What I'm Reading This Week (August 4, 2024)

 

It appears that my hoped-for early start on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist is already doomed, so I'm adjusting my reading plan accordingly. My library system, probably the largest in the state of Texas, does not have anywhere near the number of copies yet that are going to be needed to make the hold list reasonable for any of the Booker titles (and three of them are not available at all yet). I'm hoping that changes in the next three or four weeks now that the actual longlist has been announced, but at least for the moment, I'm not expecting any Booker titles until late November or early December at best. 

I finished two books last week (reviews to come soon - I hope), and I have two others in progress.  Finished up were a couple of e-books, The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and Mrs. Plansky's Revenge by Spencer Quinn. The two in progress are these:

I didn't spend a whole lot of time with The Death of the West last week, but what I read continues to fascinate me with its prescience. Buchanan's book is like reading a 20-year-old playbook for the accelerated destruction of Western culture we've experienced in the last two decades. Everything he described in 2002 is what we are living through today. Buchanan was not a prophet...The Death of the West is more a history book that begins in World War I with the failure of Marxism to predict a worker's revolution. It's about the substitution of patient non-violent revolution for the more violent version that never manage to win "hearts and minds" in the long run.

I was lucky already to have a library copy of Canadian-American author Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History on hand before it was placed on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist or I would have had to wait a long time to get my hands on one. I'm about 180 pages in, and it's not looking to me like this will be a strong contender for the prize. My disappointment is that it is more of a novel about the particulars of one family (based on the author' own), and less a novel about the big historical events the family lived through, than I had hoped.. It's all very personal, with events like WWII's impact on Algeria, the Algerian revolution against French occupation, etc. being completely skipped over as the novel moves from decade to decade. Instead, everything is seen in the aftermath of one or another geographic move the family is forced to make. 

As for the change of plans, I hope to begin both of these this week:

I don't read a lot of True Crime, but I have always been both horrified and fascinated by serial killers. My Men is a novel based on the actual crimes of a Norwegian woman who came to the U.S. in the early 1880s to begin a new life for herself. As it turns out, she may have been the first female serial killer in this country, having killed both her husbands and (it is believed) as many as thirty other men she lured through newspaper ads. The novel places readers very much inside the woman's head - but that might not be a good thing. We'll see.

The Dark Wives, number 11 in Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, will be published in this country on August 26 so I would have likely been reading it this week anyway despite the Booker Prize fiasco I mentioned earlier. I'm very much taken with Vera, so I always look forward to an addition to the series. If I recall correctly, this is the longest series that Cleeves has ever written by at least two or three books now, so I have to wonder how many more we'll get. I do hope for lots more because, even as well as I know the characters now, I still really enjoy their investigations and experiences together. 

So that's what the next few reading-days look like here. I'm about to go outside to grill burgers for a late lunch, but I'll look forward to visiting a bunch of your blogs this evening to see what everyone's been up to. Have a great week...