Early January's reading

At the moment I am reading:
1. The uses of literacy (Hoggart) - it's sort of incidental to the things I'm trying to study, and is a good substitute for "real" work because it's so very readable. I'm a little bit bothered at the moment by some of his tone: while he asserts his working class credentials pretty regularly, he's obviously moved quite a long way from his roots and can seem to have a slight zoo-visitor's curiosity. Still, I can't put it down.
2. Heart of darkness (Conrad) - I really can put it down, and so far seem to have spent more time going backwards than forwards, trying to work out who's meant to be talking, where this boat is meant to be going, etc. Perhaps this is a punishment for choosing it for the wrong reasons. I desperately want to have read all the books on my ebook reader, to give me a justification for having bought it (justification in whose eyes? I LOVE it and bought it with my own honestly earned money, not even all that much of it) and I picked this one because I thought it would be a quick one.
3. Home (Marilynne Robinson) - I'm not actually technically reading this but it's still occupying so much of my mental space that I feel like I am. I certainly can't pick up another modern novel yet, I don't want to forget about the characters in Home or be inhabiting a different house, in fact I fear the answer may be to read it again and try to get it out of my system.
4. Mistero all'Abazzia - well, it's still technically a book. A pair of Italian students are on holiday in the Lombardy countryside and stumble upon a mystery in a nearby monastery. It seems that there may be soldiers, disguised as monks, bringing heavy weaponry into the abbey at nights. Everyone in the town appears to be in on some kind of sinister secret, and only Marco and Anna can get to the truth. We had a false reveal in chapter 8, where M&A learned that they were just being silly, and had been spying on a film set...but in chapter 9 it turned out that the tramp really had vanished (too long to explain) and all of their films containing photos of the abbey had been stolen. Only one chapter remains and I can't imagine how this will resolve itself; moreover, with the book's being written in Italian and my Italian being what it is, I'm not even sure I'll ever know.
5. There are more...I will continue.