The November Non-Challenge: Books I'm Reading Instead of The Books That Changed The World

Way back in January, when I was plotting out monthly challenges, I had intended The Books That Changed The World to immediately follow Books For Blasphemers. I wanted to wade through all the major works that have helped shape this crazy world we live in. For better or for worse. In the list I had J. S. Mill's On Liberty, Marx's The Communist Manifesto, Mao's Little Red Book, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Darwin's Origin of The Species, Hitler's Mein Kampf and Greer's The Female Eunuch. I had yet to decide on a poetic form with which to review them, my two favourites having been taken up by the Biblical texts (limerick) and the Books I Swore I'd Never Read (haiku). Perhaps a few sonnets were in order. Then it occurred to me. Hadn't I suffered enough for your entertainment? I read Eat Pray Love for fuck's sake! Plus, did I really want to go out and buy Hitler's paranoid rantings? I'd be too ashamed to do it in person, even more so than that time I bought The Celestine Prophecy. Or Twilight. Ordering it online would put me on some CIA watch list. Again. I get arrested at airports enough as it is. While I was being consumed by existential kvetching, the pile of books I was excited to read continued to grow, and I came to realise that I needed to abandon the whole challenge approach altogether. And so I bring you a very loose theme for November, Books I'm Reading Instead of The Books That Changed The World. Yeah, it's wordy but I like the sound of it. I've already knocked over the new Auster and Krauss novels (more to come on them soon). Don Quixote straddled the October/November divide. I'm about to start the new Bernhard Schlink. And any day now I. J. Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi, which I am very chuffed to see is back in print, shall find its way to my mailbox. I haven't decided what else will make the list this month but hey, I like to live dangerously. In a room. In the corner. With a book.