What I'm Reading This Week (December 11)

 

My library has come up with a new scheme for checking out books that I'm still trying to adapt to. I understand why the change was made, and I think it's a great idea because it keeps books in circulation and should cut down on hold-times. But it's made it much more difficult  for me to predict what I'm going to be reading from one week to the next.  

The old system allowed for an immediate six-week checkout period for any book that was not on another patron's hold list. Books on hold by others were limited to two-weeks. The new scheme, however, limits all initial checkouts to two weeks...then when the books get within five days of their due date without having been returned, the library software automatically renews them for another fourteen days if no one else is actively requesting a copy. The same thing can happen again two weeks later, so the total checkout period can still add up to six weeks.

But when you have twelve to fifteen books checked out at all times, the near constant rotating of due dates makes it virtually impossible to predict exactly which book is going to become due first. Consequently, I'm tabling a bunch of half-read books because others suddenly turned out to have shorter fuses attached to them than the ones I've been reading.

All whining aside (finally), I did finish three this week: This Other Eden by Paul Harding, The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman, and And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman. As a consequence of the library changes I mentioned, I'm carrying these partially read books into the new week: The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves, The Blues Brothers by Daniel de Visé, and Not Dead Enough by Phillip Thompson. 

I've also read the first few chapters of Tan Twan Eng's Booker Prize nominee The House of Doors, and I've already been pleasantly surprised by Eng's prose style and plot construction. Somerset Maugham is in 1921 Malaysia, along with his thinly disguised secretary/gay lover, researching his next novel when he discovers that his host's wife may have relatively recently had an affair with Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat Sen. He starts digging for details, but the story he hears turns out to be not at all the one he expected.

This afternoon I'm picking up two books for which I've been waiting several months (Tom Lake and Lessons in Chemistry), and both of them immediately jump to the top of my priority list because I know that the checkout period for neither is likely to be extended beyond two weeks.  

Others I'm dying to get to include:

It's all a bit unpredictable, really, but with all of this choice it is guaranteed to be another pretty good reading week. I wish you all the same.