What I'm Reading This Week (October 30, 2023)

 Last week's plan kept changing on the fly as "short-fuse" books fell into my hands. I did finish two of the books I expected to finish, Jane and the Final Mystery and Old God's Time, but all of a sudden I'm back to alternating my reading time between seven different books (I do, though,  kind of love it when that happens). 

Take It Out in Trade, first published in 1957, is the book that triggered all the changes to my expected week because I'm such a pushover for pulp fiction style book covers. The novel was out of print for over sixty years before Cutting Edge Books released a new edition recently. This is the book's original cover when it was published back in the day by Ace Books as a paperback:

The novel's history intrigued me, as did that original cover, and I couldn't resist adding it along with a few others to those I was already reading:

This is the new cover art for the Cutting Edge Books edition of Take It Out in Trade by Walter Whitney. "Walter Whitney" was the pen name for an author whose real name, at least as I understand it, was never "officially" released by Ace Books or ever used again. Part of what intrigued me about the book is that in 1957 it was declared "Objectionable" on the monthly Roman Catholic Church's Office of Decent Literature list. As a kid, I used to love looking at that list of books and movies so much every month that this brought back vivid memories. (By today's standards, and despite its theme, the novel is surprisingly tame, I do have to say.)

As I mentioned last week, Death Writes is the sixth book in Andrea Carter's Inishowen Mysteries series. Luckily, the novel is working very well as a standalone, and I'm really enjoying its coastal Ireland setting along with all the colorful characters who inhabit the little town in which a former Booker Prize winning novelist suffers a very public death during his appearance at the lone bookstore's annual literary festival. There's also an intriguing side plot involving the main character's parents that I'm just as interested in as the murder.

The Last Ranger is my first experience with a Peter Heller book, but it won't be my last. The man is a great storyteller, but I'm even more impressed by the amount of knowledge about the everyday life in a national park for humans and animals alike that I am so painlessly absorbing within a story about poachers and locals who sometimes resent living in such close proximity to the federal government's direct reach. I'm reading this one via its audiobook version, and that's working so well that I'm sometimes sorry to reach my driving destination.

Ramona Emerson's 2022 debut novel Shutter is even better than I expected it would be. The basic premise of a Native American forensic photographer being guided at crime scenes by the ghosts of murder victims is intriguing enough, but it's Emerson's layer by layer construction of main character Rita Todacheene that really impresses me most. Even within her tribe, Rita's ability to see and converse with ghosts is a scary proposition. The author, in flashbacks to Rita's early childhood shows exactly when it all started and how Rita learned to cope with such a mixed blessing.

The Puzzle Master, from Danielle Trusson, just arrived late yesterday evening so I haven't had the chance to read even a page or two from it yet. I'm looking forward to watching the relationship develop between a puzzle-solving savant and an imprisoned murderer who has refused to speak for decades but has constructed a puzzle that may hold all the answers for what she did. Apparently, only fifty cases of this type of savant syndrome triggered by traumatic brain injury have ever been documented throughout the world.  Who knew this could even happen?

A Spell of Good Things is one of my short-fuse Booker Prize books, so I'll be spending a lot of time with it this week, I'm sure. Ayòbámi Adébáyò's is a Nigerian author and her novel explores the "gapping class divide" that exists in that country and how the classes intermix at the class fringes. Nigeria, unfortunately because it's a country more famous for phone and internet fraudsters than anything else these days, is one whose daily life I know very little about. I'm hoping that A Spell of Good Things gives me a better feel for its people than the stereotypical image now lodged so firmly in my brain.

Actor Tom Hanks's debut novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is quite literally among the heaviest books I own. Hanks has had some short story success in the past, but this novel about the making of a superhero movie based on yet another comic book seems to be an ambitious one. I've only read about twenty pages into the book, but I'm very impressed already with how well Hanks writes. I'm not sure yet just how much I will enjoy the plot, but Hanks is doing a fine job so far of introducing characters and setting the scene. If I need to drop anything from the week's reading list, however, this is likely to be the first one tabled for a revisit.

This is likely to turn into a week of surprises for me because so many books are right on the verge of arriving, and I might end up juggling priorities again. Happy reading to you all...tell me all about it.