What I'm Reading This Week (June 3, 2024)

 Just as I hoped, Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies ensured that last week ended up being a really good reading week. I've read quite a few Lehane novels now, and this one just might be the best of the lot. But I'll have more to add on Small Mercies later in the week, so enough said for now. The wild card of the week turned out to be the unexpected copy of John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 that came my way. The only other book I finished was Why We Read by Shannon Reed, but I also made some progress on Matt Haig's The Humans and started reading Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves. Oh, and I DNF'd the Bill Mahar book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, because it was way more one-sided and biased than advertised.

I've kind of settled into a routine lately of having one physical book, one e-book, and if the right one comes along, maybe one audiobook going at the same time. That's what I'm doing with these three, and as long as the approach continues to work for me, I'll stick with the routine. Not sure what caused me to pull back that way, but it feels comfortable for now. I'm hoping to attack my shelves and Kindle backlist a little more successfully this way, but the only way to make that work for long is to limit temptation by cutting my library visits way back. And that won't be easy.

I'm having fun with The Humans but I can't shake the feeling that it has some kind of mysterious tie to the Resident Alien TV series I watched a while back. The premise of both stories is eerily similar: alien comes to Earth to eliminate mankind because humans have become a threat to the rest of the galaxy all of a sudden, but said alien learns to respect and even love certain humans enough to make the alien question his entire mission. They don't seem to be linked at all, but the similarity between the two is pretty astounding to me.

I noticed John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 was available when I opened the Libby app to return an e-book to my local library. I haven't read much O'Hara, but I do remember that Butterfield 8 was a semi-scandalous Elizabeth Taylor movie back in the day, so the title and cover caught my eye. I never did get around to watching the 1960 movie, but my memories of the publicity it got made me wonder how it could have possibly been written in 1935. I'm about one-third of the way through it now, and I'm finding the novel to be well written and and much more frank than I thought a 1935 novel would be. Still not sure where this one is headed.

Harbour Street is book number six in the Ann Cleeves Vera Stanhope series. I vaguely remembering watching the TV series version of this one a few years ago, but so far that hasn't impacted my reading of Harbour Street at all. I'm only ten percent in, and Cleeves is still in the process of setting up the crime scene and introducing all the players, but this one already seems a little bit easier to get into than some of the earlier books in the series. Maybe it's because Joe is the main character in the first chapter, and Vera in the second. No having to read 75-100 pages before Vera shows up for the first time. That's always a good thing.

Depending on what I finish this week, this is the small pool of books I'm likely to be choosing from for my next reads:

I'm also putting together plans for a ten-day roadtrip beginning on June 22 during which I hope to explore a couple of states with my youngest grandson. I want to introduce him to the history of blues music, Cajun culture, and a Civil War battle site or two, so reading time is going to be limited for the last week of June. Generally, the plan is to explore southwest Louisiana, ending up near Natchez, Mississippi, before heading north up Highway 61 (The Blues Trail), and over to Shiloh Battlefield in southern Tennessee. Then we'll head back down through places like Tupelo and Oxford before circling back through Louisiana and home. I'm familiar with all the stops we will be making, but I hope to lock in for him the same love for road trips that my father passed on to me. 

If you guys have any trip-tips for that part of the country, please let me know. Have a great week!