“ Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I’ve tried. I’ve tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

I have not been reading enough lately. I’m struggling through another Zola, Nana, and a couple other books – but I decided to refill the tank… maybe get some new game going. So I dug out my lists of books I want to read – went out on the internet – and bought a half-dozen new virtual tomes to load into my Kindle.

1. The Dice Man by Luke Reinhardt – I’ve read this one before, but want to re-visit it. I also picked up The Book of the Die as a companion volume – plus a set of dice, of course.

2. The Bloody Chamber and other stories by Angela Carter

3. Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – this is the book that Tarkovsky’s great film, Stalker, it based on.

4. Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey. I’ve been wanting to read this for a decade.

5. How to Write Pulp Fiction by James Scott Bell. Have to have at least one non-fiction how-to tome.

6. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle. Another non-fiction – this one a biography. I read Sex and Rockets, a book about the amazing and strange life of Jack Parsons several years ago, this is another take on the story.

But the question remains… which one to start first.

Well, there are six of them, and in the spirit of the first book I took out a single die and let it roll.

Now it’s off to go read.