Will Reading Fewer Books at a Time Mean Greater Retention?

 

My daily routine has been so different these last few weeks that I've slipped into, what is for me, an unusual reading pattern. I have been forced to squeeze in reading time wherever I can find it, and reading in short bursts has considerably lessened my retention rate. That means that reading in and out of eight or nine books at a time is out of the question right now, and I'm down to reading one physical book and one e-book instead. And surprisingly enough, I'm enjoying the change.

But still, I'm way behind on reviewing the handful of books that I've finished in the last month or so, and I'm not sure how that is ultimately going to work out. I suspect my reviews will be shorter than they've tended to be in the last year, but I want to write them anyway, even if just as an self-exercise to help me remember as much about the books as possible.

Finished but not yet reviewed are: 

• Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth,
• Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne,
• Eifelheim by Michael Flynn,
• The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail,
• Crows by Charles Dickinson, and
• The Body in the Bath by Ragnar Jónasson.

Honestly, it's going to be a push to get those all written, but my intentions are good...at least for now.

I just finished The Body in the Bath this afternoon, an ARC that will be published in November. Those of you who enjoyed Jónasson's Hulda series a while back when several of us were reading it, will want to get your hands on this one as soon as you can. The three Hulda books comprise one of my favorite crime series ever, and it was really fun to watch Hulda's successor start to nose around in what may have happened to her right before she was scheduled to resign her detective position with the Reykjavik police department. The Body in the Bath is actually the third book in Jónasson's Helgi Reykdal series - but it works well as a standalone for those of us who have not read the first two books yet.

I hadn't been to the library since June, but managed to drop by this morning to see if something would catch my eye. The Radiant Dark did just that, and that's the physical book I'll be reading for the next few days. From the book flap: "It's March 1980, and Carol Gerrard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist too. And so begins a decades-long exchange of messages with this mysterious, faraway civilization." The Radiant Dark was published in April 2026 and weighs in at 412 pages. I have high hopes for it. 

The e-book I'll be concentrating on is Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I decided to make this one my first attempt at reading something for my 1926 project. I'm still hoping to read at least three or four from 1926, but this one has gotten off to a bit of a rough start with me. The set-up is taking a long time, but I've read so many good things about it, that I'm going to read on until the plot finally arrives in the present day. It's the story of a middle-aged spinster forced to move out of the family home by her brother. And there she makes a pact with the devil and discovers that her true calling is witchcraft. I think it's an early feminist novel that uses satire to make its point.

I think this less distracting pace is just what I need right now if I'm going to be able to remember anything about my reading...now I just need to find the time to read and write a little. I hope you all are doing well out there. It's so hot and humid in Houston that we are all keeping our heads down as much as we can. Theoretically, that means more reading time. We'll have to see about that. 

I See You've Called in Dead (2025) - John Kenney

 

To say that I've been overwhelmed by life lately is a gross understatement. We are still in the early stages of dealing with the aftermath of my brother-in-law's sudden accidental death on June 23, and that is likely to remain the case for the next several months. Because we do not live particularly near any of the locations we need to meet with contractors, lawyers, insurance people, and public authorities, we have been on the road an average of twice a week for the past five weeks...something like nine trips and about 2,000 miles at this point. 

But in a case of serendipity, the right book for the moment hollered out to me a few days ago. I was looking around my library website for something to read and stumbled upon "Libby Reads Global" and the chance to read John Kinney's I See You Called in Dead immediately. No waiting list, just borrow the book and begin reading it along with thousands of others around the world at the same time. The timing was perfect.

It's the story of an obituary writer named Bud Stanley who is going through a traumatic midlife crisis at the age of 44. Bud's wife has left him for a much more interesting and successful man, and Bud is back into the modern dating scene. Let's just say that's not going particularly well for him. He bottoms out one night when he is waiting for his blind date to show up - only to learn that she brings her ex-boyfriend along with her to tell Bud that they have decided to get back together. Bud is humiliated by the experience, goes home to get drunk on his own, and ends up writing his own obituary as a joke. The problem with that little exercise is that he decides to post the obituary on his newspaper's live website. 

Of course, the paper wants to fire Bud, but they learn that it is illegal to fire a "dead person." Until they can work out that little snag in their system, Bud is suspended without pay, and is own his own. With all of that free time on his hands, Bud begins, along with a couple of friends of his, to attend the wakes and funerals of total strangers. I know...let the hilarity begin.

