What I'm Reading This Week (January 8, 2024)

 I've eased into my reading plan for 2024 by finishing up two review copies I didn't finish reading last week (Family Family and The Night of the Storm) along with another review copy (My Favorite Scar) that I will be thinking about for a long time. I can't wait to tell you all about that last one later this week.

In the meantime, I've started several new books while keeping in mind some of my set reading goals for the year. The result is that I'm rotating between eight books at the moment as the mood strikes me that it's time to switch books as one or another of them start to feel a little stale or tedious. Two of the "new books" (The Diabolical and The Blues Brothers) are actually review copy carry-ins from last year that are to be published in February and March, respectively. And as usual, my additions to what I'm reading don't exactly match last week's expected adds:

I'm a fan of David Putnam's Bruno Johnson series but have really been bad about reading them out of order, and that's not the best way to read this particular series. Anyway, The Diabolical is the latest, and finds Bruno, his wife Marie, and the fourteen children in their care hiding out in Costa Rica because there are criminal warrants out on both Bruno and Marie in the U.S. The kids, if you're wondering, with the exception of one of them, are rescues from terrible Los Angeles home environments. No paperwork required...

As you can see from the cover, All the Little Bird-Hearts is part of the 2023 Booker Prize longlist. It is one of the four remaining books I want to read from last year's list, and it is fascinating for a couple of reasons: it's main character and narrator is an autistic woman trying to cope with the new friend she has suddenly acquired from next door; and the author Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow is herself autistic. I'm only fifty pages in, but I already find myself enjoying the prose and the plot so much that I'm finding it hard to put this one down.

I've not read a lot of John Grisham recently, I suppose because I started finding his books to be a little repetitive in nature, but since The Boys from Biloxi is one of the books loaned to me by my brother last summer, I decided to see why he liked it so much. Grisham strikes me as kind of an old-school storyteller of multi-generational crime sagas - a style that builds to the real action very slowly over many pages (454 in this case) and that's what's happening here. So far, so good, and it reminds me that this style can be a comfort read.

I found a ratty copy of Francine Prose's 2018 What to Read and Why at a used-book bookstore a couple of years ago and until recently have done little more than thumb through it. But having read the novel about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein a few days ago, I was interested in learning more and it's all covered in chapter 2, so I started reading more carefully. And I still am. The book selections are not too surprising, but Prose has a lot to say about them and she says it all very concisely and clearly. This will take a while.

It's shameful to admit that I had never heard the name Walter Tevis before stumbling upon his wonderful The Queen's Gambit last year, but it's true. I was so fascinated by that novel and the Netflix series it resulted in that Tevis became someone I wanted to know more about. Turns out he was even bigger in his day than I imagined, and I've finally started reading The Hustler, a novel about pool hustlers that became a major motion picture during Hollywood's golden years.

I'm about to finish up Thomas H. Cook's Red Leaves and I'm chipping away at Writing to Learn, so I may have time to begin one or two from this bunch later in the week:

As I said up above, I'm easing in to the new plan, especially by searching for back catalogue books that I either entirely missed back in the day or just never got around to reading. Have a great reading week, guys, and don't forget to tell us all about it!