Friday morning

17 March 2017

— after rain in the night

Good Morning All,

I do not think I've ever recommended to anyone a book I've not myself read, but today’s Day Book quote for Towing Jehovah tempts me! It’s by some bizarre fellow named James K. Morrow, and it won whole bunches of awards.

Here’s what Wikipedia says: Synopsis: God is dead, and now God's two-mile-long cadaver is floating in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Africa. As a result, the archangel Raphael hires supertanker captain Anthony Van Horne to tow the cadaver into the Arctic, with the intention of having it be preserved by the cold.

You gotta admit, whether you are religious (as I am, sort of) or not, that is one entirely inviting scenario! 

Which gets me most conveniently to a serious request. Several (and in this case I mean at least eight) former students have been badgering me for a recommended reading list I put together fifteen or twenty years ago.

I finally found that sucker on my old iMac and over the past few days have been  updating it. I've decided to call it 501 Books for After World III.

My initial plan was just to list favorite books, but I realized I'd too rapidly run out of room. Fitzgerald alone, for example, would gobble up eight entries. As would Hemingway, E. M. Forster, Carson McCullers, and a dozen more, especially among my crimmy favorites.

So, I shifted to authors I liked, but restricted them to one title max per genre. Thus did I knock the wonderful Scotty Fitz down to four: Tender Is the Night (Novel), The Great Gatsby (Novella), Babylon Revisited (Short Story), and The Crack-Up (Non-fiction).

I am at present up to 367 titles written by roughly 222 authors. And—most happily—I have just about run out of the authors I've read and liked the most. 

So, today I made a decision: I shall keep adding author/titles until I reach 400, and then—by golly!—ask the people on my Day Book list to take a gander at the list and then suggest authors I have either forgotten or neglected.

Would some of you be game for that? I really could use the help. I do very much know I have missed deserving authors, not least authors in the last ten or fifteen years.

You need not do anything yet, but sometime next week, probably closer to Thursday than Tuesday, I’ll send you my 400, in the hopes you can give it a gander and send back a recommendation or two, which I would be glad to include.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron