As if I didn’t have enough books around here already to choose from for my in-the-works plan for a binge reading week in Ocotber, my Bookman had to go and bring home mores tempting books!

• The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers. From the flap copy: “Optimus Yarnspinner inherits from his beloved godfather a mysterious and particularly superb manuscript. He is also assigned a single mission: to find the author, who has disappeared into Bookholm–the so-called City of Dreaming Books.” There are book-creatures, and bookhunters and critics-for-hire, and reading books, it turns out, can be a genuinely dangerous undertaking.
• The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman. This is the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Polish Christian zookeepers who saved over three hundred people from the Nazis.
• The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind from Odysseus to Socrates by Keld Zeruneith. This will be something for me to pick up when I am done with The Odyssey. The author supposedly “makes a provocative argument about the origins of our modern consciousness.”
• Porius by John Cowper Powys. Never read him and know nothing about him except I’ve heard his name before. This book is a novel that takes place in North Wales in 499. Saxons versus the Romans and Merlin even makes an appearance.
• To go along with the novel is Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys by Morine Krissdóttir. This will help with the I know nothing about him part. He sounds like an interesting person and I’m even more interested in his novel(s) since on the bio flap it mentions his work has been compared to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, and Edgar Allan Poe.
• Design Flaws of the Human Condition by Paul Schmidtberger. This novel arrived unannounced in the mail for me today. It looks quirky and possibly funny. The two main characters meet in an anger-management class. Iris is there for a meltdown on a crowded airplane flight. Ken is there for defacing library books with rude messages about his ex-boyfriend. They become friends and so ensues a comedy of manners according to the cover blurb. Has potential.

And so I am going to have a really hard time figuring out what to read on my reading binge. But that is half the fun!