Looking at a shelves in the library

Looking ahead - it seems my reading pattern fluctuates, moving in what I guess might be a sine curve, reading a lot of classics for a time but then need to come up for some air and read some contemporary pieces - and then I start to pull back, to feel that really the best literature is the literature that endures, that in any given year there may be one or two books that will be read years from now, so why spend so much reading time with books that are just fair creatures of an hour? - but then, when I find myself immersed in James or Joyce I often feel I need some news about the world around me - and so it goes (between these waves of reading I tend to go with story collections when traveling, because I can't really focus on an unfolding narrative when I'm interrupted a lot by travels and relocations) and I do manage to read almost every New Yorker short story sometime during the week (force of habit - also "read" the cartoons). On a bit of a contemporary jag now and have picked up (from library) Half-Broken Horses (?), which I think got a lot of positive attention a year ago and looks, after a brief glance, quite accessible. What else did I look at on the shelves?: the new book by Ondaatje, which BR recommended to book group (I might give it a try to see if I agree, but not sure I'll have the patience for such a stylized book), looked also at something new by Ishigura, and an Everyman edition of Naipaul stories (I'll almost definitely pick that up eventually). Was hoping to see on shelf a copy of that German novel about Majorca that draw a rave in the NYTBR on Sunday - not sure if it'll ever make its way to library shelves around here, though. Waiting on a countertop near me: Absolum, Absolum, which I kind of abandoned in mid-stream of consciousness, but to which I've vowed : I shall return. Yes, during my next foray into the classics.