It’s been two weeks since my last post.  I need to get back to bloging big time and what better way to do this than with a lusting-after-books-post.   I use this feature to highlight books, reviewed by other book bloggers, that I’m most definitely want to read in the near future.  So, I couldn’t resist the following books:

• Zone by Mathias Énard – I decided to read more one-sentence novels after I read Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass.  So how apt was it to encounter a review of Zone by Lisa’s Other Bookshelf ?  Words Without Borders describes the books as a “a spy thriller; a miniature history of the Mediterranean; intellectually dense and historically expansive; an overwhelmingly exquisite and trying tome”.  A one sentence 512-page book.  Sounds like my kinda work!
• The Vagrants by Yiyun Li – Maphead listed this book as one of his favorite fiction reads of 2010 and since I think highly of Maphead, I had to look it up.  Turns out that I had already noted it down after reading a review by Hungry Like A Woolf.  At the beginning of the review, Kerry laments the lack of attention paid to this book. Yiyun Li was one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list and she was also awarded a US “genius” grant. Hopefully the book and her works will get more attention.  The Vagrants is set in the era of China’s Cultural Revolution.
• Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat – A collection of essays on what it means to be in artist in, and from, Haiti. I first heard of the book through a review by the writer Geoffrey Philip
• Palafox by Eric Chevillard – A book about an unclassified protean creature.  It is described as non-realist or anti-realist fictio.  Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading said “I am not precisely sure what I think of Palafox, because it is an exceedingly difficult book to summarize or to impose a reading on, but I think the book has something to do with seeing sense as a relative phenomenon”.  In any case, I’m intrigued.
• Death as a Side Effect by Ana Maria Shua –  The Spanish edition of this dystopian novel was chosen as one of the best 100 Latin American novels published in the last 25 years.  A Progressive on the Prairie says the book uses “dark satire to effectively meld societal and personal tribulations”.
• A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava –  A 700-page self-published novel about a public defender.  There hasn’t been a lot of noise about this one.  Conversational Reading say that it’s the self-published book that we must read.  Then I read a glowing review at With Hidden Noise.  Yep, I’m tempted.

Have you read any of these books? Do any of these books sound interesting to you?