Big Books

Here is a recent photo of new 600-page-plus books in my TBR pile:  The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, War and Peace, and John Fowles's The Magus.  Somehow I am reading BIG BOOKS this summer and astonished my husband by carrying a HUGE paperback in my bike pannier yesterday.   

"How many times have you read War and Peace?"


"I'm not reading War and Peace."

Then there are the big books I'm still working on. 

John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun--good historical novel; give it the National Book Award; I'll probably be working on it all year. 

Lisa Alther's Kinflicks.  Virago reissued this in 1999, and I thought it was extremely funny when I read it in 1977.

R. F. Delderfield's Theirs Was the Kingdom.  Popular novel, second in the Swann trilogy. 

Elizabeth Jane Howard's Slipstream.  A memoir.

Then there are the books I accepted from PR people ONE YEAR AGO (none of the above, and not all of them are big, but I have declared a moratorium on gifts from publicists because I rarely read them).  One of them is H. Rider Haggard's Alan Quatermain, a good summer read (I LOVED King Solomon's Mines! REALLY), and I should get to this soon.  And then what about all the OTHER Alan Quatermain books? 

I've finished some of my big books this year: David Lodge's A Man of Parts, H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger,  Bleak House, Maugham's Of Human Bondage, Nancy Hale's Prodigal Women, Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills, and...

Some more that I can't think of.