Incoming Books: Week of June 24, 2023

This is part three of the big box from Hamilton; see the last two weeks for more details. It's slightly cheaty to call this "incoming books" for "this week," but no one actually cares.

This time out: Other Stuff! Mostly fiction, mostly old and/or famous so you could call it "literature" if you want, with a couple of bits of non-fiction.

The outlier is Witty Comebacks, a quote book compiled by Tim Glynne-Jones (who is only credited at the end of his introduction) and published to be a small coffee-table book or otherwise read in small moments. I used to have a lot of books like these stacked up, but my supply has seriously dwindled - and I think books like this aren't published as much anyway; they've all turned into online listicles, which are better attuned to the attention span in question here.

I read a Matt Haig novel long ago - for the SFBC actually; it was The Dead Fathers Club and I think we offered it - and have looked at his other books since then, meaning to read more of them one of these days. Well, I got his non-fiction book Notes on a Nervous Planet, which seems to be partly the story of how he got over an anxiety disorder and partly his recommendations for how everyone should live in the modern, media-soaked world.

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by Ernest Hemingway that you may have heard of. I'm pretty sure the only Hemingway I hit during my academic career was A Moveable Feast - I got my English degree at about the nadir of his reputation - and every so often I think I should read something by him. Probably this, which is why I got it.

Goodbye to Berlin is the one book by Christopher Isherwood that anyone has ever heard of, because it inspired the musical Cabaret. Maybe I'll read it: it's short and now I have a copy on my shelves, close at hand.

The publishers of the next book don't seem to trust their audience - it's Jack London's 1913 memoir John Barleycorn, with the subtitle A Drinking Life much larger on the cover. Again, it's a book I think I'll want to read at some point, and now I can easily if "at some point" suddenly appears.

The Devil in the Flesh is a very short novel from 1923 by the very young Raymond Radiguet, about a teenager who has an affair with the wife of a soldier - apparently it's semi-autobiographical, was somewhat scandalous at the time, and that Radiguet died very young, soon afterward. That all sounds intriguing, so why not?

And last is Paul Theroux's 1982 novel The Mosquito Coast. I've been reading his nonfiction for a long time, and have a couple of his novels on the shelf, but have never actually read one. This is maybe his most famous/acclaimed book, so it's a good choice to have on hand if ever I decide to dive into fictional Theroux.