The Book Chase April 2021 Reading Plan

I spent the second half of March in a mad rush to finish up several library books that were due back pretty much at the same time. As it turned out, I only had to turn one book back in without reading it, so it all ended up better than I expected it would. But that means I'm coming into my April reading a lot less organized than I usually am at the beginning of a new month, so I'll just highlight some of the most likely books from my TBR stack to make it to the top of the stack this time around:

Blood Grove is Walter Mosley's fifteenth Easy Rawlins novel. Mosley started the series featuring this black detective in 1990, but this is his first addition  to the series since 2016. This one is set in 1969 Los Angeles and finds Easy at a pretty comfortable stage in his life. His agency is doing well, he lives in what most would call an actual LA mansion in the hills with his adopted 13-year-old daughter, and he has friends all over the city. Mosley is one of the best crime writers out there - and this one, as usual, is very much LA noir.

Her Here was, I think, published on March 9, so I really need to get this one done and reviewed in the first half of April if I can. Here's the blurb: "Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella's story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation."

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, is not a book I would have ever picked up if I had not read a glowing review of the book on one of the blogs I follow. I mean...look at the cover. You would think it's aimed at teenaged Japanese girls, wouldn't you? Turns out, though, that its about a 36-year-old autistic woman who has found her niche in the convenience store she manages so well. But now her family is pressuring her to marry and start a family, and that's not easy for someone like her.

The Law of Innocence was published last November, and I picked up my copy in January, but it still sits in my stack. And that kinds of surprises me because Michael Connelly has, over the years, become one of my regular go-to authors. If I can't have a new Harry Bosch novel in a given year, then I often can have a Lincoln Lawyer novel in which Harry shows up to help his half-brother through another case. In this one, that brother, lawyer Mickey Haller is the one being charged with murder. No worries...here comes Harry Bosch to the rescue.

I'm really excited about Michael Punke's Ridgeline. This one, to be published on June 1, is Punke's first novel since his hugely successful The Revenant, and it is a fictional look at a an Wyoming frontier fort that I visited a couple of years ago. The grounds of the old fort are still much as they were back in the day (1866) that Chief Crazy Horse suckered a contingent of soldiers out of the fort into an ambush and then put the rest of the fort under siege. I hope I'm not expecting too much from the novel, but knowing Punke from The Revenant, I doubt that I am.

How could I possibly resist a book like Heather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read (coming on July 6) Just look at the blurb: "...about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails...illustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it." Sounds great, right?

I postponed The Council of Animals last month (and may do it again in April) because it's not to be published until July 20, but it's getting harder and harder to resist. It's an Animal-Farm-like book about...well, this: "Now, continued the cat, "there is nothing more difficult than changing an animal's mind. But I will say, in case I can change yours: humans are more useful to us outside our bellies than in." After some sort of calamity that wipes out almost everyone, it seems that human survivors are not in much of a position to argue their own case.

These are the seven most likely to be read in April, but they are just the beginning of a plan. I have James Lee Burke's new one, Another Kind of Eden, on hand but it isn't to be published until mid-August, so this is probably not its month to be read. But, I really want to read another classic western this month and another book by Tana French whether that turns out to be one of her Murder Squad books or her other standalone, The Witch Elm. And, I need to get back to my project of catching up on the MANY crime/detective series I'm reading, so that means maybe something from Louise Penny, Craig Johnson, Ian Rankin, Robert Dugoni, Deborah Crombie, etc. So much choice...so much to look forward to.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I continue to read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove at a deliberately-slow pace so that I can enjoy it as much as I did the first two times through. Unless I get carried away, as has happened on a few days, I am limiting myself to a chapter or two per day.