What I'm Reading This Week (July 28, 2024)

 

I am eagerly awaiting announcement of the twelve or thirteen books that will comprise the 2024 Booker Prize longlist this Tuesday so that I can get an earlier start on the list than I managed last year. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying several books before I start trying to locate the first two or three of the prize-nominated "Booker Dozen." 

I'm about halfway through Graham Moore's The Sherlockian and I'm having quite a bit of fun with it. The novel, which centers around the 2010 murder of one of the Baker Street Irregulars, is told from two points of view: a club member who takes it upon himself to do what Sherlock would do and try to solve the murder himself and, in alternating chapters, that of Arthur Conan Doyle as he tries to cope with his decision to kill off Sherlock Holmes and move on with his life in the 1890s. It all makes me want to know more about the real Doyle...and those rabid fans of the stories.

I was clearing a box of books the other day and found Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West among a few others I decided to keep for re-reading. I'm only 60 or so pages into the book now, but it blows my mind that it was written in 2002 because everything that Buchanan predicted in The Death of the West is almost exactly what is happening in the world today. I don't remember taking the book all that seriously in 2002 because it seemed too fantastic to me to ever really happen - but it has. I wish more of us had paid attention to books like this one when they were published two decades ago.

I first heard about Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History on a YouTube video claiming that it was one of the better books written so far this year. As it turns out, the novel is set in Algeria, a country I lived and worked in for almost a decade, so I was really curious. It covers seven decades of Algerian history (1940-2010) largely from the point of view of the pied-noirs, those Frenchmen whose families had/have lived in Algeria for their entire lives as they struggle to survive and maintain their identity through all the turmoil and war that has plagued Algeria for so long.

I have high hopes for Mrs. Plansky's Revenge even though I haven't started it yet (as the library clock is ticking away). I learned of this one over on the Staircase Wit blog (if you don't read that blog, you need to check it out), and it just punched all the right buttons for me. It's about a 98-year-old widow who falls for an AI scam that ends up emptying her bank accounts. Suddenly, she is near penniless - and she's not having it. After authorities don't offer her much hope of recovering her lost money, she decides she can do a better job finding the scammers herself. So she does. Can't wait to get started.

I did finish Lynda La Plante's The Dirty Dozen this week and was enough satisfied by La Plante's style to want to read more of her Jane Tennison series. Also, I'm still reading a few pages every few days from the Helen Keller autobiography The Story of My Life, but I'm finding it to be so dryly written that it's a bit of a slow read. I do plan to complete it, but I don't feel much of an urgency to get on with it. Next, I need to tackle four or five reviews that have stacked up since my road trip and the hurricane experience. I'm relying on some pretty detailed notes to do those, but I've seldom waited this long to write up my thoughts on what I've read so it's going to be a bit of a reach for me to do them justice.

I have no idea what comes next after this bunch - even though I have been on a bit of a book-buying binge this last few weeks - because of the anticipated Booker Prize announcements. I hope you all are doing well and reading away, too. I'll look forward to checking in to see what books you guys will add to my TBR list because that thing can never be too long, can it?