What I'm Reading This Week (March 25, 2024)

 

I'm not real sure where last week disappeared to so quickly, but it's already time to start another reading week. I finished two books last week (Sociopath and Again and Again) and made some good progress on a couple of others, but it sure doesn't feel that way. I'm almost done with The Storm We Made and have gotten to a couple of twists in this story of Japan's WWII occupation of Malaya that leave open endless possibilities for the novels last fifty pages so it will be fun to see where that one ends up. I've also started, and almost finished, what is becoming a surprisingly disappointing detective novel by Amulya Malladi set in Denmark called A Death in Denmark - and I'm on the verge of abandoning Kat Timpf's You Can't Joke About That because I don't hear that one calling me anymore. 

A Death in Denmark is Amulya Malladi's introduction to her Danish detective series featuring Gabriel Praest. The plot is a relatively straightforward one involving powerful Danes who do not want their family history of WWII collaboration with Nazi Germany exposed to the world. When a politician threatens to do exactly that in a new book she is researching, the Russian mafia is called in and people begin to die. The problem I'm having with all of this is that Gabriel Praest is a walking, talking cliché of the worst order. 

Ordinary Human Failings is a novel I've snatched from the 2024 Women's Prize list. It's set in 1990 London and involves an Irish immigrant family caught up in a backlash after a ten-year-old child is suspected of a violent crime against another child. The main character, already pretty much crushed by the hand she's been dealt by life, has to deal with what is happening along with everything she learns about her family and its past. It all sounds pretty gloomy, I admit, but it's relatively short and should be a good way to sample the list. 

I've read the first thirty pages of this edition of The Plague by Albert Camus despite my reluctance to pick up another covid novel anytime soon. While this one is about a mysterious illness too, I want to read it because it takes place in a foreign city I'm somewhat familiar with from my time in Algeria. Despite being set in Oran about forty-five years before I visited there in the early '90s, it reminds me very much of the mysterious feeling that city left me with. The way this plague sneaks up on everyone in the city who might have stopped it has been scary to watch...a little to reminiscent of our world's early-days handling of covid.

I've also started reading Crow Talk, but after 40 pages I'm still trying to figure out what this one is all about. I chose it because I enjoyed Eileen Garvin's The Music of Bees so much that I wanted to read more from her. Lots of scene-setting and character introductions to this point.

And I will probably be adding one or two of these before the end of the week also. I say probably because I do have a one-day roadtrip planned for tomorrow that will eat up a big chunk of reading time - and could easily turn into a two-day trip:

So here we go...good reading everyone! Have a fun week.