Full List of Unread Books

It's been a bad year. Well, it's actually been a good year full of fantastic new books and newly discovered books and recently unpacked books. As a result, the stack of unread books loitering around my home has become truly ridiculous. Thus  I present this list, in an effort to shame myself into finally sitting down to read them!

Fiction

• The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips
• Irma Voth, Miriam Toews
• By The River Piedra I Sat Down & Wept, Paulo Coelho
• The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold
• The Commoner, John Burnham Schwartz
• By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham
• The Appointment, Herta Muller
• Johannes Cabal The Necromancer, Jonathan L. Howard
• The War of the End of the World, Mario Vargas Llosa
• Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• The Marrowbone Marble Company, Glenn Taylor
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
• The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
• The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
• Karma and Other Stories, Rishi Reddi
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Collected Novellas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean
• Delicate Edible Birds, Lauren Groff
• The Bells, Richard Harvell
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
• An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin
• Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
• The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien
• The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Jose Saramago
• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago
• Blindness, Jose Saramago
• Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart
• The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
• Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch, Dai Sijie
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
• You Shall Know Us By Our Velocity, Dave Eggers
• How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers
• Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
• Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
• The Child in Time, Ian McEwan
• Atonement, Ian McEwan
• Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco
• Game of Thrones, George R. Martin
• Clash of Kings, George R. Martin
• Embers, Sandor Marai
• The Secret of Lost Things, Sheridan Hay
• Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
• Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino
• Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
• Glory, Vladimir Nabokov
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Empress, Shan Sa
• The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
• The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
• Identity, Milan Kundera
• Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• The Short Stories, Ernest Hemmingway
• The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
• The Saffron Kitchen, Yasmin Crowther
• Death on the Installment Plan, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
• Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
• The Buddah Tree, Fumio Niwa
• Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson
• Bright Before Us, Katie Arnold-Ratliff
• State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
• I Curse The River of Time, Per Petterson
• The Wilding, Benjamin Percy
• Turn of Mind, Alice LaPlante
• Townie, Andre Dubus
• Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
• The Instructions, Adam Levin
• Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos

Non Fiction

• Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal
• Descartes' Bones, Russell Shorto
• On Literature, Umberto Eco
• Talking Right, Geoffrey Nunberg
• Last Words, George Carlin
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
• My Life in France, Julia Child
• Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh
• Touching Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh
• Going to the Territory, Ralph Ellison
• The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

NPR Books Joins Facebook

NPR Books has launched a page on Facebook. It offers a one stop selection of book recommendations, author interviews and other resources of interest for avid readers and bibliophiles. Since I tend to keep Facebook open at all times it will be a nice addition to my feed.

Indiespensable #23 Shipped!

The newest installment of Powell's Indiespensable is on its way, and I admit that even though I am excited and curious I am even more apprehensive. The Instructions is a monster of a book, over 1,000 pages long. It's been well over a decade since I read anything that lengthy, excluding books in series such as Lord of the Rings. Even with all the bulk, its events occur over a short four day period, so the book is drawing a lot of conclusions to Ulysses (another book I keep meaning to read and putting off). Here's hoping I can make it through!

Reading Arthur Phillips

I've had The Egyptologist on my shelf for years - I greatly enjoyed Arthur Phillips' first novel Prague and picked this up shortly after finishing it. I've started reading it several times but have never been able to get more than twenty or thirty pages in, even though I adore the premise of multiple unreliable, deluded narrators. That being said, I finally got the urge to really dig into this one last week and watched a number of documentaries on Egypt through Netflix to really spark my interest. Then, when I finally went to the shelf to grab the book I realized it was missing. A week later, a thorough overhaul of my bookshelves, car and every bag and surface in my condo and the book still hasn't turned up. Who knows where it has run off to, but I've got a new copy on order from a small bookshop up the hill and will be reading this next week when it comes in. For the time being, I picked up a copy of Phillips' newest book The Song is You and will try to polish that up in the meantime.