What I'm Reading This Week (September 1, 2024)

 

Not quite sure how it happened, but I finished three books last week even while exploring the 2024 Booker Prize longlist - as much as my limited availability to those novels allowed me to do that. To say that the books I read last week have nothing much in common is quite an understatement - although at a stretch, I do see something rather dystopian in all three. The three were: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell (2011), and The Death of the West (2002) by Patrick J. Buchanan. (I will share my thoughts on those three in the days to come.)

I'm reading only one of the current Booker Prize nominees right now, Samantha Harvey's Orbital, but I've taken a close look at two others via the free samples that Amazon Kindle allows customers to download and have four other samples on tap waiting for me to take a look at them. Thankfully, the two Booker books I've sampled are really intriguing because the last two I've read were so underwhelming that I'm beginning to question the judgement of this year's nominating committee.

By the way, if you haven't made use of Kindle samples, you're missing a really good opportunity to "browse" before you buy or take a library copy home with you. The samples I've read almost always include at least the entire first chapter - sometimes two -of a book because Amazon usually offers something in the range of a book's first 20-25 pages for a free test-read.

 

I really wanted to like British author Samantha Harvey's Orbital, but it's become a real struggle for me even to pick this one back up lately. It's the story of sixteen days in a space station inhabited by two male Russians, a Japanese woman, a British woman, and male astronauts from the U.S. and Spain. Six people crammed into a tiny space from which they can't escape each other for the next three months. I have enjoyed learning how being in such tight quarters for so long impacts each of them, but the sections about the environment and borders become a bit tedious and overwritten at times. And there's a lot of that.

I mentioned last week how I discovered The Collection of Heng Souk buried deep inside my Kindle when I was working on all of my e-books a few days ago (a project still not finished). Well, it's turned out to be one of my favorite books of 2024, and I so dread what I think is going to be its ending, that I've been reading its last 75 pages at a really slow pace. The idea of a man going back to Viet Nam to learn if his father (a man he didn't know existed until days earlier) died during the war there is intriguing enough - but what happens once he gets there is heartbreaking in so many ways that this is a story I'll never forget.

I was expecting to receive a copy of Indrajit Garai's The Man without Shelter from Amazon on July 9. Well, Hurricane Beryl decided to arrive on July 8 and most of Harris County was without power for days and days after that. The book finally arrived a couple of weeks later, and I've just started reading it. It's about a man who is suddenly released in the middle of the night  after 20 years in prison (he was wrongly convicted) with no place to go. He's pretty much just booted out the front gates, so he's basically homeless and can't find a job or shelter because of his past and ends up living on the streets of Paris. The first chapter is dark and ominous as he wanders the streets trying to find a place that feels right enough for him to stop walking.

I've also been dabbling in Sanjay Gupta's Keep Sharp, a book about brain health, and have at least temporarily abandoned a memoir called Everything All at Once because after 40 pages, I find that I still haven't connected with Stephanie Catudal and what she experienced, deeply sad as it all was. The book is doing quite well in library and Amazon sales, but the style and construction of the memoir are not clicking for me right now - maybe one to return to later on. 

AND I woke up this morning to a library email telling me that four physical books and one e-book are ready for me to borrow. All of a sudden four of the Booker Prize books are there for me to pick up on Tuesday morning:

American Nominee

American Nominee

Dutch Nominee

British Nominee

I've read the Amazon Samples of The Safekeep and Wild Houses, and I'm hoping that I will have finally found a couple of Booker nominess other than James that will speak to me. These four short-fuse novels will probably claim most of my reading time for the next two weeks, along with the others I'm already reading, but as always I expect a few surprises to jump the queue somewhere along the way, too. Happy Reading to you all!