What I'm Reading This Week (December 18)

 I didn't end up reading exactly the selections I thought I would be reading this time last week, but I ended up finishing three of them: Not Dead Enough (reviewed), The Raging Storm (reviewed), and Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein (review to follow on Wednesday). I had expected to have Lessons in Chemistry on hand days ago, but it arrived late at the library and I won't be picking it up until tomorrow. Oh...I also abandoned The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis after roughly fifty pages of nonsense and silliness that never even came close to appealing to my reading taste. I suppose this shows that I take my science fiction too seriously to enjoy this kind of comedic farce.

Coming into the week, I have four books going: The Blues Brothers (which has been tabled for two weeks now), The House of Doors (which is turning out to be much better than I expected it would be), Tom Lake (one of the most refreshing and beautifully written novels I've read this whole year), and The Night of the Storm (see below).

I'm only 20 pages into Nishita Parekh's The Night of the Storm but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. The novel is set in a Houston suburb on the night that Hurricane Harvey blows into town. A young woman and her son are at her sister's fancy home to shelter from the storm with a small group of people, mostly family. All very normal for Houstonians right up until someone dies - is it murder or an accident? Is there actually a murderer trapped in the house with them? Should be fun, and I'm curious to see how realistic it all reads as regards the storm and what it's really like to sit tight as one goes by. (Believe me, I'll be able to judge for myself.)

Definitely coming up this week because they have already been renewed the two times I'm allowed to renew a book are these:

This one is described by its publisher as "a riveting page-turner about a Black classical musician's desperate quest to recover his lost violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world." The violin is being held for ransom, with "the descendant's of the man who once enslaved Ray's great-great-grandfather asserting the instrument is rightfully theirs." I've flipped through the book a little, and I like the author's style. At this point, I'm just hoping that it's not a super-woke plot that ends up boring me with its required predictability.

I put The House of Doors aside for the last few days, but I'm looking forward to getting back to it. It's turned out to be a really unusual plot that combines literary biography with the murder trial of a British woman in Malaysia who killed the British man who tried to rape her. The biography/historical fiction portion of the plot involves Dr. Sun Yat Sen and the British colonial system as regards that part of the world. This was also a Booker Prize nominee. 

And these are getting ever-closer to the top of the stack:

Of course, there's no way any of us can anticipate much of anything regarding our schedules for the next two weeks, so you might see some of these on the TBR-this-week list again next week.

 Happy Reading, guys.