Random Sunday Evening Thoughts - Mostly Bookish

This has been one of those weeks that thankfully come around only once in a great while.

• Precisely seven days ago (I am writing this at 9:00 p.m. local time) my wife had just been delivered to a hospital emergency room by ambulance to deal with back pain so severe that she literally almost could not move.  Nine hours later she was transferred to a local rehabilitation hospital for treatment that lasted until noon today when she was released from the facility. (She is much, much better but still in considerable pain.)  Let's just say that I now fully understand what a combined effort it is to keep a household functioning smoothly - even one of only three people - because I've taken up the slack, and let's just say that I am exhausted.

• I did manage to post several book reviews this week, but never did find the energy for anything else.  By the time I squeezed in a few dozen pages of reading, it seemed like the day was over and it was time to start planning for the next one.  I suppose the only bright spot to my change in schedule is that I was on the road so much (trips to the hospital and carting my grandson to and from his summer classes) that I made some great progress on a couple of audiobooks - finishing one completely and getting halfway through Beartown by Fredrik Backman.  Backman is a Swedish author whose books are all being translated and published in the U.S. now, and I'm a big fan.  Beartown has, in fact, turned into a big surprise.  What I thought was going to be a rather ordinary coming-of-age novel about a youth hockey team in Sweden, took such a drastic right angle turn about a third of the way through, that I can't wait to get back to it.  

• For some reason my library holds often all decide to show up within a few days of each other...nothing for a couple of weeks and then five or six show up in the same week.  It's happened again, and now I have so many library books in the house that today I had to resort to creating and printing a special calendar just to keep up with when they all need to be returned.  I already suspect that at least a couple of them are going to have to be returned unread so that I can start them through the cycle again.  Counting Beartown, I now have eleven library books on my desk and another thirteen still on hold.  I'm at the top of the queue for at least three of those thirteen, and with my luck they will all show up next week.  I'm about done with How to Read Literature Like a Professor and Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, and I've started The Man from the Train and The Sympathizer, but the clock is ticking on the other seven.

• Some of the books I have on hold are really intriguing and I know that I'll be tempted to start reading them just as soon as I get my hands on them (partially because they have dozens of people lined up behind me and I will only be able to check them out for two weeks).  Included is the the first book I've seen on the Bill Cosby trial, a book by Nicole Weisensee Egan called Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America's Dad that I'm hoping can explain this man to me.  Among the others is another of my "books on books" titles, The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedra Patrick and some popular titles like Big Sky (Kate Atkinson), The Lost Girls of Paris (Pam Jenoff), Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (Casey Cep), and On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel (Ocean Vuong).

Sometimes it seems that the faster I read, the further behind I get - and when I combine that with a period in which I spot new books that I want to read everywhere I look, this is what happens.  Oh, well.  As far as problems go, this one is kind of fun.