What I’m Reading This Week (5/18/26)

 I turned a lot of pages last week but ended up only actually finishing one book, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist. I really like the way that Sullivan develops his characters, especially Cross who suffers from Asperger Syndrome, and I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the DS Cross series soon. 

I’m over halfway through Godfall now, and I’m still trying to answer one of the questions I had coming in: is this a mystery or is it a scifi novel? At this point, the author seems to be focusing more on the serial killer who has come to town along with the alien, but I’m really looking forward to how he ultimately resolves the issue of a three-mile-tall alien dropping from the sky. 

I’m struggling a bit with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but that doesn’t surprise me much. I struggle with McCarthy in exactly the same way that I struggle with Faulkner. Those long descriptive sentences demand so much concentration that I can only read the book when I am most alert. So if I don’t read from Blood Meridian early in the day, it’s just as well that I pass on it for the whole day. Otherwise, I often end up reading the same long paragraph two or three times to make sure that I haven’t missed something important. The result is that I’m only about 130 pages into this one.

I’m doing my monthly 200-mile round trip drive for lunch with friends from my high school graduating class this week so, in addition to Godfall and Blood Meridian, I’ll be adding a new audio book to get me through those four hours of driving - plus these two:

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Strout’s novels, and I’ve fully explored her Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge worlds now, especially getting a kick out of the way she intertwines the two worlds. I’m always ready for more about those ladies, but The Things We Never Say is a standalone focusing on a 57-year-old high school teacher called Artie Dam who is struggling with a kind of deep loneliness that would surprise his friends and students. The real irony is that Artie is married to a therapist. This one has been well received by Strout fans and critics alike.

The Camp of the Saints seems to be quite controversial these days. It is a French novel written in 1973 by Jean Raspail that predicted the open borders situation that the world is dealing with today. I’m only about thirty pages into the novel, but it begins on the morning that a fleet of ragtag boats is arriving on the beaches of France with almost a million impoverished Indians onboard. The novel was out of print for a long time, and a 2025 reprint was taken down by Amazon a couple of weeks ago over an “offensive content” issue before it was re-listed due to the feedback the take down received. I decided to see what the big deal was for myself. Is this a racist rant or is it a prophetic novel…or can it be both, I wonder. 

I’ve chosen The Little Liar by Mitch Albom for Wednesday’s road trip. I’m not much of a Mitch Albom fan, but this one seems to be different from the others of his I’ve read. It tells the story of an eleven-year-old Jewish boy duped by the Nazis into working with them to convince his neighbors that they have nothing to fear when boarding the trains to “new jobs and safety.” He only figures it all out after his own family is “herded into a boxcar” headed to Auschwitz. This sounds perfect for what has become a rather boring drive over the years…not too complicated, but not too mindlessly silly either. 

So that’s it for the next few days. I look forward to seeing what you all are up to.