What I'm Reading This Week (July 15, 2024)

 

Well, not much really.

Just staying as cool as possible these last few days while trying to find decent hot food at least once a day, gasoline for the small generator that has made life bearable, and making sure that various small lights, phones, and other devices are charged up by the time it gets pitch dark has taken a lot more time than I imagined it would. And even when I do sit down to read, I'm either too sleepy to concentrate, too hot to concentrate, or it's too dark to read because all the window covers are closed to minimize the inside temperature. (I hope I don't come across as a whiner, but I'm so frustrated by the totally incompetent response of CenterPoint to this storm that it feels good to vent a little.)

So I've been lucky if I read 30 pages a day, and that's not a lot of progress on the two 400-plus-page books I'm reading right now. That's the bad news; the good news is that both books are good.

This 2019 book is the fifth in Lynda La Plante's Tennison series, but it's the first one I've read even though I've enjoyed the Tennison television shows for a number of years now. Turns out, it's not a bad place to jump into the written series because it's set in 1980 just as Jane Tennison becomes the first female detective ever assigned to the Met's elite Flying Squad, otherwise known as the "Sweeney." I don't know about the rest of the series, but The Dirty Dozen is very much a detailed police procedural, and I'm really enjoying it.

Keith Pearson's tuned out makes for a real change of pace from the Tennison novel. I'm only about 60 pages in, and I'm still waiting on the "time travel" aspect that's promised in the book's subtitle, but I do find the prose style very readable. So far, it's the story of a 30-year-old university graduate who is sobered by his (and his whole generation's) chances of ever achieving the kind of financial success and security that all previous generations have achieved. He's tired of all the advice his parents  give him - and somehow (I think) manages to time travel back to the time they were his age. It's all very light, with a tone somewhere between sarcasm and irony, and I hope it remains so when the time travel bit finally starts.

I still have some reviews to help keep me awake and busy enough to forget that it's now 87 degrees at my desk as I write this up at 10:45 a.m. So here it is, Day 8 of no power, with a target date of "end-of-day July 19" for reconnection to the grid and serious doubt on my part that that will really happen. Of the 2.3 million people who lost power during Huricane Beryl, some 250,000 of us remain to be powered up. Lucky me being in the last 11%. 

Later, guys.