And next I'm going to read ...

dining room piles
June 8, 2016

In a couple of locations around the house are "books I'm going to read next." In the dining room are a couple of little piles. Currently atop the two are a new biography of Mark Twain and the next novel by John A. Williams I'm going to read. (As visitors here know, I'm working my way through all of his novels.) Below them are other titles I will soon (?) get to. Honest.

There's another pile upstairs (but I, for the nonce, am too lazy to go up there and take a photo). But I remember a couple of them: Things Fall Apart (which I just have never gotten around to reading) and The Lady in the Van, the Alan Bennett story used for the source of the recent film that Joyce and I both liked very much. (Link to trailer for the film.)

There's also a biography of Alan Turing, a book that's been lying there for a long, long time. Oh, and there's the new book by Earle Labor, my friend and mentor: The Far Music, a memoir about his youth in the Southwest. I will definitely get to that one in a hurry.

Every now and then I get reminders--subtle and otherwise--that I've not gotten around to reading something. Yesterday, for example, this page popped up on my book-nerd calendar. I'd not remembered this 2013 biography of Margaret Fuller that I'd bought, placed on a pile, and forgotten about. In fact, at some point that title moved to a shelf, where I just found it, removed it, vowed to read it. Soon. Joyce is putting a protective cover on it; then it will return to the pile, probably the one near my bed.

This book, by the way, has some personal resonance for me: Fuller was associated with the Transcendentalists, and it was in a course on American Transcendentalism at Kent State in the summer of 1969 that I noticed a bright young woman in the class. Joyce Coyne. I made no move: I figured it was suicide for my self-image to do so (why would she be interested in me?) ... but things worked out. In fact, she's upstairs right now, putting a Brodart archival cover on a biography of Margaret Fuller that I am definitely going to read.

And soon ...