Since February has Valentine’s Day and the birthdays of two of my three daughters, I’m going to switch from lust to love this month. Rather than list the books I am lusting after, I’m going to list a few of those I loved enough to now have waiting on the headboard of the bed or the bookshelf next to it. Sadly, they are only the top of the TBR list.
- Yalo, Elias Khoury — I actually got this book to do a review (so I will be reading and writing soon) and to scratch my world literature itch. Since then, it has made the shortlist for Best Translated Book of 2008.
- Vilnius Poker, Ricardas Gavelis — The fact this is the January installment in my Open Letter subscription shows how far behind I’m getting on my reading. I am particularly interested in this because it will be the first Lithuanian work I’ve ever read.
- Daemon, Daniel Suarez. Appearing on last month’s Bibliolust list, I picked this up from the library and am hoping I can get to it before the two-week loan expires.
- Searching for Bobby Orr, Stephen Brunt. This has been on my wish list for months. Hockey season, a gift card and a discount coupon combined to move it from there to the headboard bookshelf.
As if that weren’t enough, I’m number one on the reserve list at the library for The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which was amidst December’s Bibliolust, and the February book from Open Letter will surely arrive any day now.
Well, I better not be heard complaining that I can’t find anything to read.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
Elizabeth Hardwick, The Paris Review, 1985
reprinted in The Paris Review Book
