The Book Chase December 2021 Reading Plan

Even though it's almost time for most of us to start thinking about next year's reading plan and goals, we do have one more month to work on some of the 2021 goals we set a year ago. If you're like me - and it's not necessarily a bad thing - your actual reading and your planned reading during the last eleven months don't match up all that well. For me, it's been a year of discovering new authors and going off on reading tangents I never even imagined while setting goals in December 2020. I love how that happened.

Coming in to this final month, I'm already reading four books, and the likelihood is that I will be lucky to finish even one of them before December 1:

This is the third book in Shaw's Alex Cupidi series. I picked it up a couple of days ago, and it ended up temporarily pushing the other three books out of rotation. From the back cover of the UK edition: "Two teenage boys speed off on a moped with a stolen mobile, ready to celebrate their luck at last. Until their victim turns up looking for what's his - and is ready to kill for it." And on the other side of Kent, a severed arm ends up as part of an art installation. Cupidi catches both cases. 

I'm only a couple of chapters into S. Kirk Walsh's The Elephant of Belfast but I'm already taken with the main characters in this story about a young woman who bonds with a young zoo elephant in 1941 in the aftermath of the Easter Tuesday Luftwaffe attack on the city. From the book flap: "...renders the changing relationship between Hettie and Violet (the elephant), and their growing dependence on each other for survival and solace." I've heard nothing but good things about this one.

The Texas Job will be published in early February 2022, and I'm still not sure if I should call it a standalone or part of Wortham's Red River Series. The main character in this Depression era novel is Texas Ranger Tom Bell who is featured prominently in the third novel of that series, The Right Side of Wrong, as an old man in a 1965 setting. The Texas Job is set in 1931 when Bell is still very much in his prime and chasing a murderer up into the "Red River" setting. Prequel, maybe?

Louise Erdrich is a longtime favorite author of mine, so there was no chance that I would let this one slip past me. What I didn't intend to do was read it as an audiobook but that turned out to be the quickest way I could get hold of a library copy. The unexpected bonus of the audiobook version is that Louise Erdrich narrates it herself - and does a completely excellent job of this haunted bookstore story. Wow.

In addition to these four in-progress books, I plan to choose a few from my small stack of "comfort reads," books I've set aside for a while because I sort of hate not having them "in the bank" for later...probably these:

Other than Penny's latest Gamache novel, How the Light Gets In is the only one of the seventeen Gamache books I haven't read. I'm to the point where I'll soon have to be waiting a whole year between my Gamache fixes, but I think I've held onto this 2013 novel long enough now. This is the one in which Gamache seems to be near rock bottom as far as his career goes. He and everyone around him are struggling but Three Pines, he hopes, can save all of them. 

The Dark Hours is both the fourth book in the Renée Ballard series and the twenty-fourth book in the Harry Bosch series. Now that Harry is more or less working on his own, teaming him up with a much younger LAPD detective like Ballard offers a brilliant solution to allowing Bosch to keep his head in the game. The two have very little in common and were a little wary of each other at the beginning, but they have now meshed into one of the most effective crime-fighting teams in Los Angeles. Connelly is just a brilliant writer. Period.

Fleshmarket Alley is the fifteenth of twenty-three Inspector Rebus novels. I think this is one of the more underrated crime series out there today even though it's one of my very favorites. I've read the earlier books and the later ones in the series (this will be my 14th) but have a gap in the middle. This 2004 book will be bring me back to that period in Rebus's career. Rebus, like so many of the detectives I've been reading for twenty or more years, is officially retired now but still somehow involved. That's probably why I love them so much; we have aged together. This is pre-retirement John Rebus.

Depending on time  and mood, I may finally get to Ann Cleeves's second Vera Stanhope novel, Telling Lies, also. I meant to read it this month but ran out of time. And if I really feel ambitious, I might even return to Tana French's second Dublin Murder Squad novel, The Likeness. I've already given that one two tries and have bogged down both times, first from the utter unbelievability of the plot,  and second from the inertia of a plot in which everything seems to be happening in slow motion. I see that I stopped on page 140 of the 466-page book on my second try. Still a long way to go, and I'm beginning to wonder if The Likeness is going to end my Tana French phase. 

Now, it's on to December.