What I'm Reading This Week (November 27, 2023)

I didn't get in many pages yesterday because the day was pretty much taken up watching the Texans lose a 24-21 heartbreaker to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Traffic in and around the stadium was truly horrendous because of the perpetual road construction going on in that part of town, and getting back to the north part of the county was a real nightmare. 

But looking back at the week, I see that I finished three books (The Longmire Defense, If I Survive You, and The Fourth Rule) and abandoned two others (the Booker nominated The Ascension and Tim O'brien's America Fantastica). I abandoned The Ascension out of sheer boredom with it, and abandoned America Fantastica because I found it to be much to farcical to suit my reading taste. 

So I'll be beginning the week with five books, several of which I've mentioned before: The Blues Brothers, Pearl, The Other Eden, The Raging Storm, and Saved. I seem to have stalled on The Blues Brothers at about the forty percent mark, but I'm looking forward to getting much deeper into the two Booker nominated novels (Pearl and The Other Eden). At the moment, the book I'm most enjoying is the eye-opening memoir Safe by Benjamin Hall, but I'm also finding Ann Cleeves's The Raging Storm to be the best book in her now three-book Detective Matthew Venn series. For the first time, I'm actually looking forward to spending more time with Venn and his cohorts. 

My library queue also decided to cough up four new books that I need to pick up today, but I'm hoping that most of these will be eligible for six-week checkout so that I am not faced with some difficult choices again after waiting so long to get my crack at some of them. I can already tell it's going to be an interesting week with these new ones thrown into the mix:

I have thoroughly enjoyed every Fredrik Backman novel I've read, so I wonder how I missed this 2017 novella for so long. This one tells the story of three generations of men who love each other very much. Never has that been so apparent as when the grandfather in the story began to suffer from dementia. Now the old man needs the help of his son and grandson...but he still has much to offer them in return for their love and for helping him adjust to his new reality.

This is the fourth installment of the Thursday Murder Club Mystery series by Richard Osman. Despite some speculation that this was going to be the final book in the series, Osman has assured readers that it is not. The plot focuses on a "dangerous" package that turns up missing after a friend of the club members is murdered. By this point, fans of the series are pretty familiar with all the main characters, so I'm pretty confident that I'm going to enjoy The Last Devil to Die a lot.

Kathy, over at Reading Matters, gave The Last Talk with Lola Faye such a glowing and intriguing review last week that I had to run right out and find it. The novel sounds like one of those intellectually challenging literary mysteries that don't come around nearly often enough. I didn't expect it to show up so quickly at my library, but it looks as if I'll be bringing it home this afternoon. It is centered around a face-to-face meeting, a very unexpected one at that, between a writer and the woman he holds responsible for his father's death years earlier. 

Have you ever read a book description that baffles you? That's what this one did to me: "A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization taught her." I still don't get it, but I trust Lauren Groff enough to take a look at everything she publishes, so here goes... 

This should be a calmer week than the one before, so I'm looking forward to some good reading and checking in on all the blogs I've neglected these last few days. Happy reading to all.