Is it just me or do you too just want to start reading from your list after you figure out what you're going to read. 

I don't want to wait until January to start reading that Twain complilation.

Yup, I've already rounded up copies of Origin of Species and Confederacy of Dunces and I'm resisting the urge to get a head start.

I have to admit that I am giving more serious consideration to starting I Promessi Sposi than I have ever mustered up prior to this.  It  took quite a while to get hold of both an Italian edition AND a good English translation of this famous novel by Alessandro Manzoni.   The English edition is 720 pages long, while the Italian one is 746 pages, but the Italian one has ILLUSTRATIONS, by Gonin, since it is a photolithographic reproduction of a very rare edition of the 1840 novel.   The Italian title  translates into English as The Betrothed, and the Italian subtitle, Storia Milanese del Secolo XVII, just means a story of Milan in the 17th Century.

But before anything else happens, I am going to make a point of finishing the Dr. Oliver Sacks book I am presently reading, An Anthropologist on Mars.   It's the second book by him I've read, and again I find myself marvelling at the patent veracity of that old saying, "Truth is stranger than fiction."  Ain't it the truth?    One of my 'summer' books was People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, and two of the chapters in it were journalism, NOT fiction.  That was a wondrous combination of a real-life happening (the surfacing of a half-millenium-old religious manuscript in Sarajevo, on the heels of the conflict there in the late 1990s) plus an imaginative account of the manuscript's creation and its precarious existence through five centuries of tumultous European and Middle East history,  

I suppose maybe it's the journalist in me (although kinda dormant nowadays) that makes me like books with some History to them.  It was interesting to see, yesterday, that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a superb piece of medical journalism, is still standing at the top of the mass market paperback bestsellers list.   There was nothing fictional about that story, but the book reads very much like a really good novel.

Tome Trader,

No need to delay starting the Twain compilation.  You always have the option of replacing it with something else during 2012.