What I'm Reading This Week (September 18)

 I'm still having trouble concentrating...seems as if my mind is always thinking more about the next thing I need to do than the actual thing I am doing. Somehow or another, though, I did end up finishing three books last week: Woman with a Blue Pencil, Teddy and Booker T, and Crook Manifesto so it wan't a lost reading week. The Jerry Lee Lewis biography I had barely started came due so I decided to table that one for a while, meaning that the only carry-in from last week will be Rachel Cantor's Half-Life of a Stolen Sister.

In addition, I've already started on these:

In this one, Gordon McAlpine imagines what it would be like if Sherlock Holmes were every bit as real a person as his real-life creator Arthur Conan Doyle. It seems as if someone has barely failed in an assassination attempt against Doyle, and now the author wants to hire Sherlock to both protect his life and figure out exactly who wants him dead. Holmes Entangled is written in the style of the original novels, but my favorite character is turning out to be Sherlock's former landlady (now Dr. Watson's widow).

I'm not at all sure what to think about this one yet. Whalefall is the story of a teenaged diver who decides to look for his father's body in rough seas off the California coast. The boy gets into serious trouble when a giant squid threatens him, but things take an even graver turn when sperm whale shows up in the same area to feed. The diver becomes entangled in the tentacles of the squid at precisely the moment the whale decides to feed on the squid. Down the gullet, along with the squid holding him in place, goes our teen diver. 

I found Jacqueline Winspear's The White Lady while browsing the current edition of Bookmarks magazine. It is rated four stars in the magazine, especially impressive since I don't know that Bookmarks goes higher than four stars in a review. The book is set in 1947 but its main character has been shaped by her WWII experiences as an agent for the British government. She is trying to make up for some of what she had to do during the war. A well written historical thriller.

Wifedom became available quicker than I thought it would, but after seeing it mentioned on a couple of blogs I follow and hearing Anna Funder speak about it on a podcast, I really hope to make a big dent it this week and finish it up next week. It's the story of George Orwell's first wife, the woman he was married to when he produced his classic works. If I understand correctly, his wife may have had a lot to do with those books herself - and Orwell supposedly treated her pretty shabbily. So...

I should mention, too, that I culled Everyone in My Family from the top of my TBR stack because...well...something had to give. I do hope still to be able to read soon the Lucinda Williams memoir Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.