Have you read any of these?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Recently, I've been trying to pick up some authors and some books that I haven't gotten to yet that I really feel like I should. So, here's what they are.

[00:00:07]And yeah, you can tell me which one you think I should read first. First up is Life for Sale by the famous Japanese author Yukio Mishima. This will be my third novel from him that I've read.

[00:00:17]This sounds really weird to me. It's about a guy who puts his life up for sale in an ad in a newspaper and the interactions he has with the people who respond to that ad. Austeritz by WG Sebald. I've never read anything from him before. This is one of his more famous works. I actually think this was the last book that he put out, but this is about a young boy who moves to England during World War II and kind of follows his life as he tries to piece together who he is. This next one, multiple people have told me that they think it's the best book ever written, which is a crazy claim, but I don't know. We'll see. This is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. She wrote this when she was only 23 years old and I guess it's about the feeling of isolation living in a small town in the American South. In America by Susan Sag. This is a historical fiction about a real life actress from Poland who moves to the US I think in the early 1900s. I've never read anything from Susan Sag which seems like a travesty to me. So that's why I picked this one up.

[00:01:16]The White Album by Joan Ddian. This would be my second non-fiction from Joan Ddian. This is all about the social upheaval of the 1970s coming off the back of the 1960s. I think the 1970s is one of the most interesting decades in American history. The music and the movies that came out of that era were incredible. A lot of pivotal moments in politics came out of that era. So, I'm really excited to read the essays about that decade from such an incredible writer. Okay. And this last one is an absolute beast. This is Divine Days by Leon Forest. Look at how large this book is. So Leon Forest is one of those authors that I've never read and I don't think a lot of people have these days.

[00:01:58]It's he's an author that was very highly acclaimed during his time but has since just kind of been forgotten. And this is I guess his magnum opus. It's published by my friends over at Northwestern University Press. And it's about a guy who comes back to Chicago after the Vietnam War. He served in the war and it just tells the story of life in the city during that era. And obviously Forest had a lot to say about that because yeah, this is a big one. I think it's like 1,200 pages. I've read a little sample of this. I thought the writing was fantastic from that little bit that I've read. I'm not exactly sure when I'll be able to fit this into my schedule, but um yeah, I'm certainly interested in it. If you've read any of these, I would love to hear what you think of them. And uh if you were me, which one would you read