The Reading Week Ahead - March 23, 2026

 Despite having seven books going last week, I still found myself in a bit of a reading slump because even though I finished one of the seven, Ben Bova’s Mars Life, I found it tough to get much into any of the other six at all. The only other one that I found consistently engaging was Ron Chernow’s 1100-page biography of Mark Twain - and I’m going to be reading that one for a few more weeks before it’s done. I find it ironic, too, that the title of the one book I abandoned for good was A Passion for Books, the essay compilation edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan. 

And, I added these two:

Lawn Boy (2018) is the third novel by Jonathan Evison that I’ve read, having previously read The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance. I’m near ninety percent of the way through Lawn Boy, but this one is not grabbing me quite the way the previous two did. I’m finding it hard (for reasons I’ll get into later) to buy-into the lawn boy character, and since he’s the main character (as well as narrator) of the book, that tiny bit of disbelief is present on every single page. That’s been a problem.

I expect that just about everyone out there is familiar with the plot of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, but it’s been more than 50 years since I’ve read it or seen the movie version. While the plot is not exactly new to me, I find it interesting to see how Blatty builds the book’s tension so effectively by dropping numerous hints along the way of all the dark evilness to follow; and how explicitly he describes all the horrible things that end up happening to the young victim. I turned up my 1971 Book Club edition a couple of days ago and started turning pages. I’m still turning them.

I stalled on Sherman Alexi’s short story collection, Blasphemy, for a while after reading the fourth story in the book, one so sexually explicit that it managed to offend me even at this age. But I knew I couldn’t give up on Alexi, he’s just too good a writer to make that mistake with. I’ve since read three of the longer of the thirty-two stories in the collection, and they are all truly excellent.

I haven’t read much lately of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie but I still consider them as active reads. And then there’s Chernow’s Mark Twain - that one is starting to seem eternal.