What I'm Reading This Week (August 21)

 I read quite a number of pages last week, but in the process, I still ended up acquiring several more books than I completed. I met up with my brother in a neighboring small town for lunch and a quick swap of books, and came home with four new ones that way - but I managed to give him over twenty at the same time, so I created some shelf space via the swap (a really good thing). Now add in three review copies that came in through the mail, along with five library pick-ups, and I'm more stacked up than ever. 

I did finish three of the books I began the week reading and decided to return one other to the library unread because I was just not feeling at all excited about even beginning it. Also, I'm about 70% done with the week's other two selections and enjoying both of them, so all in all, it was a successful week. The in-progress books are Satan Is Real by Charlie Louvin (a Louvin Brothers bio) and the apocalyptic novel The Revivalists by Christopher M. Hood. Both of those should be finished and reviewed here this week. 

Here are the new ones on the horizon:

American Ramble is one of those long-walk books I'm so fond of. In this case, Neil King Jr. recounts the highlights of his hike from his Washington DC home all the way to New York City. King is a recent cancer survivor, and his aim for the rest of his life is to truly relish and get the most out of every day he has left. With that in mind, he is walking backroads with a planned schedule in mind, but is still willing to let serendipity rule the day whenever he crosses the paths of interesting people or places.

Patrick deWitt first came to my attention a while back with his novel The Sisters Brothers, and I've been a fan ever since. The Librarianist is the fictional biography of a now 71-year-old former librarian who lives alone, has no friends to speak of, and is looking for a new purpose in life. The book begins as Bob Comet stumbles upon a lost elderly woman in a convenience store and walks her back to the facility from which she's wandered away. The bulk of the book, though, is a flashback to Bob's life before that fateful day. 

Sometimes it feels like I've been a James Lee Burke fan forever, so I've been looking forward to Flags on the Bayou for a while. It's the story of Civil War Louisiana as seen through the eyes of several alternating characters: a slave woman, an elderly plantation owner, that plantation owner's pacifist nephew, the local sheriff, and the leader of a renegade band of former Confederate regulars who is terrorizing that part of the state, among them. It's a novel that reads quickly but tells an intriguing tale. Not sure yet just how realistic a tale, but...we'll see.

I've lost count of exactly how many of the Akashic Books noir short story collections I've read now, but it must be at least twenty of them. Each of the collections is very dark, in the old style, and most of the stories are written by writers native to, or who have other close ties to, the city in the title. Some of the authors are world famous, of course, but some of the best stories always come from writers I was introduced to for the first time in these collections. I'm anxious to get into this one to see how it compares those I've already read.

I see that William Ryan's The Constant Soldier was initially published in 2016, but I recently acquired an early-read copy of this soon to be published edition of the novel. It's set in Germany during World War II, and its main character is a man who has returned home after having been terribly disfigured in battle. He soon learns of a "rest camp" for SS officers that is nearby, and that a woman whose arrest he feels responsible for is one of the women being forced to work there. 

Nick Hornby is another of those guys I've been a fan of for a long time. Hornby is kind of all over the map, but Dickens and Prince seemed like kind of a stretch even for Hornby before I started reading it. Hornby believes that Charles Dickens and recording star Prince shared a particular kind of genius that made them as awesomely productive as they were - especially while both were still in their twenties. I have to say he's making a strong argument in favor of his case.

So that's where my Monday morning begins. But Monday is going to be a lost reading day because I'm off to the town I grew up in (about 110 miles southeast of here) to have lunch with a few folks I graduated high school with way back in the mid-sixties. I do hope you all have wonderful books lined up for the week, too...can't wait to hear all about them.