Library Additions

By some strange coincidences, I have been offered a lot of books for the past month. Geosi of Geosi Reads has given me a pack of Booker-Winning books to help me achieve my Top 100 Books Reading Challenge. Some of the books are not on the list but are on the authors to be read list, which is not - in essence - a challenge but one that guides me in my purchases.

• Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This books is on my Top 100 Books Reading Challenge. Apart from being a winner of the Booker, I was drawn to this book by the word 'Pi'. I had always imagined it to have something to do with mathematics or at least geometry, until I read the review some time ago. Yet, I still think of the book in such realm.
• Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. This was a late addition to the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge. This book replaced V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State. 
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri. A friend sent this book to me but a mistake in the postal address ensured that the book never got to me. It is also on my Top 100 Books Reading Challenge.
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. This book is not a Challenge book but the author is on the list of authors to read.
• July's People by Nadine Gordimer. Gordimer's The Conservationist has been my target. However, haven't not read a complete novel or novella from this Nobelist, it is only a matter of 'correcting-the-wrong' that I should read this. I have read two books from her fellow South African (now Australian) Nobelist, the recluse J.M. Coetzee.
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith. This makes it two of White Teeth on my shelf now. I would give one away. I have been looking for this book for sometime now. Just when I found one, I have been gifted with another.
• On Beauty by Zadie Smith. This makes it the second Zadie.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. This book and its author on neither of the above-mentioned lists. The title sound interesting and Geosi says it is.
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. There are three of Atwood's books on my Top 100 Books list: The Handmaid's Tale, which I have already reviewed, The Blind Assassin and The Year of the Flood. I have read Oryx and Crake. 
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. This book is also on my Top 100 Books list. It will also help me reach farther into India. I wonder why most of the Indian writers are now in England or the US, just like African writers. Talk of Salman Rushdie et al.
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. This author is on the list of authors to read but I wasn't too keen to read him. I have my own reasons; however, the book will also not remain on my shelf unread. Reading it would help strengthen or weaken my argument.
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. I now have two of the three Rushdies on the list of Top 100 Books list, Satanic Verses being the other I have and Shame, the one I don't.
• The English Patient by Michael Ontaadje. This is not a Challenge book but the author is on the list of authors to be read, per bloggers' reviews and recommendation.
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. I listened to the author on the BBC World Book Club and fell in love with her book.
• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. This is an outlier It belongs nowhere as I haven't made up my mind to read any play by a non-African writer. However, since Ola Rotimi's The gods are not to blame is based on this play, I guess I would have to read this too.