What’s Rob reading in January?

With my return to the business of full-time reading and reviewing beginning again tomorrow, I thought I’d open proceedings by giving you all a quick rundown on the literary delights that I’ve set up for myself to read during this first month of the new year.

First off I’ll admit that I failed miserably in my goal of reading through the shortlist for this year’s Costa First Novel Award (I’d pledged in this post to read the shortlist before category winners were announced earlier this week. Fail! ), but I’m not going to let a tiny detail like that stop me. My interest was genuinely piqued by every one of the novels chosen for this year’s shortlist (hence my desire to read the category), so there’s NO WAY I’m going to pass up on an opportunity to ‘journey’ through a such a delicious quartet.

So with the overall Costa Book Prize winner being announced later this month (the 25th to be exact), I’m setting up this date as the new deadline for reading my way through the shortlist category. I’ll then pass on a retrospective opinion on whether I think Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night (Beautiful Books) was a worthy winner of the category (and indeed the overall prize if the book happens to win that too).

As a refresher then the four titles on the Costa First Novel Award shortlist, and therefore the first four books on my own reading list for January, are:

Witness the Night by Kishwar Desai (Beautiful Books) | Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (Quartet Books) | The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer (Viking) | Not Quite White by Simon Thirsk (Gomer Press).

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Moving on and it’s an exciting month for David Vann fans on both side of the Atlantic Ocean (and for English-language speakers the world over of course), as the author who penned the gut-wrenching debut, Legend of a Suicide (Penguin Books) bounces back with his first bona-fide novel, Caribou Island. Published by Harper in the US on the 18th, and by Penguin in the UK on the 27th, January is set to be a massive month Vann-wise, and not least on RobAroundBooks where fandom (or maybe that should be Vanndom ) will no doubt reach epic proportions. Suicide of a Legend tore out my heart and handed me it on a plate. I expect Caribou Island to do much the same.

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Also hitting the bookshops on the 27th of this month, courtesy of Constable & Robinson, is another title which has the potential to rock me to the core. Bitter Bitch is the English-language translation of Bitterfittan, a novel written by Swedish author Maria Sveland. Described as being ‘angry, candid and uncompromising’, this is a novel which has taken much of Europe by storm. If you need a vivid illustration of how controversial this book may be, then do a little research to find out the literal English meaning of the word that forms the latter half of the original Swedish title (I’m so glad that Constable & Robinson went for a looser translation of the term for the English edition ).

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Last, but certainly not least in the selection of books I’m going to be focussing on on RobAroundBooks during January, is the new series of four titles coming from Massachusetts-based publisher, Madras Press. You may remember at the end of 2009 I reviewed Madras Press’ debut series of titles. Then, I couldn’t be more delighted both with the stories chosen for publication and the unique 5” x 5” square format of the published product, and here they come again with the next offering. This second series promises more of the same equilateral deliciousness (and as always with all net proceeds going to the chosen charity of each author), with stories coming from legendary short story specialist Donald Barthelme, surreal fiction writer Ben Marcus, All My Friends Are Superheroes author, Andrew Kaufman (a favourite here at RobAround Manor) and a fiction writer who always seems to be a favourite with The New York Times, Ken Kalfus.

So there we go folks, I’ve set myself a mammoth reading task for this opening month of this new year (and I’ve not even told you what short story stuff I’m going to be ticking off), but I couldn’t be more excited about it. This is an eclectic selection for sure, but that’s exactly how I like it. If nothing else it completely illustrates just how diverse and cosmopolitan I like things to be around here, and that makes me happy. I hope you like the selection I’m focussing on in January, and I also hope that there’s something amongst this lot that excites you just as much as it excites me. Remember to follow my progress through the usual avenues (Twitter, online Reading Journal etc), and don’t be shy about joining in on the chit-chat.

So fellow reader what books are you most excited about reading this month? What great titles have you got lined up on your reading list? Let me know, below.