Book Chase: The June 2020 Reading Plan

I strayed farther from my May reading list than I've have on any of the earlier ones. I could feel myself starting to slip into another of those reading funks where my concentration was getting worse and worse, and I knew I had to do something quickly or it was going to turn into a serious slump. I found myself putting books aside if they didn't grab me in their first 20-25 pages. Even that didn't completely do it for me, though, and I'm going to end up reading fewer pages this month than I have in a long time. But it did keep me reading and exploring the digital world for new books to try. 

As it turns out, I will have read nine books during the month of May but only three of them will have come from the reading list. I will probably have a fourth one from the list, Robert Dugoni's The Last Agent, at least fifty percent done by June 1, but the other six were either temporarily set aside or didn't even get opened. Another part of the problem this month is that I kept get distracted by shiny new books suddenly being made available to me from my library hold list - despite the fact that just a few days earlier the library was still estimating at least a six-week wait on all of them. Go figure.

So, the June list. I'm not going to slide all six of the remaining books from May onto the list, as I would normally do, in hopes that adding some different ones might help to get me back to turning pages at a more normal clip.

1. This is one of the three I'm holding over from the last list. I didn't even crack it open in May, sort of fearing that my somber mood would somehow taint the experience of reading the latest book from one of my favorite writers of series detective fiction. As I look back to what I said about The Night Fire on last month's list, I'm also  wondering if maybe I'm subconsciously reluctant to read this new one - because then I've got to start that long wait until the next one arrives.  There's just something nice about having an unread book around that I just know I'm going to enjoy on several levels. 

2. The Dead Don't Sleep is about a soldier who managed to survive the Vietnam war in one piece despite all he saw and did there. He even managed to carve out a nice peaceful, and rather normal, life for himself when he got back home. But then, in a chance meeting at a firing range, one of the ghosts from his past, a fellow veteran of that war comes back to haunt him. Now, all bets are off. If nothing else, this one promises to be very different from what I've been reading lately. 

3. The Last Agent by Robert Dugoni is a Charles Jenkins book that sounds as if it picks up right where The Eighth Sister leaves off. Charles Jenkins is a six-foot-five-inch black man so he's not the ideal secret agent to be nosing around in Russia, but that's a large part of the fun. Not being able to blend into a crowd is most certainly not a good thing for a spy. I've only read a couple of Dugoni novels, but I've been impressed by both of them, and I really happy that he has a substantial backlist for me to explore. I will be about halfway through this one coming into June.

4. The Book of Lost Friends is one I got stalled on and set aside after only 20 pages in May, but I'm not willing to give up on it just yet because I've heard too many good things about it from a lot of trusted sources - including several blogging friends. It was one of those surprises I got early from my library, and I only have another eight days to read it before it automatically goes back to the library. I don't know why I found it difficult to get into this one because it is partially set during the Civil War, and that is normally smack dab in the middle of my reading wheelhouse.

5. A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea is an ARC that I received from LibraryThing a few days ago. It appealed to me because of its unusual plot and because it is a translation from the original French (one of my 2020 goals that I'm doing particularly poorly in so far is reading more translated fiction). It is set in 1954 and is about a group of men trying to find a huge fossil they've heard rumors about buried deep in an Alpine glazier. 

6. Run with the Wind by Jim Cole is another book I've received for review purposes. It's Cole's second book in what is a planned trilogy. I read Never Cry Again, the first book in the trilogy, a few months ago and enjoyed it so much that I'm looking forward to this new one set in Galveston. Jim Cole is into his eighties now, and I love the idea that he's carving out a whole new world for himself by turning to writing at this stage of his life. 

7. Saul Bellow wrote The Dangling Man in 1944 but his reputation was not really made until 1953's The Adventures of Augie March, a novel I've long admired. Another of my 2020 goals is to read some "classic" literature from the first half of the 20th century that I've missed, so this one fits right in to that goal. Too, it's part of my Library of America collection - and I really need to delve deeper into those 106 volumes than I have to this point. I fight being distracted by the shiny new ones out there, but I seldom am able to do it successfully for very long.

8. If You Tell by Greg Olson is a true crime story about three sisters who somehow managed to survive life with their psychotic mother. Others, apparently, were not so fortunate. I'm in the mood for more nonfiction than I've been reading, and I think this one should be pretty good. Actually, it serves another purpose, too. I have something like 350 ebooks on my reader, of which I've only read about 75, and I need to start reading them - or quit buying them (and I know that won't happen).

9. Ian Rankin's Strip Jack falls squarely into another 2020 goal of mine: reading the earliest books from my favorite detective series. This is the fourth book in the series and it was first published in 1992. I own it in the paperback version of the hardcover I've used to illustrate this selection. I haven't read any of the three Rebus novels in this collection, so this will let me catch up on books four, five, and six. For those of you not familiar with Rankin, he's a Scottish author and his Rebus stories are set in Edinburgh. 

10. The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard is a book I've owned for about fifteen years but have still read only one of the stories from. I can't tell you how many times I've picked up the book intending to read a few of these old magazine stories - and how many times that didn't happen. So I'm formally challenging myself to read some of the stories in June - maybe even all of them - because Elmore Leonard is one of my favorite crime fiction writers and I expect that his westerns will also be outstanding.

Now, realistically, I don't expect to read all ten of the books on this list. What I do expect is that I will receive at least one or two early surprises again from my library, and that my wandering eye will lead me to half a dozen other books before the month is over. But that's a big part of the fun of being an avid reader...right?