Reading round-up

I thought I might try posting occasionally — maybe once a week, maybe less often — a listy-type post about what books I’m reading, what books I’ve acquired recently, and/or what books I’ve put on my TBR list. It might be fun to keep track a little more closely of the books that come in and out of my house and the ones that have caught my eye.

For today, I’ll list the books that I’ve put on my TBR list recently (I keep track of these books on GoodReads):

• Ted Solotaroff’s The Literary Community: Selected Essays 1967-2007. I know nothing about this book and GoodReads doesn’t tell me much about it. But the table of contents looks interesting, and it would be good to browse through to see if I might like it. I put it on my list to remember in case I run across it somewhere. I read about it on a Book Riot post.
• Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. The amazing Roxane Gay has been been writing about and praising this book. It’s a collection of essays and won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
• Mitchell S. Jackson’s The Residue Years. This is a novel, published by Bloomsbury Press. I heard an interview with Jackson that intrigued me.
• Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. I’m reading Patchett’s recent collection of essays, and although I have some reservations about it, I’m enjoying it in parts and I want to read this memoir about her friendship with Lucy Grealy. I’ve got Grealy’s memoir on my shelves to read, and I like the idea of reading the two books together. Speaking of reading two books together, Patchett briefly mentions the brothers Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff, both of whom wrote memoirs of their childhoods, although they lived in different places. These would make another good pairing.

The two books I acquired this week are:

• Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic, acquired through Book Mooch. I don’t remember where I first heard about LaValle, but the name has stuck with me as one to investigate further.
• D.A. Mishani’s The Missing File, which I’ll be reading next for my mystery book group.

As for what I’m reading:

• I’m finishing up the Patchett essay collection This Is the Story of  Happy Marriage, and
• I’m about halfway through Minae Mizumura long, long work A True Novel.

More of these last two books later!