It is still summer, I assure you, but the buzz is all about the big important books of the fall. Well I'm still not done reading my summer trash, and now that a bunch of books on the to-read list are in paperback there's no excuse. Here's some shit I saw wandering around the bookstores...

Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett. A Depression-era horror novel that follows a vagrant riding the rails in search of the man who murdered his child. Looks cool but has a stupid title.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Cheating cause I already read this, but the trade edition has the same great cover as the hardback despoiled only by a white boxed tag line across the bottom. One of my favorite Lethem novels and well worth a revisit

Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy. A difficult call, it's the third book of a trilogy over a decade in the making so I'd have to catch up on the usually convoluted threads of Ellroy's ongoing plot. He talked some pretty crazy game about this novel and I hate to say it intrigued me, but Ellroy is a genuine fucking nut ball. His newly released memoir about his sexual exploits, The Hilliker Curse, sounds almost too scary considering he talks openly in interviews about his wayward days as a drug addict, breaking into ladies' homes to smell their underwear and stuff.

And I guess I still have to wait a year for the massive new Murakami book. (Don't read that link unless you're primed for spoilers.) Think it would take me less time to learn Japanese and just read the fucker than wait for the translation to be finished, or should Erik and I just commit seppuku (that is if he has enough arm strength to lift the sword and decapitate me).

How did your summer reading plans work out, Blogtown?