What I'm Reading This Week (7/17/26)

 As far as my reading goes, this last couple of weeks has really been hit or miss for me. I've found it hard to concentrate even when I've had a little time for myself, and that's caused me to change some of my book choices as I try to find books a little less concentration-demanding. I've really only put one book aside for the long term, however, and that is the huge, in every sense of that word, James Jones novel From Here to Eternity. No matter how hard I try to get into that story, it's just not working for me at all right now. I've temporarily tabled a couple of others (The Longest Walk and the Mark Twain bio), but plan to get back to those sooner rather than later. 

On the positive side, I've made surprising progress with the controversial French novel The Camp of the Saints that I've been reading for a while now. And pretty decent progress on the book on Cajun history I've been reading, The Acadian Saga. Misleadingly, I did also finish three books in the last couple of weeks, but I was already relatively near the end of two of those (The Cyclist by Tim Sullivan, Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth, and Eifelheim by Michael Flynn).  

These are the new ones I've started in the last few days:

A lot of you probably have already read Donna Everhart's Women of a Promiscuous Nature because I remember seeing it reviewed on several blogs a few weeks ago. It's historical fiction focusing on that period in American history (well into the 1940s and 1950s, it seems) during which husbands or fathers of sexually active females could solve the "problem" by having the women institutionalized. The first couple of chapters haven't hooked me yet, but I'm still hoping this one will grab me soon.

I think this new collection of Walt Longmire short stories is scheduled to be published in early November. Have Courage is one of several Christmas story collections that Johnson has published over the years, and I've read them all, I think. There are thirteen stories in Have Courage, covering different periods in Longmire's law enforcement career from the early seventies to the present day. Each story is set either on Christmas Day or thereabouts. Walt Longmire stories are, for me, fiction's equivalent of comfort food.

Charles Dickinson has been one of my favorites since the eighties even though no one would ever describe him as anything remotely close to prolific. I first read Crows around 1992, but it was published in 1985. Honestly, I remembered very little about it when I started this re-read other than how much I enjoyed it the first time around. And now, 83 pages into it, Crows is still reading like a book I'm reading for the first time. Great characters, quirky family, good story...loving this one already.

So Old So Young follows a group of college friends for about 20 years, starting in 2007. This one got some pretty good early press when published a few weeks ago, and that's when it caught my eye. I'm hoping it's not just another one in a long line of novels that use this exact set-up, but I'm already beginning to have some doubts. The writing is good, so I'll keep going for another 50 pages or so before deciding whether or not to DNF So Old So Young. It's hard to show much patience right now, and that's probably not fair to Grant Ginder.

So that's me for the next couple of weeks. I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your reading time. Make the most of it!