What I'm Reading This Week (March 11, 2024)

 

I had another of those hard-to-concentrate weeks last week that seem to be plaguing me more and more often these days. Seems like my mind was all over the place, with quick, but short, bursts of energy that pulled me in multiple directions all week long. As a result, my week didn't go at all as planned. I did finish a couple of books (Hitchcock's Blondes and How to Build a Boat) but never did get around to reviewing How to Build a Boat. And from there, my reading time was allocated all over the place: a couple of short stories from the current edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, an hour-long listen to an audio book whose reader almost put me to sleep with his sing-song cadence before I abandoned the audiobook for good, several literary movies, and lots of bookish YouTube stuff that is always dangerous to my reading (more on this later).

I think what messed me up last week was my disappointment in the Perry Mason novel I've been reading, The Case of the Empty Tin. I'm finding it to be very repetitive and just can't suspend my disbelief to the degree that this plot is asking me to. And what's with this one anyway? It's the nineteenth book in the Perry Mason series, and with only about 25 pages left to read, Mason hasn't sniffed the inside of a courtroom yet. If this were the first Perry Mason novel I'd read, I would really not like the Mason character very much. I'll save "the why" for the review, and just say that I'm having a hard time with a defense lawyer who delights in tampering with evidence...or even creating it in order to throw the cops off. So I ended up tossing this one aside for most of the week - and my mind started looking everywhere else for something more fun to read.

And that's about the time How to Build a Boat really began to impress me, and I started having so much fun with How to Solve Your Own Murder (sound like two instruction manuals, don't they). I pretty much alternated my reading between those two for the rest of the week, along with finally getting much deeper into Michael Cunningham's Day. But not even those could hold my attention for as long as they normally would have. 

Anyway, after all of that, in addition to finishing Day and How to Solve Your Own Murder, this is what I have planned for this week:

I am really happy about being able to read James Lee Burke's latest addition to his Dave Robicheaux series early, and I hope to get started on it in the next week or two. I purposely slow my reading pace on Burke's Robicheaux novels because they come so far apart these days. The title refers to Dave's longtime partner in crimefighting Cletus Purcell. Clete and Dave have had a lifetime's experience saving each other from themselves, and there is nothing that one doesn't know about the other. Now, they are old men...very violent old men when they they have to be. In this one, Clete takes it personally when his grandniece dies of a fentanyl overdose. This is book number 24 in the series that started in 1987 with The Neon Rain.

I read just enough last week of Again and Again to learn that Jonathan Evison is a really good storyteller. At this point, narrator Eugene Miles is still introducing himself and explaining why his 106-year-old self refuses to just give up and die. It seems that Eugene has had only one true love in his life, and that despite having lived for about 1,100 years all told, he's only run into her in two of his lifetimes. He feels that dying will just put him one more lifetime farther away from her. So for now, he's content to spend his days telling his story to Geno, his latest caretaker in the home.

I need to get going (nothing like a pending review deadline to get you jumpstarted) on Sociopath this week because of its short fuse. Patric Gagne says that she started making people feel uncomfortable around her by the time she was six years old. She believes this was probably because she felt none of the emotions common to other people, and people sensed this about her. She tried to pretend but found that she could not cope with that pressure, so she turned to a life of crime, and only learned that she was something called a "sociopath" when she started college.

I mentioned earlier that watching YouTube book-videos is often dangerous to my reading plans, and it's happened again. After watching several videos on the 2024 Women's Prize for fiction, I was intrigued enough by the list to see which of the sixteen books long-listed were available at my library. I found that nine of them are in the library system, and I immediately put holds on those hoping that maybe one or two would be immediately available. As it turns out, three of the books are now on their way to my branch where they will be held for my pick up. Whether this turns out to be a project similar to what I did with the 2023 Booker Prize list remains to be seen, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were about to happen. At least this time, I would be starting relatively early (and have already read one of the sixteen) because the shortlist is not to be announced until April 13, and the winner on June 13. 

I was negligent in visiting other blogs much last week, but I hope to make up for that this week, so I'm hoping you've all had a great last few reading-days. Can't wait to see what you've been reading.