Like one of those YouTube videos where people talk about stuff they picked up. Or at least so I've read since I've never seen one of these videos because....well why would I? Why would anybody read this? Life can be like that sometimes.
Murphy - The Black Hole of the Camera (Warhol)
Hale - The Dedalus Book of French Horror
Gubern - Luis Bunuel The Red Years
Breunig - The Cubist Poets in Paris
Condini - Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry
Tibbets - The Gothic Imagination
Willsher - The Dedalus Book of English Decadence
Balio - The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens
Seife - Tashlinesque
Warner - Stranger Magic (Arabian Nights)
Jones - Classics Illustrated A Cultural History
Hatch - Looking for Bruce Conner
I also looked at Kwarteng's Ghost of Empires but it seemed tedious and I'm not sure why it was on my list, probably a positive review somewhere that I've now forgotten. Recently read things about Holderlin that made him sound interesting but checked out a few passages in the library and they seemed a bit too plain. Clearly a subject for further research at some point but not now. Found the new translation of D'Annunzio's Notturno but didn't know it was about him going blind and didn't feel like getting into that right now. Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists looked well worth the trouble but not only is it quite thick when I already had a full bag but it's likely something I'll want to buy when it comes out in paperback. Koestenbaum's Anatomy of Harpo Marx looked far too impressionist though that might be a strength - in any case also for another time. And apparently misplaced were Bellos' Is That a Fish in Your Ear, Saller's As If and Blair's Too Much to Know which are really the books at the top of the list. (Metaphorically speaking - my library list is actually ordered by catalog number for obvious reasons.)
So the question is how much of this will I actually read? I'm guessing most. The one most likely to fall to the side is the Italian poetry anthology if it's even merely routine. As something of a fair weather poetry reader it often has to be very striking or very much to my taste for me to finish. I abandoned Paz's collection of Mexican poetry because it was just so much blooming blossoms and Lambs of God that it felt like wandering through a haze (and didn't help by having one translator that made every poet seem pretty much like the same writer). The book on foreign films in the US might turn out to be yet another academic research dump in which case I would end up skimming much of it. Warner's book on the Arabian Nights sounds like just my kind of digressive stroll through cultural by-ways but if she's too cutesy or too heavy-handed that could also be a stop. Most of the rest seem like things I would finish even if the book isn't very solid just because the subject interests me that much.
Of course one advantage to an academic library is that they don't care how much I check out and everything can be renewed more or less endlessly. I only go by every couple of months because my ID doesn't scan so the guard has to buzz me through and the help desk has to look up my account to check anything out.