What I'm Reading This Week (December 25)

 

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you are all enjoying a blessed day with friends and family and that all your wishes come true this Christmas. 

It is strange to be beginning a new reading week on Christmas Day, so this look ahead will have to be a little shorter than usual. Last week I finished and reviewed Tom Lake, finished The House of Doors (review scheduled for tomorrow), and worked in The Bookstore Sisters, a standalone short story that Alice Hoffman wrote especially for the Amazon bookstore. Both the novels ended up on my "best of the year" list, so it was a satisfying week of reading despite being utterly underwhelmed by the Alice Hoffman short story, a story I've decided it's best for me not to review. It's a case of "if you can't say something nice, etc."

I'll be beginning the week with four books in progress. Nishita Parekh's The Night of the Storm is a holdover from last week, and I've added Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, The Last Talk with Lola Faye by Thomas H. Cook, and Family Family by Laurie Frankel. 

I'm about a third of the way through The Last Talk with Lola Faye, and so far it's my favorite of the current lot. After the book's narrator is blindsided into going for drinks with a woman from his past, someone he still blames for the death of his father, he takes for granted that she is still the uneducated redneck he remembers from growing up in rural Alabama. I'm starting to suspect that Lola Faye is there for a specific reason - and that she's much smarter than our Harvard educated narrator. I'm getting Hitchcockian vibes here.

I have heard the basic premise of Lessons in Chemistry and how popular the novel is, even to being made into a Netflix series. Admittedly, I'm still relatively near the beginning of the story, but already I'm a little surprised by the oddball characters and its comic tone. It strikes me as being some kind of feminist comedy, if that makes sense. The novel is set in 1952, a time during which women didn't have a lot of choices when it came to jobs or how they would be treated in the workplace. Elizabeth Zott, the chemist/cook hero of the novel is having none of it.

I've given up on Brendan Slocumb's The Violin Conspiracy because I've grown kind of weary of being preached at all the time about my racism and how bad things still are out there. Slocumb is a good enough storyteller, but this way too common theme is really starting to bore me now.

So if I finish one or two this week, the next reads up are going to be selected from these candidates:

 I'm considering a new approach to my reading choices for 2024 and beyond that I'm hoping will make the chosen books feel fresher and more exciting to me than they sometimes have this year. I'll mention more about that next week because at this point I'm still trying to finalize the plan. Have a great reading week, folks...and a Merry Christmas to All!