Well, that's it. The final bank holiday before Christmas has been and gone. We're now hurtling towards autumn, but as woolies are dragged from bottom drawers, take comfort in the succession of big titles about to hit the shelves:
In the next few days, MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood and Jhumpa Lahiri's latest, The Lowland will be published. Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge will be out mid September with Stephen King's Doctor Sleep out later that month. In October, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, will be published with American Smoke by Iain Sinclair due 7 November.
This is just a handful of the new titles out soon. What are you looking forward to reading over the coming months?
But before that, here's a roundup of some of the books you have been reading over the last week:
I foolishly attempted another DeLillo, (Libra) thinking I might enjoy this one as it sounded slightly different to the other's I've tried - but after 80 pages and a promising first chapter, it's all just become very dull with the usual humdrum passages of morose men eating breakfast and speaking unnatural dialogue with no real spark of human life in them so once again I tossed aside.
Made it up for it by blazing through Joe Hill's '20th Century Ghosts' in almost two days, now on the final story - he has clearly inherited his father's skill for drawing real and (sometimes) sympathetic characters, as well as showing a sense of humour more sophisticated than King's, not to mention actually funny. This excellent collection displays both classic horror hallmarks, as well as startlingly original and disturbing concepts in turn, and as I think the guy says in the introduction, the fact you see some of the twists coming is by no means a bad thing - the largely negative portrayal of fathers throughout the book is also quite interesting. A couple of people on a previous thread spoke very highly of this book, and I would now join them in urging it onto whoever else is willing to read it...
Coming up next, I think, is 'Empire Falls' by Richard Russo - I keep reading quotes from his various books on Facebook, and am always impressed. We'll see how I get on...
Anywhere's Better Than Here by Zoe Venditozzi because it was on the shortlist for Not The Booker Prize. So far underwhelmed and disappointed.
Next on my TBR list is Magda also on the shortlist and which I hope lives up to expectations
Our review list:
Fiction:
• A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava
• Lolito by Ben Brooks
• Call It Dog by Marli Roode
• Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
• Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo
• The String Diaries Stephen Lloyd Jones
• Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates
• The Never List Koethi Zan
• Paris Requiem by Lisa Appignanesi
Children's:
• More Than This By Patrick Ness
Just wrapping up Infinite Jest. Maybe it's the structured nature finally kicking in now I'm on the home stretch or maybe I just wasn't paying attention properly in the beginning before I really grasped what the book was about or how it would unfold but from the part discussing Kate Gompert and the inability to express clinical depression properly, I feel like the book has taken a sudden and immediate turn into an extra level of profundity on the human condition. Passages like the description of Hal's ennui and Mario and Avril talking about how to know if someone is sad are just amazing in both form and content.