Is There a Genre for This?

I have always maintained that my writing is hard to force-fit into a literary genre. Multicultural and literary come about as close as any labels can. My reading tastes are also wide-ranging. Here is what I have been reading in the last month.

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, winner of the 1952 National Book Award and a classic ever since. You might find it interesting that President Obama in college read and reread this novel until it was dog-eared. See The Washington Post excerpt from the upcoming David Marannis biography of the President.

• Cuentos de Amor de Locura y de Muerte [Stories of Love Madness and Death] a collection by the gifted Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, who died in 1937.

• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, a book of poems about the individuals buried in fictional Spoon River.

• Hope of Israel, a fabulous historical novel by Patricia O’Sullivan, “based on the true experience of Jews in Lisbon, Amsterdam and London during the politically and spiritually tumultuous 17th century." [Publishers Weekly]

• Inseminating the Elephant, a Pulitzer Prize finalist poetry anthology by Lucia Perillo.

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a surprising page turner of a book that also lets one peek into early U.S. history.

• The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a psychological novel by the award-winning Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima

• Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

How would you label my reading tastes?