What I'm Reading This Week (August 7, 2023)

 Last week was another good reading week for me during which I managed to read and review four of the six books I came into the week reading. I also made good progress on Richard Russo's Somebody's Fool and Shauna Robinson's The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks. And, happily enough, I'm really enjoying both of those - despite how really different from each other they are.

So I'll start with those two and then add the other books I've started or am about to start:

Richard Russo is the absolute master of the slowly building climax. Just about the time the reader begins to wonder where it is all headed, all of the seemingly unimportant, individual dramas in a Russo novel start to combine in ways that were hard to anticipate. I'm 300 pages into Somebody's Fool, and the intricacies of this one are finally growing clearer to me; now I'm finding it difficult to put the book down. I realized this morning that even though I've read about half of Russo's back catalogue, there's a whole lot of his work yet to enjoy and look forward to.

I keep saying (mostly to myself) that books like this one are not really the kind of thing I enjoy reading - but once again a Rom-Com of a novel is proving to be a whole lot of fun. I have about 75 pages to go, and The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks is right on the verge of reaching its long anticipated climax. It's all very far fetched, especially in the current business climate, but the characters are pretty much all enjoyable, even the villain of the piece, so it verifies that any book with "bookshop" in the title deserves at least a second look.

Actor Sam Heughan is, of course, best known for his leading role in the long-running Outlander series. About the only other thing I knew about the man when I began Waypoints is his extreme love of, and pride in, his Scottish heritage. I'm about 40 pages in, and have learned that Waypoints is as much a biography as it is a memoir about the author's 96-mile solo trek across the Scottish Highlands in the dead of winter. I've also learned that Heughan's prose is not all that compelling, but it's definitely enough to keep me turning the pages.

Chenneville (the last name of this historical novel's main character) is scheduled for a mid-September publication. I'm a fan of the novels of Paulette Jiles, so I was really pleased to get my hands on an advance reading copy of this one. I'm about 40% done now, and this story of a wounded Union soldier who returns to his family home near St. Louis several months after the war only to learn the tragedies his family suffered during the war is a compelling one. Set on personal revenge, Chenneville is tracking down the man responsible for what happened - from Missouri to Texas.

Fans of the kind of "pulp fiction" written primarily in the forties and fifties are likely familiar with the name Cornell Woolrich, one of the best, and most underrated, writer of that style of noir fiction. Black Is the Night is a collection of 30 new short stories supposedly written in Woolrich's style as a tribute to him. I've read the first four stories in the compilation, and I'm a bit concerned because usually a short story collection opens with at least one or two of its better pieces. If that's the case here, I might not be finishing this one...kind of underwhelmed at this point.

I've enjoyed Deborah Crombie's Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James books for a number of years now, but I've probably only read about half of the books in the series. Since I'm taking forever to catch-up on the series, I thought it might be a good time to read the latest of them, A Killing of Innocents. I still find it hard sometimes to remember that Crombie is a Texan and not a Brit because of how well she captures that part of the world in her novels. From the few pages I've read so far, this one promises to be another worthy addition to the series.

It always happens, and this week will likely be no exception; I'm probably going to pick up a couple of books not mentioned here, and there's always the chance that one or two of these will end up on my "abandoned books" list. But that's the fun of keeping a long TBR list, isn't it?

I want to briefly mention that I "discovered" a new genre author this morning at my local library. The library search-and-hold app has been acting up a bit these last two days, so I spent more time studying the shelves than I usually do. A little book titled Holmes Entangled caught my attention - and the description inside did the trick. In this one Holmes is a "real" person in his seventies who has retired from solving crimes and mysteries. But then he's approached by the Arthur Conan Doyle (author of all the Sherlock Holmes novels) to identify the person threatening Doyle's life. That premise is just hard to resist.

Right next to the Holmes novel sat one by the same author called Woman with a Blue Pencil about a Japanese American "academic" who can't get seem any help from the WWII era Los Angeles cops to solve his wife's murder. He's getting nowhere on his own - not realizing that he is an author's "discarded fictional creation," not a real person. 

The author responsible for both these novels is Gordon McAlpine, and I know absolutely nothing about him or his work. Any fans/readers of his out there?