The Worthy Unread

The books piling up in my house

It’s much easier to buy books than to read them. So they pile up. Some, fortunately, are on my Kindle.

Here are my most worthy unread.

With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy. Florence King is the rare female curmudgeon. As an antidote to America the Chirpy, I like curmudgeons: from Schopenhauer to Mencken, John Derbyshire to Christopher Hitchens.

The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. I’ve become fond on the short-story, something I can read in one pre-bedtime sitting. This promises to fill the bill.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories, volume 35 (2018, the latest) Ditto my comment on the previous book.

The Golden Argosy. Stephen King called this his favorite short-story anthology.

The Dispossessed Ursula Le Guin’s famed book, capitalism vs. socialism wrapped in a sci-fi novel.

Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter. Seen as the best book by mystery writer, Ruth Rendell, known for her psychologically rich characters.

Essays in Biography. Joseph Epstein is my favorite essayist. I’ve already read a few of the essays: V.S. Naipaul, Adlai Stevenson, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Friendship: An Expose. Epstein’s essays reveal a more social version of the person I aspire to be. So I picked up his book-length meditation on friendship.

Underworld. Don DeLillo is so honored by literati and this book viewed as his magnum opus, a wandering exploration of humankind’s likely descent, that I feel I should read it, but this doorstop sits.

Lewis Carroll: A Biography. This was strongly recommended to me by a reader, as an exploration of what motivated a brilliant man to write children’s books. Another fatty, it sits calling to me.

Business Adventures. We’re all moved by story and I do care about business being successful while ethical. This collection of essays about a range of corporations is written by John Brooks, the long-time financial writer for The New Yorker.

The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience by Sherif Karama et al. It’s becoming clearer that intelligence’s is heavily affected by brain physiology. This anthology — and I’m a fan of anthologies because they aggregate multiple people’s efforts — was just published and so contains current information.

Genius. Fat and daunting, but having read a bit, at some point I may well muster the will to tackle what seems to be the definitive book on a topic that has always fascinated me.

On my Kindle:

The Anthropocene Reviewed. John Green is among today’s premier authors of Young Adult books but he has taken this dip into the adult world: reviewing many aspects of homo sapiens, each with one of today’s ubiquitous star- ratings.

Infinite Jest. This the acclaimed book by the beyond-the-box-thinking and alas suicided David Foster Wallace. I’ve started it and love the skewering of sports-obsessed colleges and vivid look into the mind of a middle-class druggie.

Centennial by James Michener. Ever living in a coastal white-collar bubble, I see Michener as a reliable guide to the evolution of the broader population of America’s midsection.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Letters. As mentioned, I like short-form, and like Vonnegut’s cranky, tolerably liberal iconoclasm. That was enough for me to buy the book but apparently not yet enough to read it.

Eugene Onegin. Pushkin is Tolstoy and Dostovesky’s progenitor. And his favorite work is Eugene Onegin, a novel is set in verse. So I bit, but it sits. But now, in preparing this article, I read the first stanza. It makes me want to read more:

‘My uncle, man of firm convictions* .

By falling gravely ill, he’s won

A due respect for his afflictions —

The only clever thing he’s done.

May his example profit others;

But God, what deadly boredom, brothers,

To tend a sick man night and day,

Not daring once to steal away!

And, oh, how base to pamper grossly

And entertain the nearly dead,

To fluff the pillows for his head,

And pass him medicines morosely —

While thinking under every sigh:

The devil take you, Uncle.

Die! ‘

Hillbilly Elegy. I’m a sucker for true stories that counter the media meme that the Horatio Alger story is a myth. Countless people, like my dad and the myriad Asian immigrants and many others succeeded by dint of hard work and intelligence, not the government. As I understand it, this book is an Appalachian example.

Islandia, A respected friend called this his favorite book of all time. Its author, a Harvard grad, made creating of this fictional world called Islandia his life’s avocation. The Amazon reviews are great . . . and yet the book, another fatty, sits, beckons.

I Robot. When Issac Asimov had his 450th book published and was asked, “Whet would you do if you had six months to live?” His answer: Type faster. So I figured that I should buy his best-known book: I Robot, a collection of linked stories about, yes, robots.

Out of Step. That title defines me, and Sidney Hook is a name I vaguely had heard of as unusually smart guy. So, there sits that doorstop book.

The Woman Racket. Despite its inflammatory title, it’s a rather scholarly counter to the woman-as-victim narrative. Recommended to me by a luminary in gender studies.

Penguin’s Little Black Classics. This is a collection of 80 booklets of classics from Wang Wei to Jane Austen to Karl Marx, in a black sleeve. The packaging, seductive enough to get me to buy it, hasn’t yet seduced me to even take off its sleeve.

So, do you feel like reading one of these before I do? I’m guessing you’ll have plenty of time.

You can reach career and personal coach Dr. Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net