Book Watch

A few friends and I recently decided to start a book club. What began as suggestions for our first book club book turned into a list of books I'd like to read this year. Included are:

• 2666 by Roberto Bolano (The other members of the book club thought that a three-volume book was too much for our first book--funny, that.)


• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Sounds like a page-turner; won the Man Booker prize in 2008).


• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (Because I need to throw in some non-fiction once in a while.)


• Stunt by Claudia Dey (Sounds like something slightly akin to Lullabies for Little Criminals, which I loved.)


• Cockroach by Rawi Hage (Because I'm curious to check his writing out for myself after hearing so much hype and even a bit of controversy.)


• American Wife: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld (Because I devoured Prep and have heard that this one is equally as good, though of course with a very different protagonist/subject matter.)


• How to Buy A Love of Reading by Tanya Gibson (Because it's been compared to Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I loved.)


• Stripmalling by Jon Paul Fiorentino (Very funny stuff, and because I'm slightly obsessed with anything I consider "genre-bending"--usually poetry/novel, but in this case novel/graphic novel.)


• God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Because I've loved all the other poetry books by this very talented and entertaining lady.)

The Pilot reading at Blizzarts last night was also full of good material. I'm quite excited about Angela Szczepaniak's novel-in-poems (again with the genre-bending) Unisex Love Poems. And Eva Moran's reading from her new book Porny Stories really had me laughing out loud, and from what I can tell so far is as well-written as it is funny.

Speaking of funny, check out an except from Jon Paul Fiorentino's new novel over at Joyland.