What I'm Reading This Week (May 27, 2024)

 

After finishing two novels last week (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler and Dad Camp by Evan S. Porter), I begin the new week with three books in progress. I set Matt Haig's The Humans aside all of last week, but I'm looking forward to reading it this week, am almost halfway through Shannon Reed's Why We Read, and am completely taken with Dennis Lehane's 2023 novel Small Mercies. Of all five books I've just mentioned, I suspect that Small Mercies is going to prove to be the best of the lot.

I have mixed emotions about Why We Read at the book's halfway point. This is a collection of short essays about readers, how they became readers, and why reading is so important to so many of us. But still, it's not what I thought it would be. It often tries, I think, to be too cute and clever for its own good, even to the point of making me question at one point whether or not I would be finishing it. Too, I did not expect a memoir, but that's what Reed seems to be going for here as much as anything else - and it's not a particularly insightful memoir, at that. Still, there are some gems of insights to be mined here if only I'm patient enough to keep digging...so here I stand, shovel in hand, hoping to finish Why I Read this week.

I bought Small Mercies almost a year ago when I caught it marked down to 50% of retail not too long after it was first published, and I'm just now finally getting to it. The novel is set in 1974 Boston during the period in which Boston is about to begin bussing students in order to desegregate the city's schools. Mary Pat Fennessy, a lifetime Southie resident, is looking for her daughter who disappeared on the same night that a young black man was found dead nearby. It doesn't seem likely that the two events are connected, but Mary Pat starts asking the wrong people the wrong questions, and if she keeps it up much longer the Irish mob is going to have to shut her up. The casual racism in this story is shocking by today's standards, but it reminds me that this was the norm just fifty years ago.  

Right now, I'm limiting myself to two or three active books at a time, way down from the seven or eight I usually have going at the same time, because I'm curious as to how that might affect my comprehension and overall speed. Just a little experiment to see which style fits me best at this age. But if I do at least get to begin one or two new books this week, these are among the most likely candidates to be chosen:

It's always the wildcards, though, that make reading so much fun for me, and I wonder which ones will come out of nowhere this week to claim a spot. Have a great week, everyone, have fun.