The Book Chase June 2021 Reading Plan

Looking back at my May 2020 reading plan, I see that I read five of the eight books I listed. I also see that I read seven other books that were not even much on my radar going into May, making me wonder if all this planning is anything more than just a jumping-off point for the upcoming month. Of the initial eight, I read: Lonesome Dove, Earthlings, The Real Cool Killers, Not Dark Yet, and Hombre. Of the other three books on that list, I'm still reading Philip Roth: The Biography, America, and (sort of reading) Under the Wave at Waimea. I plan to read America this month, but it is unlikely that I'll finish the Roth bio in June or that I'll finish Under the Wave at Waimea at all unless that one gets a whole lot better very quickly. I'm just not into the whole surfing lifestyle, and the first 60 pages have been a struggle for me. I only decided to try this one in the first place because I'm a big admirer of Paul Theroux's writing - and it's just not working yet.

These are the others I already know that I want to read in June:

I'm well into Linda Hogan's 1990 Mean Spirit already and this will probably be the first book I finish this month. Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw writer and university professor who may be primarily known as a poet. Mean Spirit is her fictionalized version of what happened to a group of Native Americans after oil was discovered under land they owned, and lived on, in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. Author David Grann told the same story in a 2017  nonfiction book titled Killers of the Flower Moon that many of you will remember. If I had not read the nonfiction version first, I would have found it difficult to believe that the things described in Mean Spirit could have happened in the 1920s.

Like Linda Hogan, up above, Sherman Alexi is also a Native American writer. The Indian Killer title of this one can be read two ways: either someone is killing Indians or there is an Indian killer out there...and in this case, it's the latter. "A serial murderer is terrorizing Seattle, hunting and scalping white men. And the crimes of the so-called Indian Killer have triggered a wave of violence and racial hatred." Alexi, too, is known as an exceptional poet, so this one is something entirely different for him. It was published in 1998.

Havana Blue is book one of Cuban author Leonardo Padura's "Four Seasons" or "Havana Quartet" (it is referred to both ways). The other three books are titled Havana Gold, Havana Red, and Havana Black. The short series has done especially well in Spain, France, Italy, and Germany and features Inspector Mario Conde. The books do not appear to have been published in the order I listed them above, so I'm assuming that the four crime novels work equally well as standalones. Havana Blue was the third of Padura's books to be made available in English.

 I am not sure how I heard about Hazel Gaynor's When We Were Young & Brave, but I'm willing to bet that it was featured on one of the book blogs I regularly read. The cover, alone, is enough to stop me in my tracks, though, and I would have to pick this one up wherever I ran across it. From the book description: "But everything changes in an instant when Japan declares war against the United States and Britain following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and soldiers march into Nancy's school, placing it under the control of Japanese forces." I was hooked after reading that.

The Best Man to Die, published in 1969, was Ruth Rendell's fourth Inspector Wexford novel. I'm reading a paperback copy of the novel that has this cover on it, and I'm still trying to figure out the significance of the image - if there is one. The short blurb on the back says: "Who could have suspected that the exciting stag party for the groom would be a prelude to the murder of his close friend Charlie Hatton? But it was - and Charlie's death sentence was only the first in a string of puzzling murders involving small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women." 

Becoming Inspector Chen is Qiu Xialong's latest Inspector Chen novel. The series is new to me, but I know that it's a series that some of you have been enjoying for a while now. It sounds, in this one, like the inspector has reached a point in his career where his entire world might be falling apart. The book jacket description ends this way: "Has fighting for the Chinese people and the morals he believes in put him in conflict with the Party? Why is he being kept away from the new case? As well as his career, is his life now also at risk?"

The Essence of Nathan Biddle by J. William Lewis is a book being published sometime this month. I decided to give it a try, despite knowing nothing about the book or the author, when I saw it described as a "Southern Gothic-esque coming-of-age tale that unfolds on the Alabama coast in the 1950s." That sounds like a great combination to me. I just looked at the first page, and found this opening sentence: "On the first anniversary of Nathan's death, we went to the sea." Looks like a lot of flashback ahead.

I've been holding off reading James Lee Burke's Another Kind of Eden because it will not be published until August, but my will power is faltering now, and I'll probably read this one before the end of the month. The novel seems to be a rather dark look at the American West of the 1960s (most of Burke's books are dark, so that's no surprise) and "the menace and chaos that lay simmering just beneath the surface." This is a continuation of Burke's multi-book, and multi-thread, Holland family saga. I've read everything this man has ever written and he very seldom disappoints me.

So those are the nine target-books, but I also plan to make big dents in the Philip Roth biography (now that I finally have a copy with all of its pages) and the Paul Theroux novel I mentioned earlier. And who knows what will pop up out of nowhere and demand to be read in June - especially as I finish up the Great Courses lessons on Mysteries and Thrillers (only 6 of the 36 segments to go now). My TBR list has grown by leaps and bounds since I began watching those lessons.