October Books

These are some titles from last month's New York Times Book Review section (and various issues of Entertainment Weekly magazine) that I might like to read at some point (plus pictures I took of the Halloween decorations at our local library):

Fiction

But Not For Long - Michelle Wildgen; "Three members of a housing co-op in Madison, Wis., face a sort of apocalypse when gas stations run out of fuel, a prolonged blackout hits and honeybees disappear. Eventually people break out their bikes and begin foraging for mushrooms. The plot sounds didactic, but there is nothing preachy about this novel."

How to Read the Air - Dinaw Mengestu's "own origins inform this novel about an Ethiopian-American tracing the uncertain road once taken by his immigrant parents."

Nemesis - Philip Roth; "In 1944, a New Jersey phys ed teacher unfit for military service wages his own war against a polio outbreak."

The Odious Ogre - Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer; "The legendary team behind The Phantom Tollbooth, join forces again . . . A natural read-aloud."

Spooner - Pete Dexter; "A story about a man's struggle to help his troubled stepson by a novelist who writes about trouble better than most anyone."

Nonfiction

At Home: A Short History of Private Life - Bill Bryson; "Centuries of history dwell in every nook and cranny of your home."

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 - Dave Eggers; "A collection of the year's best writing - tweets, fiction snippets, blogs, letters to the editor, and so on - with an introduction by David Sedaris."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary - Steven R. Weisman; "Moynihan's correspondence makes absorbing reading because his grand ideas were always driven by his internal tensions."

Listen to This - Alex Ross; "The New Yorker music critic follows up his best-selling The Rest Is Noise with this indispensable, erudite collection of his magazine essays, which span the aural universe from Schubert to Radiohead."

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream - Arianna Huffington; "The American middle class as an endangered species, from the editor of the Huffington Post Web site."