Which books would you like to buy - or receive for Christmas, perhaps - soon? I'm currently lusting after a bilingual Rimbaud (I've tracked one down on the Book Depository), the collected poetry of Robert Lowell, the collected prose of Flann O'Brien, "The Falling Sickness" by Owsei Temkin (I've read it on Kindle but would like a hard copy), "The Green Road" by Anne Enright (same as the Temkin book), and a nice edition of "The Idiot" by Dostoyevsky.
I don't go all gooey over paper books, so my current reading project is finding free ebook editions of classic and highly-regarded books I haven't read, or haven't read in years. I'm working on To Kill a Mockingbird and have 1984 and Moby-Dick on deck. Turns out there are English-speaking countries whose copyright laws aren't nearly as onerous as ours in the US, though most of the books I plan to read are in the public domain.
I'm not planning on picking anything up for the holidays, as I already have a nice little stack of to-be-reads from my own bookshelf. Namely Gaiman's Fragile Things, Rushdie's Satanic Verses, Cash's This Dark Road to Mercy, and Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. But I do have a list of what I'm likely going to pick up afterward, whenever that is. I've been meaning to get into Murakami, so probably one of his most accessible ones. There's always a Gaiman title on my list somewhere...possibly Coraline or another one of his short story collections. Or The Graveyard Book. Not sure yet. Probably Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. There might be a few others I can't think of at the moment. And, once I get caught up on my backlog of comics, I still need the newest Inhuman and Ms. Marvel trade paperbacks.
Project Gutenberg! I haven't yet read "Satanic Verses", but I liked "Midnight's Children". I'll probably get 'round to "Satanic Verses" at some point. Don't waste your time on Murakami. He's a hack. His storylines are predictable, his sex scenes are laughable, and his credentials as a "literary writer" are seriously questionable.
Here are some that are on my wish list. "The Stickmen" by Edward Lee, "No ordinary moments"by Dan Millman, "She should talk" by Erica Ehm, and "45 Master Characters" by Lynn Schmidt.