As the author puts it, Bud Stanley is "an obituary writer who is afraid to live." This is his chance. As Bud delves into the lives of the strangers whose funerals he attends, he learns more and more about life and what it means to be human. Along the way, the rest of us get to meet the fascinating people in Bud's inner circle: Tim, his wheelchair-bound best friend and mentor; Clara, the woman who first drew Bud into attending all those funerals; Leo, the little boy down the block who truly believes that he and Bud are best friends (and maybe they are); and Tuan, Bud's gay obituary co-writer who helps Bud adjust to life more than he knows. 

"How rude of the dead to die. How selfish. Wherever they are, no pain, in eternal darkness or wondrous afterlife. And here we are, tears streaming down our cheeks, the knotted stomach and clammy palms, a feeling akin to falling, in a dream that won't end."

Don't let this quote mislead you. True, much of I See You Called in Dead is quite poignant - but it is often laugh-out-loud funny, too. The whole package is quite inspirational, in fact, because it's a reminder of just how short life really is, and how easy it is to waste it.

I think you'll like this one a lot.

Have Courage (November 2026) - Craig Johnson

 

For me, reading a Craig Johnson novel or short story is very much akin to enjoying the kind of comfort food I grew up on as a kid. After having read Johnson for so many years, I feel completely at home in the Absaroka County world that he has created for the sheriff, and I always look forward to the next chance to visit Walt and his friends there. 

Have Courage, scheduled to be published in early November, is Johnson's latest collection of Longmire short stories. Each of the thirteen stories takes place during the Christmas season just when the sheriff's office is as short-handed as it ever will be and everyone is expecting things to have pretty much quieted down for the rest of the year. But as Walt has learned the hard way, that's not the way things work in Absaroka County, Wyoming.

The thirteen stories cover the entirety of Walt's policing career, from the early days when Walt was just a green young deputy learning the trade at the knee of Lucian Connally, to when Walt has become a fixture in the job he ultimately inherited from Lucian. Along the way, a cast of familiar deputies comes and goes - although I do think that Walt's best friend, Henry Standing Bear, is under-utilized in this collection of stories. (I am one who doesn't think that you can ever have enough Henry Standing Bear.)

The stories offer insights into Walt Longmire's character and how he got to be the man he turned out to be. They are stories of reclaimed lives, violent hostage situations, seeing the best in people during the worst day in their lives, havoc caused by the surprising results of DNA testing, dealing with a skunk that decides to crash a Christmas party, an old dog needing a new friend, and much more. And best of all, no matter how violent or sad the situation might be, it's all narrated with the same wit that Craig Johnson fans have come to expect over the years. I don't usually do "Christmas in July" stuff, but I'm grateful that that reluctance didn't keep me from reading Have Courage when I got the chance. 

This one is for the Walt Longmire fans.

What I'm Reading This Week (7/17/26)

 As far as my reading goes, this last couple of weeks has really been hit or miss for me. I've found it hard to concentrate even when I've had a little time for myself, and that's caused me to change some of my book choices as I try to find books a little less concentration-demanding. I've really only put one book aside for the long term, however, and that is the huge, in every sense of that word, James Jones novel From Here to Eternity. No matter how hard I try to get into that story, it's just not working for me at all right now. I've temporarily tabled a couple of others (The Longest Walk and the Mark Twain bio), but plan to get back to those sooner rather than later. 

On the positive side, I've made surprising progress with the controversial French novel The Camp of the Saints that I've been reading for a while now. And pretty decent progress on the book on Cajun history I've been reading, The Acadian Saga. Misleadingly, I did also finish three books in the last couple of weeks, but I was already relatively near the end of two of those (The Cyclist by Tim Sullivan, Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth, and Eifelheim by Michael Flynn).  

These are the new ones I've started in the last few days:

A lot of you probably have already read Donna Everhart's Women of a Promiscuous Nature because I remember seeing it reviewed on several blogs a few weeks ago. It's historical fiction focusing on that period in American history (well into the 1940s and 1950s, it seems) during which husbands or fathers of sexually active females could solve the "problem" by having the women institutionalized. The first couple of chapters haven't hooked me yet, but I'm still hoping this one will grab me soon.

I think this new collection of Walt Longmire short stories is scheduled to be published in early November. Have Courage is one of several Christmas story collections that Johnson has published over the years, and I've read them all, I think. There are thirteen stories in Have Courage, covering different periods in Longmire's law enforcement career from the early seventies to the present day. Each story is set either on Christmas Day or thereabouts. Walt Longmire stories are, for me, fiction's equivalent of comfort food.

