What Amy Bloom's Been Reading

Amy Bloom responds to my query about her current reading:

Jane EyreThe Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon

Robert McCrum, who has spent 10 years at the literary helm of Britain’s Observer and before that, as editor at Faber and Faber, steps down and offers a thoughtful view of the literary world as it is and as it has been.

No doubt many book pages (this is a guess based on past performance as I am less inclined to consult or passingly peruse such) are devoted to the arguable notion of some kind of seasonal reading impulse (summer reading?). OK, if you want to waste your time with such hooey, let me offer you my own arbitrary and capricious list of 2008 books (known in mediaspeak as Fifteen Books That Oprah Missed and You Shouldn’t) you may have but ought not to miss:

• The Song Before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright
• Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir by David Rieff
• The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma
• Nazi Literature in the Americas by Robert Bolaño
• The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb
• The Dark Room of Damocles by Willem Fredrik Hermans
• Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea by Sergio Ramírez
• The Outlander by Gil Adamson
• The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter
• Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker
• Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew
• The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette
• World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler
• Fall of Frost by Brian Hall
• The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel