What I'm Reading This Week (May 13, 2024)

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures was one of the hottest books of 2022 and, at least in my recollection, of 2023. I got on my library wait list a little late and finally threw in the towel when I realized that it would be most of a year before I would get hold of it that way. It wasn't until this year that I thought about the novel again and decided to get back on the list - and I still started at number 65. But I had also signed up for the large print edition book and started the wait for that one in the mid-twenties. As it turns out, the wait for that edition was only three weeks, and I spent a lot of time last week finally reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. With just a few pages to go, I'm still not sure what to think of it - and that's probably not a good thing. 

I did finish up both Alice McDermott's Absolution and the Mark Twain classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well, and made good starts on James Lee Burke's Clete and Alan Murrin's The Coast Road. Too, I've started re-reading Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the novel that turned me into a lifetime fan of Tyler's work the first time that I read it back in the eighties - and I'm down to the last short story in Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons. This was one of those weeks that I found it particularly hard to focus, so I found myself moving from book to book quicker than I normally do, with shorter bursts of reading that I don't find nearly as satisfying as reading at least fifty or so pages from one book before moving on to the next. I do hope that changes this week.

Clete is a little bit different in that it is being correctly marketed as book number 24 in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series despite Dave being very much a secondary character in the novel - at least through the first third of the book. This time around the narrator is Clete Purcell, a private investigator who has been Dave's closest friend since their days in Vietnam. Once again, Dave and Clete are dealing with some truly evil people in small town Louisiana, but it's been eye-opening to see Dave through the eyes of a man who knows him better than anyone else in the world could ever know him. (I've read the first 23 books in the series so it's interesting to learn that Clete sees him a bit differently than I see him.)

I'm about thirty percent of the way through The Coast Road and I still haven't settled into it comfortably. The characters, all of whom are women with marital problems of one degree or another, have not separated themselves in my mind yet, and that makes it hard to keep up with the intricacies of their day-to-day experiences together. It's still hard to know which of them can be relied on to tell the truth and which of them are lying to themselves. I do expect this one to suck me in soon - well at least I hope that's about to happen.

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983 or so, and it turned out to be one of those books that influenced my reading for decades to come. It made me a lifetime fan of Anne Tyler's work, and I've pretty much read everything she's ever written now. But guess what? I don't remember a whole lot about the plot anymore, only how immersed I ended up being in the world Tyler created and how fascinating I found the characters to be. This is one of those risky re-reads that I hope doesn't end up lessening my fondness for a book that's been on my shelves for a long, long time.

Oh, and I also gave up on Susan Orlean's On Animals because the pieces I read from the essay collection didn't seem to work together as a whole. Maybe if I had read them as standalone magazine articles they would have struck me differently. 

The little stack of books still waiting for their turn includes this bunch:

That's my Monday morning start to the week. I do have a couple of short road trips scheduled for later this week: a baseball game against Arkansas over in College Station and a lunch date with a few of my old high school friends down toward Beaumont, but it looks like we're in for another round of hard rains that are likely to wash out both trips. Whether that ends up translating into more reading time or more time frittered away remains to be seen. 

I hope you are all doing well, and I hope to visit a bunch of blogs this week that I missed out on last week...have fun.