Lazy 3-day weekend poll ~ fall reading list, edition 8 :: Now Smell This

Welcome to our 8th annual fall reading poll! Please recommend a great book to add to our fall reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.

(Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last quarterly reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.)

Or, as always, just talk about something else, and of course, do report your fragrance of the day if you like.

What I’ve read since the summer poll:

On the fiction front, I read Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, and then reread Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse before starting in on this year’s Booker longlist. I had already read two on the list, Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, and now I’ve finished The Palm House by Gwendolyn Reilly, Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation and Christian Kracht’s Air. So far, I loved all of them. The one I will scent is The Renovation, which is an easy call: L’Artisan Parfumeur Traversée du Bosphore.*

I have not read a single mystery or spy novel in the last quarter, which is unusual for me. 

For non-fiction, I read Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes, which I became interested in after reading more about netsuke in conjunction with our annual haiku challenge. It’s a wonderful book even if you don’t really care about netsuke. I also read Xiaolu Guo’s Radical: A Life Of My Own, most of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, and I reread Nigel Nicolson’s short biography on Virginia Woolf for Penguin Lives. I read about half of The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History & Teachings by Donald S. Lopez.

Note: top image is Folded Book – Line Symmetry [cropped] by Tanja-Milfoil at flickr; some rights reserved.

*From the lead in to an NPR interview with the author…

There are lots of home renovation nightmares, but none perhaps quite so chilling as when Dilara and her husband – both Turkish exiles living in Italy – remodeled their bathroom. Our narrator, Dilara, moves aside a tarp to see the finished bathroom and finds herself inside a Turkish prison cell complete with guards.