wide ranging list of things to choose from over the holidays depending on how much time I get to just lounge and read and be decadent (I’m hoping for a lot, though I know how I generally work and I’m too fretful to spend whole days in bed doing nothing, not to mention the fact I need to eke out some writing time to get to novel’s end as well). I’ve noticed my book compulsion has dialed up a notch again lately, and I’m wondering what it says about my overall need to escape from my working life mainly and just take a stroll through someone else’s imagination for awhile……
This is the time of year for book lists – an interesting one being the Guardian’s Best The decade’s best unread books, not to mention the Advent Book Blog which is all over the gifty recommendations in books. I don’t know if I could even put together a top ten for the decade at this point, I’ve had some many miraculous and inspiring tomes come into my hands over the past ten years….. but perhaps a top ten for the year is in order before we get into 2010.
