What am I Reading these Days?

Loads of student papers (essays and fiction pieces)--they keep flooding. Yet, my hunger for some leisure reading is insatiable too, so these are the books I carry around these days, hoping that maybe over lunch I may read several pages:

Philip Caputo: Crossers (I actually finished this one and reviewed it for the Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review),
Ha Jin: A Good Fall, which will be available in bookstores in December.
Lucy Howard-Taylor: Biting Anorexia (reviewing it for Sac Book Review)
Wil Wheaton: The Happiest Days of Our Lives (coming out in December); reviewing it for Sac Book Review
William Styron: The Suicide Run, a collection of short stories. I love the serpentine wriggle of the sentences in these stories; Styron knew his way in the jungle of language; remember Sophie's Choice?

I probably owe the poetry world ten to fifteen reviews, but nowadays I carry around A Tiara for the Twentieth Century by Suzanne R Harvey.

These are the new things out there, and there are more that I hunger for: Kazuo Ishiguro's new short story collection, Margaret Atwood's new novel, A.S. Byatt's Children's Book and many others.

Of the old publications, I keep within reach copies of Say You're One of Them (Akpan), Housekeeping (Robinson), Unaccustomed Earth (Lahiri), Cathedral (Carver), African Stories (Lessing). Just in case I get bored somewhere, or that I may end up getting some spare time, I may sneak in a short story or two. Reading, it's a lot of fun, I tell you.

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