Books To Look Forward To In 2006

David Foster Wallace's collection, Consider the Lobster : And Other Essays. His previous books were the kind of door-stoppers that's too thick for my consideration. I will always wonder what I could be doing with my life if I wasn't wasting it reading this thick, thick book. But this collection looks fun.

A.M. Homes's new novel, This Book Will Save Your Life (April), tells the story of a self-sufficient stock trader struck with a crisis that teaches him how much he needs other people.

Also in my to look out for basket (it's a small basket) - Sarah Water's Night Watch, coming out February.

From Amazon.co.uk, the synopsis goes:

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching ...Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret ...Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover ...Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances ...

And what all this tells me is that Waters's not doing Victorian lit anymore. D'uh.

Books I'm looking out for in paperback this year:

A Plea for Eros: Essays by Siri Hustvedt
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion