What I'm Reading This Week (August 11, 2024)

 

 I finished two books last week - each of them being a challenge of sorts to get through - and neither of them made for a particularly enjoyable or satisfying reading experience in the long run. That's not to say, however, that they are necessarily bad books. Of the two, Victoria Kielland's My Men was the more rewarding because of it's unusual twisting of first and third person voices to tell the story of America's first female serial killer. On the other hand, Claire Messoud's This Strange Eventful History was disappointing to me more for what it failed to do than what it did. Even so, I'm pleased that I experienced both the books and I'm likely to try each of the authors at least one more time.

And somehow or another, I've ended up with four books in progress even though I was trying to cut down to two at a time to see if that would jumpstart my reading back to where it was before the summer started. (I suppose maybe that experiment worked because adding books to my current reading has been the norm for me for years, and it feels comfortable to me to do it that way again.) These are the four:

  

I read another two chapters in Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and I grow more and more astounded at my ignorance of the world's relatively recent political history. I'm learning about the Frankfort School (founded in Germany in 1923) and it's 100-year-old philosophy that is playing out in the West today. Also learning who people like Hungarian Georg Lukacs, Italian Antonio Gramsci, German Theodor Adorno, and German Herbert Marcuse were and how they set the world on its hellish course in the last century.

I'm about forty percent of the way into this latest Vera Stanhope novel from Ann Cleeves, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Cleeves just keeps getting better and better. Her earlier Vera novels were much heavier focused on the mystery than on the main characters, but now over time Cleeves has shifted more to developing these characters via our ready access to their thoughts and emotions. They are now very real people to longterm fans of the series, me included, and I dread the day that Cleeves writes her last Vera Stanhope novel.

I have read quite a few Native American writers in recent years but only recently heard about a new talent from that community, Morgan Talty. Talty's Night of the Living Rez is a ten-story collection that won four separate literary prizes for the author in addition to getting him chosen as a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" nominee. I've read the first two stories, the first being only five pages long, the second over twenty pages in length. Both stories focus on the bleakness of reservation life, and they both pack a solid punch to the gut. Good stuff.

Because I literally discovered this little book while browsing a used-book bookstore the other day, I had to chuckle a little bit about the historical origin of that word as described early on in Jeff Deutsch's In Praise of Good Bookstores. According to Deutsch, to browse originally men to to graze or chew one's cud, a word commonly used to describe a cow's activity. Somehow, the word became associated with the way that bookstore customers behaved when shopping - as they grazed for new books. I'm already liking this one a lot because Deutsch brings up so many interesting bookstore-related things to ponder.

Waiting in the wings, among dozens of others, these few are starting to peek around the corner now:

Review Copy 

Number 1 in the Series

Love the 1950s Pulp Covers

Have heard great things about O'Connell

So there you have it for now. I don't expect to get to all four of this last bunch right away, if ever, but they are the ones that have caught my eye this week. 

As for the Booker Prize situation...just as I'd hoped, lots of early signers-on to my library's hold-list have already dropped off out of frustration. I have not moved up significantly for any particular title yet, but at least there's noticeable movement. I do feel pretty good about having already read two of the thirteen nominees, but it will still be quite a wait before the third one gets into my hands. And then they'll probably all show up in the same ten-day window...