What I'm Reading This Week (February 5, 2024)

 

I'm enjoying the books I've been reading (taken as a whole) more than I have in a long time, and I'm hoping that's at least a little bit attributable to the reading plan I began the year with. So far, so good. I finished another three books this week and enjoyed each of them: The King of Late Night, Resurrection Walk, and Ruined by Reading. Reviews of the latter two books will be posted sometime this week if things go as planned. 

I got back into a few others, too, that had fallen by the wayside because of other due dates I wanted to honor (The Blues Brothers, My Side of the River, Writing to Learn, and Larry McMurtry: A Life) and was pleasantly surprised at how seamless picking them up again felt. But I still haven't been able to return to That Affair Next Door or What to Read and Why. Maybe this week.

I did finally begin Thomas H. Cook's The Chatham School Affair and managed to get myself sucked up by Michiko Kakutani's Ex-Libris: 100 Books Read and Reread.

This is the third Thomas H. Cook novel I've read recently, and I've learned that Cook is a master at maintaining a constant feeling of dread in his novels. It seems as if every chapter of The Chatham School Affair includes at least one or two sometimes-not-so-subtle hints or clues about terrible things that have already happened but not yet been disclosed, or terrible things that are going to happen soon. At this point, I still can't figure out who the victims are, exactly what happened to them, who the actual bad guys are, or whether the narrator is one of the good guys or one of the bad guys. And, of course, I can't quit turning pages to find out all of these things.

Because Michiko Kakutani chose to title her book Ex-Libris, I'm assuming that the 100 books she talks about are ones from her personal library - or at least were at one time. It's actually more than 100 books because Kakutani sometimes dedicates a section to several books from the same author; Saul Bellow, Bruce Chatwin, and Joan Didion, for example. I've gone through the first twenty or so sections now, and was inspired enough by Kakutani's thoughts that I went out and bought myself a copy of Albert Camus's The Plague yesterday afternoon. So there's that, even though Kakutani has kept me irritated much of the time because of something I'll get into later.

I'll almost certainly be starting Ken Bruen's Galway Confidential this week because I want to make sure my review is posted before the novel is published later this month. I'm a big fan of Bruen's Jack Taylor series, but it sounds like I missed the book right before Galway Confidential because Jack is coming out of a long coma as this one begins (and if I had read the previous book, I'd know why that is). Can you imagine waking up, as Jack does, with no idea that Covid-19 ever happened? Then Jack finds out that two nuns have been bludgeoned by a hammer-wielding man - and that he is the best hope the nuns have to keep more of them from suffering the same fate.

Among the most likely books to be added this week are:

I'm thrilled to learn that Study for Obedience is ready for me to pick up at my library because it's one of the three remaining 2023 Booker Prize nominees that I've still not gotten my hands on. I have not read any of Alexander McCall Smith's Ladies' Detective Agency books, but I fell in love with the characters last month via the one-season HBO series from a few years ago, and I figured it was time for me to test-drive the actual books now. The Only Good Indians is a novel I found on a list somewhere of very good novels written by Native Americans, although it looks a little weird at first glance. And, finally, Tom Clavin is one of my favorite writers when it comes to Old West nonfiction, so I'm hoping to get to The Last Outlaws soon.

Here's wishing a great reading week to each and all!