What I'm Reading This Week (September 4)

 I finished three of the seven books I was reading at the beginning of last week (The Librarianist, Dickens and Prince, and Cleveland Noir), and I'm less than 100 pages from completion of both A Town Called Solace and The Secret Hours, so it was a nice week with not a clunker among them. I'm particularly pleased with one of the ones still in progress, Mick Herron's The Secret Hours, because it has really started to click with me now that I finally have its premise and all the characters figured out. I'm going to save the details for a formal review, but that one is exceptionally clever.

So this is how the reading-week is shaping up, beginning with the books already started:

This one has already joined the stack, but is not yet started:

I'm really looking forward to this 2022 novel from Loren D. Estleman. I'm a big fan of the old pulp magazines and the noir paperbacks that ended up replacing those after WWII, so this cover was screaming at me to take it home for a while. It's about a war veteran who comes home to resume his writing career only to find that the market has completely changed on him. His research for what he hopes will be a breakthrough novel leads him to a crowd that doesn't appreciate his snooping. 

And these are the ones most likely to be among those added during the week:

Half-Life of a Stolen Sister is a "reimagining" of the short lives of the Brontë siblings. From the back cover: "Chapter by chapter, the novel brings together diaries, letters, home movies, television and radio interviews, deathbed monologues, and fragments from the sprawling invented worlds of the siblings' childhood..." I'm not at all sure what the reference to home movies and media interviews is all about, but there's only one way to find out. Anything about the Brontës always gets a second look from me, so I'm hopeful.

I Hear You're Rich is a collection of flash fiction from Diane Williams, a writer dubbed "Godmother of Flash Fiction" by The Paris Review. Thirty-three stories in just 111 pages is most definitely a collection of flash fiction, a genre I haven't explored for a few years now. I've enjoyed some really good...and really short...flash fiction in the past, but I don't seem to run across much of it anymore. At three to four pages per story, these stories are actually a bit longer than some of the ones I've previously read and enjoyed. 

This one is about a form of cancel-culture that belongs on the old Twilight Zone TV series, and in fact, I remember an episode very similar in plot to Woman with a Blue Pencil. It seems that an amateur PI suddenly finds himself unrecognizable to friends and sources and "all signs of his existence" start disappearing one by one. As it turns out, our PI friend is a fictional character in a novel, and he's being steadily erased by a book editor who is trying to improve the novel he is/was part of. 

I was excited to learn about this new (scheduled for January 2024 publication) collection of short stories from James Lee Burke. Burke wrote a lot of short stories early in his career, but not all that many since those early years. This collection, from what I can tell, continues to explore the themes Burke uses so well in his novels: flawed people struggling to do the right thing while caught up in situations they cannot always control. Eight stories and one novella are collected here. This is one I'm really looking forward to, but I may decide to wait another month on it...this is money in the bank.

This Jerry Lee Lewis biography caught my attention mainly because it is written by Rick Bragg, a writer I've always enjoyed. I'm a lifetime fan of Jerry Lee's music, too, ever since seeing him drunkenly perform at a bowling alley when his career was obviously not going real well. I love his style and I was fascinated by his utterly reckless determination to live life on his own terms, bar the consequences. Rick Bragg's writing...Jerry Lee Lewis's story. How could this not turn out to be great?

I'll probably only add two or three of these five, but the ones not added are destined for a try next week. I've been reading a couple of complicated books, especially The Secret Hours, that demand a little more concentration than most novels, so I've cut back to five books going at once instead of trying to keep up with eight of them. That seems to be working really well, so I may stay on that approach for a while.

Have a great reading week, y'all. I can't wait to hear all about it.