It's Monday, What Are You Reading? #20

I finally finished The Lacuna midway through the read=a=thon Saturday. Then eventually started listening to the audio of The Help which will probably occupy me most of this coming week. It is due at the library next Tuesday and is 15 CD and I'm only on the third.

The next test novel I pick up will be City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell because it's a review copy.

I have 15 novels checked out of the library right now, 6 of which just renewed for their last three weeks. 7 are over 400 pages. 4 of those chunksters landed on my hold shelf last week because I forgot to set their activation dates to dole them out over three months after I went on an ordering spree.

I don't have room for them on the shelves so they are stacked on a ledge in front of a shelf that is ordinarily reserved for Merlin to sit and watch the birds and the neighbors cats. He has knocked such stacks off on me before so I really can't leave them there. The picture at right shows the stack of books that were that unintended flood last week sitting on the ledge which is about 18 inches above my pillow.
With NF sitting atop 4 fat novels.

Since then I pulled the fiction off the shelf by my desk to make room for the NF and now that stack is all novels and even taller. I need to winnow it severely. That is a daunting challenge. I was thinking of listing them all here and asking for input but I'm pressed for time now.

I already have the list of NF created in my read-a-thon post so I'll paste it in here as I will be spending significant time with many of them over the next weeks as I prep for NaNo:

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway Have read several times so will mostly be refreshing my memory of certain things. This is my fiction writing bible and I so wish I had my own copy but they run $80 new and the one time I found a used one in reasonably good condition it was $67. So I send for the library copy several times a year.
The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray If I remember right, I quit this one last October at the point where talk of first draft shifted to talk of rewrites since I was looking for tips to get me through NaNo. I'll probably be focused on the same thing this time.


New Media ed. Albert Rolls -- essays on web based multimedia systems. There's a whole section on blogging!
Anatomy of Spirit by Caroline Myss

3 by Barbara Ehrenreich:
--Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
--Bait and Switch: the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
--This Land is Their Land

The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy by Raj Patel
Math of Mystics: From the Fibonacci Sequence to Luna's Labyrinth to the Golden section and other Secrets of sacred Geometry byRenna Shesso For the Science reading challenge
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer For the Science reading challenge
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
Resurrecting Eve: Women of Faith Challenge the Fundamentalist Agenda by Roberta Mary Pughe and Paula Anema Schl For the Women Unbound reading challenge. I believe I all but finished this one last winter but that was over 9 months ago so I may have to restart it.
Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? by Robin P. Williams
Frida Kahlo: The Paintings by Hayden Herrera (A companion to Frida: A biography of Frida Kahlo, the basis for the Miramax film--which I watched last week because Frida and husband Diego Rivera were prominent characters in Kingsolver's The Lacuna So not specifically for NaNo tho it wouldn't surprise me if I figured out a way to make it relate since Friday and her art has made such an impact on me. I'm under her spell and I don't think it will lift anytime soon.)

Those are the library books these are a few off my own shelves which relate to NaNo prep in one way or another:

Jung and Tarot: An archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols
Thinking Shakespeare: A how-to guide for student actors, directors, and anyone else who wants to feel more comfortable with the Bard by Barry Edelstein
Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination by Robert Jourdain