January 2017: Books to Read and Review

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope your holidays were well-read and restful. My books-to-read stack this month is curiously made up of a lot of short novella-sized books as well as what might be the slowest novel I’ve ever endured: Peter Handke’s The Moravian Night. Not to say the Handke’s bad by any means, but it’s quite a far cry from a book like Warren Ellis’ comic-book-esque Normal.  Some books to fly through and some to slowly savor. This month’s reading will be curiously paced, to say the least.

The stack, from top to bottom:

Normal by Warren Ellis (FSG Originals)
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag (Penguin)
The Moravian Night by Peter Handke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Commotion of the Birds by John Ashbery (Ecco)
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon)
Waves Passing in the Night by Lawrence Weschler (Bloomsbury)

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Jeff Alford

Jeff Alford is a critic and book collector based in Denver, CO. He is a contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Rain Taxi Review of Books and the New Orleans Review and author of the now-retired rare books and small press blog www.theoxenofthesun.com.

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