Books in Waiting

As I've mentioned before, my "Books in Waiting" pile (along with my knitting "works in progress," which I'll save for a different post..) is now officially out of control. Here's a sampling of what's in it, after a visit to the first New York outpost of McNally Robinson Booksellers:

Babyji, Abha Dawesar
The Chinese Bell Murders, Robert Van Gulick
This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Women of Sand and Myrrh, Hanan al-Shayakh (she also wrote Only in London, which I loved)
The Rice Mother, Rani Manicka

McNally Robinson has done something I consider quite daring in it's organization of fiction: it sorts fiction first by region. That means you can browse South Asian fiction, or Japanese fiction, or the literature of Oceania. (They also have a "literary nomad" section for authors like Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabakov). Part of the reason that I read is to delve into worlds unfamiliar to me, and to travel mentally to regions of the world that I haven't seen yet (yes, I hold out hope that I will see all of this world somehow). I think their organization allows people to stumble across authors that they may not know, and might not have found otherwise. The danger is that it might "pigeon-hole" authors in ways antithetical (or irrelevant) to the subjects they write about. I think, though, that they've made an effort to make sure that the books are about the place in which they've been sorted.

More on the books later--the most difficult choice is going to be where to start...