What I'm Reading This Week (March 4, 2024)

 

I ended up finishing three books again last week, one I absolutely loved (Killers of a Certain Age), one I thought was above average (There There), and one that I found kind of appalling (Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird). I've also been really surprised by how much I'm enjoying the first half of Elaine Feeney's How to Build a Boat, another of the 2023 Booker Prize nominees. 

This week I'll likely finish Hitchcock's Blondes and The Case of the Empty Tin, and I hope to spend more time with Michael Cunningham's Day. I'm also relatively pleased so far with two others that I've started (both easily made it past my DNF threshold):

How to Solve Your Own Murder is about an elderly woman who has lived with the fear of being murdered ever since she was a teenager and a carnival fortune teller predicted that she would one day die at the hand of another. The woman grew to be quite wealthy, but lived in relative isolation for most of her life before deciding to leave everything she owns to a grandniece she has never met, cutting out of the will a conniving woman who was certain that she and her son would inherit it all. It all goes sideways after the grandniece responds to a summons to meet with the woman's lawyer.

Kat Timpf has fascinated me for several years now because of how often what she says or writes ends up making me look at some issue differently than I had before considering her take on it. You Can't Joke about That is, I think, her first book, and it's a strong defense of free speech and how that constitutional right relates to comedy, particularly to stand-up comedy. Timpf makes a strong argument that cancel culture is not only morally wrong, but that it is also extremely dangerous to all of us. She also presents the case that joking about the very issues most likely to anger people or about personal grief is one of the better ways to find healing for "things you probably wouldn't bring up in polite conversation." This is also a revealing personal memoir covering her career to date. 

Now for my biggest and best surprise of last week's reading:

How to Build a Boat is my 12th of 2023's thirteen Booker Prize nominees, and I'm kind of glad it came to me as late in the process as it did because it's turning out to be one of the better books on the whole list. As a group, the Booker list has been a rather gloomy bunch, with several of the books featuring characters somewhere on the autism spectrum. How to Build a Boat does feature a young man on the spectrum, but despite the bullying the boy endures at school, I'm finding this one to be much more positive and hopeful than almost everything else on the 2023 Booker list. 

I'm also likely to begin at least two of these this week:

Again and Again is about an old man who is spending his final days in a nursing home, but he insists that he is actually one thousand years old. The story seems largely to be about his bonding with his new nursing assistant, Geno. Mr. Texas is a satirical look at Texas politics that I have high hopes for because the book's author, Lawrence Wright, won the Pulitzer Prize for a nonfiction book I very much enjoyed a while back. And, Many a River is an Elmer Kelton western that I've somehow managed to miss despite Kelton having been my favorite western author since back in the '80s. 

Right now a lot of my time is being taken up by college baseball, so my page-count is suffering the consequences. But because my favorite team is off to an 11-0 start, I'm milking this season for all it's worth. The guys have a big one against that little school in Austin on Tuesday night that I'm especially looking forward to. The real competition starts on March 15 when SEC games start for us with a three-game series against Florida. For college baseball fans, it just doesn't get any better than this time of year.

Have a great week, everybody! Keep turning those pages...