Charles Dickinson has been one of my favorites since the eighties even though no one would ever describe him as anything remotely close to prolific. I first read Crows around 1992, but it was published in 1985. Honestly, I remembered very little about it when I started this re-read other than how much I enjoyed it the first time around. And now, 83 pages into it, Crows is still reading like a book I'm reading for the first time. Great characters, quirky family, good story...loving this one already.

So Old So Young follows a group of college friends for about 20 years, starting in 2007. This one got some pretty good early press when published a few weeks ago, and that's when it caught my eye. I'm hoping it's not just another one in a long line of novels that use this exact set-up, but I'm already beginning to have some doubts. The writing is good, so I'll keep going for another 50 pages or so before deciding whether or not to DNF So Old So Young. It's hard to show much patience right now, and that's probably not fair to Grant Ginder.

So that's me for the next couple of weeks. I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your reading time. Make the most of it!

The Cyclist (2020) - Tim Sullivan

 

The Cyclist is the second book in Tim Sullivan’s eight-book DS Cross series. As with the titles of the other books in the series, the title of this one describes the profession of the victim of the crime Cross and his team will be investigating. 

DS George Cross is a Bristol detective who is somewhere on the autism spectrum. He is not an easy man to work with or to befriend, but he is a brilliant detective with the highest conviction rate on the entire police force. Cross pays attention to detail, and combines logic and intense focus on the tiniest of clues to reveal a victim’s hidden lives and motivations - often leading him directly to their killer. 

As Cross writes him, George Cross is a very sympathetic character, but he is so socially awkward that he often comes across as rude without any idea that he is doing so. He hates noise, crowds large and small, and has never mastered the skill of making small talk or reading the emotions of others. Thus, his lack of friends. 

But George, largely thanks to input from his department partner Josie Ottey, is not unaware of the way others react to him, and he is working hard to make himself more acceptable to others.

He often spent time observing people. Sometimes from Tony’s café, where he would have breakfast every morning. He was a bit of a student of human behaviour. Not because of his work but because he learnt from it. He tried to observe, to understand the way people worked, in an attempt to fit himself in a little more easily. It had mixed results…"

 This time around, Cross and his team are investigating the murder of a man whose body was found inside an abandoned building. Using clues only he could piece together, Cross quickly determines that the brutally murdered man is a cyclist, a fact that leads directly to the man’s quick identification. Then once the victim has been identified, Cross begins to peel back his life layer by layer until all is revealed. This is a mystery involving high level competitive cycling, performance enhancing drugs, sibling rivalry, financial pressures, family feuds, and a romance gone off the rails. Everyone of any importance in the victim’s life seems to be hiding something, and what they are hiding is usually enough to give them good reason to want to see Alex Paphides dead. 

 The Cyclist comes with an abundance of suspects. 

Good luck.

Reading Novels Published in 1926: A Self-Challenge

The last two weeks have been somewhat of a challenge when it comes to finding much time to read or to post anything here on Book Chase, and that is likely to continue well into the foreseeable future. As I briefly mentioned before, we are in the midst of unraveling all the complications arising from my brother-in-law’s sudden death in a traffic accident. In less than two weeks, that has already required us to make five separate trips totaling over 900 miles, so reading and blogging time is definitely at a premium. 

But I woke up this morning wondering what people were reading exactly 100 years ago, in 1926. I’m hoping to read a few 1926 novels just to remind myself how quickly time sneaks up on all of us, and I’ll be choosing primarily from this bunch:

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner
• The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence
• All the Sad Young Men by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Mantrap by Sinclair Lewis
• Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
• The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine
• Show Boat by Edna Ferber
• Early Autumn by Louis  Bromfield
• The Silver Spoon by John Galsworthy
• Beau Sabreur by P.C. Wren
• The Hounds of Spring by Sylvia Thompson
• After Noon by Susan Ertz
• The Blue Window by Temple Bailey
• My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
• The Romantic Comedians by Ellen Glasgow
• Adam’s Breed by Radclyffe Hall
• Under the Tonto Rim by Zane Grey
• The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline

If I can read even two or three of these before the end of the year, I’ll consider this to have been a successful self-challenge. If anyone wants to join me in reading at least one 1926 novel, feel free to choose anything else from that year and to suggest others for me to consider. 

Now I need to sit down and actually read something…anything…before my frustration gets the better of me.

(The image up above is only the second image I’ve ever generated using AI, but I think it does a pretty good job of setting the tone for this new goal of mine.)