2014 Required Reading: TPL Please Help

There wasn't one local author on my year-end list posted yesterday, but one of the books I read did come from the Toronto Public Library so the Hogtown appellation still holds - just.

On my list of the books I intend to read in the coming year, there is a local author, however. It's crime writer Eric Wright, who has a new novel out called Dempsey's Lodge. It's from Quattro Books, and I believe, a first for them: a crime fiction first that is. Still with crime, I may have to set aside David Malouf and Peter Carey and the rest of the excellent Australians for an Aussie I don't know: Kerry Greenwood. She wrote a novel called Murder in Montparnasse - how could I resist a title like that? - which reminds me that I read and thoroughly enjoyed Howard Engel's book of the same name. Also on the list is any new book from Alan Furst. Furst, a New Yorker with the good sense to spend a lot of his time in Paris, writes stellar espionage novels set in Europe during WWII. I've read 'em all, and his last, Spies of the Balkans, shows he's back in form after a couple of disappointments. If Furst doesn't have a new one out then I'll find a copy of Eric Ambler's Levanter, a book he says all fans of espionage fiction should read.

I hope to read at least one diary and one memoir next year. The diary, called Diary of a Pilgrimage, by Jerome K. Jerome - he of Three Men in a Boat fame - is supposed to be about his trip to Oberammergau near Munich in Germany to see its famous passion play that's put on just once a decade. The memoir will be equally obscure. It's Richard Aldington's Life for Life's Sake. Aldington is remembered these days, if at all and which is unfortunate, for his controversial biography of Lawrence of Arabia. Poet, novelist, WWI soldier, tail-end member of the Lost Generation, Aldington mixed with the Imagist crowd - Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis - and married one of their number, the American poet H(ilda) D(oolittle). I don't know if Aldington writes about his time in the trenches, but if he doesn't I'll still have plenty of First World War at hand: Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended the Peace, her history of the events leading up to that conflagration. I read her tremendous history Paris 1919 three years ago.  

Of course, among all this non-fiction there will be plenty of novels. And since I can't possibly afford everything, the library system here in Hogtown will have to step in and save me.