What I'm Reading This Week (August 28)

 Despite a busy week that cut deeply into my reading hours, I still somehow managed to read a decent number of pages. That allowed me to complete four of the eight books I came into the week reading (The Revivalists, Satan Is Real, Flags on the Bayou, and The Constant Soldier), and I decided to abandon one other (American Ramble).That means that three (The Librarianist, Cleveland Noir, and Dickens and Prince) will be carried into the new week - and that several newbies will be added:

I've expressed my love of Mary Lawson's novels before, and at least through the first 30 pages I'm happy to see that A Town Called Solace is every bit as good as I'd hoped it would be. It's a complicated story of a still-missing 16-year-old girl who ran away from home. The story unfolds from three different viewpoints: the missing girl's little sister, the old woman who lives next door, and the old woman's thirty-something son who has recently come to town.

Mick Herron is a relatively new favorite of mine, but I've already read almost everything he's had published in the U.S. I am, of course, a big fan of his Slough House series, but Herron's standalones make for exciting reading also. The Secret Hours, set for a September 12 publication date, is one of those standalones. It's all about an investigation of MI5 that reveals a classified 1994 Berlin operation that went horrifically bad and has been covered up for the last thirty years.

I enjoyed reading Somebody's Fool so much a few days ago, that I decided to go back and re-read this first book in Richard Russo's North Bath trilogy. I first read the novel back in the mid-nineties sometime, so believe me when I tell you that other than already being familiar with the recurring characters, it's like reading the novel for the first time. At 560 pages, it's another long one, but reading it so close to finishing the novel that ends the series makes Nobody's Fool read more like a fun prequel than the standalone it must have felt like when I first read it in the nineties.

I have read and enjoyed a couple of Brian Kilmeade's histories in the past, and I'm hoping that I enjoy Teddy and Booker T as much as I enjoyed those. This one is about how much of the country reacted in 1901 when Teddy Roosevelt made the famous Booker T. Washington  part of his inner circle of counselors.  Apparently, both Roosevelt and Washington were surprised by the wave of racist violence that followed Teddy's decision. The book will be published on November 7, 2023.

Those will start me off with seven active books, but I'm already fairly close to finishing two of them, so it's not as ambitious a week as it may appear to be at first glance. I spent most of yesterday at two different urgent care centers with my grandson who suffered a deltoid muscle tear at work early Sunday morning, so I didn't get a lot done reading-wise. I suspect that this new week will happen at a lot slower pace, though - at least I hope so - because it almost has to.