In lieu of a list of New Year’s Resolutions, I have decided to publish a list of tsundoku, a Japanese word which means “the piles of books waiting to be read”. Of course, if I were to make a New Year’s Resolution, it would be to post more here and to prepare for the 2023 AtoZ Challenge well ahead of April! However – back to books!
I learned from the blog “Big Think“, that the writer Umberto Eco, a favourite of mine, had a personal library of some 30,000 books “When Eco hosted visitors, many would marvel at the size of his library and assumed it represented the host’s knowledge — which, make no mistake, was expansive. But a few savvy visitors realized the truth: Eco’s library wasn’t voluminous because he had read so much; it was voluminous because he desired to read so much more.“
It is in this spirit of aspiration that I share with you the list of books teetering on the edge of various bookshelves around the house waiting to be read. I blame the charity book table at my local CO-OP as well as the access to secondhand books at reasonable prices on the internet… So in no particular order:-
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen
The Favourite Game – Leonard Cohen
The Eyre affair – Jasper Fforde
South from Granada – Gerald Brenan
The Atheists Guide to Christmas
Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
First we make the Beast Beautiful – Sarah Wilson
Atlas of Vanishing Places – Travis Elborough
A Mind to Murder PD James
This Too Shall Pass – Milena Busquets
Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire – Akala
Siege – Geraint Jones
Land Rover s
the Story of the Car that Conquered the World – Ben Fogle
Kosovo War and Revenge – Tim Judah
The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick
The Course of Love – Alain de Botton
On Love – Alain De Botton
Samarkand – Amin Maalouf
I Coriander Sally Gardner
On writers and writing Margaret Atwood
Midnight All Day – Hanif Qureishi
Mostly Harmless – Douglas Adams
Gigi and the Cat – Colette
My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante
Ecstasy – Irvine Welsh
Hellhole – Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson
Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
An Instance of the Fingerpost Iain Pears
Right of Thirst – Frank Wheeler
Dream Angus – Alexander McCall Smith
Winter in Madrid C.J. Sansom
Caribbean – James A Michener
The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
The Kappilan of Malta – Monsarrat
The Open Society and It’s Enemies – K. R. Popper
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Blink – Malcolm Gladwell
History of the Rain – Niall Williams
Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal – Jeanette Winterson
The Wild Silence – Raynor Winn
The Lamplighters – Emma Stonex
My Name is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout
No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Chameleon – Samuel Fisher
Anil’s Ghost – Michael Ondaatje
Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand
Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Niffenegger
Not the End of the World – Kate Atkinson
Cowboys and Indians – Joseph O’Connor
The Paper Man – William Golding
The Visible World – Mark Slouka
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – Hilary Mantel
The Late Bourgeois World – Nadine Gordimer
Hag-seed – Margaret Atwood
Codex – Lev Grossman
Wilderness Tips – Margaret Atwood
A Little Life Hanya Yanagihara
Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
Absolute Friends – John le Carre
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits – Ayelet Waldman
Sex Wars – Marge Piercy
The Geometry of Love – Margaret Visser
Stay – Nicola Griffith
Whistling for the Elephants – Sandi Toksvig
The Memory Keepers Daughter – Kim Edwards
Land Rover – Ben Fogle
Mantel Pieces – Hilary Mantel
The Dust That Falls From Dreams – Louis De Bernieres
Who knows how many I will read before this time next year…
Happy New Year to anyone who stumbles in here!