What I want to read soon in my lifetime: All of the summaries are from Amazon.com
1. The Monsters of Templeton by: Lauren Groff…At the start of Groff’s lyrical debut, 28-year-old Wilhelmina Willie Upton returns to her picturesque hometown of Templeton, N.Y., after a disastrous affair with her graduate school professor during an archeological dig in Alaska. In Templeton, Willie’s shocked to find that her once-bohemian mother, Vi, has found religion. Vi also reveals to Willie that her father wasn’t a nameless hippie from Vi’s commune days, but a man living in Templeton. With only the scantiest of clues from Vi, Willie is determined to untangle the roots of the town’s greatest families and discover her father’s identity. Brilliantly incorporating accounts from generations of Templetonians—as well as characters borrowed from the works of James Fenimore Cooper, who named an upstate New York town Templeton in The Pioneers—Groff paints a rich picture of Willie’s current predicaments and those of her ancestors. Readers will delight in Willie’s sharp wit and Groff’s creation of an entire world, complete with a lake monster and illegitimate children.
2. The Novel by: Franco Moretti…Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti’s The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel’s two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth — as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre.
3. The Invention of Morel by: Aldolfo Bioy Casares… “The masterpiece among Bioy Casares’ short, intense novels is The Invention of Morel, a book that won raves from Borges (who placed it alongside Franz Kafka’s The Trial), was called “perfect” by Octavio Paz, and inspired one of French cinema’s most infamous moviesf, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Though it was published in 1940, the book’s continuing relevance was recently proven when it was featured on Lost — a cameo many viewers perceive as a key to that TV show’s plot. But that doesn’t mean this is a tough tract unfit for quality beach time… Just know that Morel is a poetic evocation of the experience of love, an inquiry into how we know one another, and a still-relevant examination of how technology has changed our relationship with reality. It’s also a great read — one you’ll be pressing into the hands of your fellow beach-goers.” –Boldtype
4. Proust’s Way by: Roger Shattuck… Cobbling together commentary, instruction and practical advice, this grab-bag of a guide attempts to fill a gap in the vast library of Proust literature, with mixed results. Eminent scholar Shattuck (author of Proust’s Binoculars and the National Book Award-winning Marcel Proust) eschews the personal approach favored by Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose in their popular memoir-appreciations, but he does not limit himself to scholarly analysis, either, producing instead a kind of sophisticated Cliff Notes. The guide begins with a helpful overview of the novel and a chapter answering basic questions: in what language should one read Proust? (In French, if at all possible.) Is it absolutely necessary to read all 3,000 pages? (It is not–and Shattuck supplies an abridged reading plan in a footnote.) Moving on to a discussion of narrative strategies and themes, Shattuck urges an appreciation of Proust’s often-overlooked comic sensibility and examines the author’s more familiar preoccupations like time, memory and art. Most enlightening is his complex explication of the double “I” Proust employs: the gap between young Marcel and his older incarnation, the Narrator, creates what Shattuck terms a “stereopticon effect,” by means of which the novel springs to four-dimensional life. A fascinating if polemical second-to-last chapter weighs in on ongoing debates in the world of Proust scholarship, judges the various French and English editions of the novel and examines its film versions. Although much of the guide is genuinely illuminating, the best material will be familiar to readers of Shattuck’s previous works (he acknowledges his borrowings in his introduction), and some of the new sections–particularly an experimental “Coda,” a fictional radio interview with a Proust scholar–strain for effect.
5. AAACKKKKK!!!! I found this while browsing and must have it! LINK HERE.
6. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by: Haruki Murakami…In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a dozen critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and takes us to places ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a panorama of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.
There’s more of course…
