Dusting off the Bookshelf – September edition

I did it! I followed through with my August challenge and read one of the many titles lingering on my To-Read shelf.

Loved, loved, loved The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews! So now I’m ready to tackle another title for September. Each month I will choose a few from the middle or bottom of the list (meaning they’ve been sitting and waiting patiently for over a year), determined to read at least one per month. If I can read even more than one, all the better. Any advice or guidance you can offer would be much appreciated.

My September is actually off to a good oldie start, as I’m deep in The Stone Diaries, which I’ve wanted to read ever since discovering Carol Shields through Unless.

Many thanks to Chels & a Book, It’s All About Books and  Books & Cleverness for their never-ending inspiration.

For September 2014, my choices are:

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Added to my shelf June, 2011 (published in 1991). Alvarez is one of those authors I know I should have read but haven’t. Not sure why…it’s just never come to pass. I’m also not sure if I should start with this one or with In the Time of the Butterflies (also on my bookshelf).

Goodreads describes it: Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters – Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia – arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost – and what they find – is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premier novelists of our time.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Added to my shelf August, 2011 (published in 1997). Everyone, and I mean everyone, assumes I have already read this modern classic, but I have not. I need to.

Goodreads describes it: The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt). When Chacko’s English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river….

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Added to my shelf in September, 2011 (published in 2011). I love baseball. I love good writing. This seems like a natural.

Goodreads describes it: At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended…Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment—to oneself and to others.

Any advice about what I should choose for September?

 

*All cover images uploaded from Goodreads

Renewing Excitement, Dusting off the Bookshelf

I often get caught up in conversations about never-ending to-read lists with other book lovers. Most of my to-reads exist on a virtual shelf, but I also have stacks of “someday I’m going to read” in boxes, on shelves and even in my car. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to read more books than I can possibly get to in a lifetime, but sometimes in my excitement to read the latest releases, or keep up with my book clubs, I fear some good books might be getting lost in the shuffle.

Apparently, I’m not alone. Other book-loving bloggers are facing the same dilemma. First, I saw the “Renewing Excitement” idea on the thoughtful and smart book blog, Chels & a Book, and it made me realize that I don’t reach past the top 10 or 20 books on my to-read list very often.

Then, I stumbled across a similar idea while reading It’s All About Books. Yvo was herself inspired by Emily at Books & Cleverness. (Really, bloggers are the most creative and inspirational group of people.)

So, inspired by these lovely women, each month I will choose a few from the middle or bottom of the list (meaning they’ve been sitting and waiting patiently for over a year), determined to read at least one per month. If I can read even more than one, all the better. Any advice or guidance you can offer would be much appreciated.

For August 2014, my choices are:

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan. Added to my shelf July, 2011 (published in 2002). Full disclosure: I did not love A Visit From the Goon Squad so I don’t have the love affair with this author that many do. However, I loved The Keep and really like The Invisible Circus.

Goodreads describes it: At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.

The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews. Added to my shelf August, 2011 (published in 2008). I never got around to reading this book and now Toews’ new book, All My Puny Sorrows, is getting tons of buzz.

Goodreads describes it: Days after being dumped by her boyfriend Marc in Paris – “he was heading off to an ashram and said we could communicate telepathically” – Hattie hears her sister Min has been checked into a psychiatric hospital, and finds herself flying back to Winnipeg to take care of Thebes and Logan, her niece and nephew. Not knowing what else to do, she loads the kids, a cooler, and a pile of CDs into their van and they set out on a road trip in search of the children’s long-lost father, Cherkis.

Open City by Teju Cole. Added to my shelf in October, 2011 (published in 2011). I know I should read Teju Cole. I suspect I’ll love Teju Cole, but it’s never made it to the top of the list.

Goodreads describes it: Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past.

 

Any advice about what I should choose first?