Gonna Be Three Very Long Days Around Here

NOT my house, but I have at least this many roofers crawling around on mine right now

 Well, as promised, the roofers arrived about six-thirty this morning to start moving their equipment into place (all raw materials were delivered yesterday afternoon). And by seven-fifteen the ripping and banging was well on the way, so I'm hoping my next door neighbor and the houses behind me were wide awake at that point. If not, I'm sure it didn't take long to get them all to that state of being. 

Too, that means cars and trucks are parked all over the corner I live on, including the three vehicles that live here with us. So barely controlled chaos seems to be the plan for the rest of the week. I have to say that the neighbors are all being very patient because several of the homes within "listening distance" are also scheduled for new roofs following the hale storm that killed off mine. (And my house is only the second one that's even gotten to this point of the replacement process, so it's going to be noisy around here for a while.)

I did try reading for a while while I was having my coffee this morning, but that didn't go very well because of the racket overhead. So we opted for breakfast out, followed by a quick library stop for me to return a book from my stack that I abandoned yesterday (a debut novel by a young Irish guy filled with characters who seemed in a big hurry to go exactly nowhere). Big mistake. In the ten minutes I was there, I dropped off the one book and spotted three new ones to take home with us.

Couldn't resist these for even ten minutes:

I've read and enjoyed three or four other titles by Sandra Dallas, so I knew the name, but in all honesty what snagged me on this one is that beautiful, eye-catcher of a cover. Dallas writes period-novels about very ordinary people and their lives, and at least all the ones I've seen are set in the American west of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This one is about a young school teacher who moves to a "two-street" Wyoming town in 1916. The story is about how she finds a husband and forms strong bonds with the other women living around her.

The Revivalists is one of those apocalyptic novels I've loved so much since I stumbled upon my first one as a young teen reader. Now they read to me more like training manuals for our likely future, so I hope that something from all that reading has sunk in and makes me useful enough that the new ruling class decides to keep me around for a while. In this one, it all starts when "Shark Flu" emerges from the meltdown of Icelandic permafrost. Global warming, anyone? Who knew we had to worry about Iceland now, too.

I'm a big fan of the Outlander TV series, which has just begun its sixth season, so when I spotted this memoir from actor Sam Heughan I had to take a look. As it turns out, the memoir combines with another favorite genre of mine, books about Long Walks, so it was an obvious choice to make this morning's cut. It appears that Heughan made a ninety-six-mile walk across some of Scotland's West Highlands during one of his long breaks between Outlander seasons. Can't imagine how he made it, so this should be an interesting one.

I just realized how quiet it's suddenly gotten...sounds like there are only one or two guys on the roof. Must be lunch time because the crew is gathering in the shade of the tall Oak tree in my front yard. Now I need to grab something to read for the next hour.

Library Haul...Now What?

 

I live relatively close to my local library (my wife would say too close), and it's by far the best branch in the entire county system. So I stop by the library at least once a week, and it's often twice a week. As a result, this stash has accumulated over the last two weeks or so, but luckily all of these were available for a six-week check out. They are stacked with the one due first placed on top of the stack, the ones due last at the bottom. I suspect that a few of you will recognize titles that you just reviewed yourselves in the last couple of weeks. If you do, just know that this is all your fault because that's why those titles ended up in this stack.

If this stack were all I planned to read in the next six weeks, I wouldn't have much of a problem, but that's not the case. From my own shelves, I am also about 120 pages into a 500-page Robert E. Lee biography (one written well after the Great Awakening that trashed the man's reputation and promises to set the record straight), a little over 100 pages into The Lineup anthology, well over 300 pages into my e-book copy of Your Perfect Year, plus about 100 pages into a review copy of Matt Coyle's series novel Odyssey's End. (I won't even talk about the other 10 books that are still on hold.)

And I know that you guys are going to keep adding to my immediate stack via the great books you all continue to uncover and review every week. I would think that something is seriously wrong with me except for the fact that I've read so many similar confessions on many of my favorite book blogs. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Books on Hold: All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby Can't Come Soon Enough

 

I seem to always have somewhere between six and ten books on hold via my county library system, and I think I'm approaching my self-imposed upper limit again right now. And that's exactly how my "shiniest object" approach to reading always gets me in trouble because it seems like none of them are available for pickup for two or three weeks  and then they all appear at once or spread only over a week or two. Because so many of them have other people in line, that means I have two weeks to read the newest, most popular titles when I finally get my hands on a copy - and the very kind of pressure I'm trying to avoid these days is on full-burn before I realize it. But it's not all bad, because I'd be broke without a library to supply the bulk of my reading (plus shelf space is at a premium around here). 

Of all the holds I'm waiting on right now, the one I most look forward to receiving is S.A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed, the third book the author has published since his big breakthrough with Blacktop Wasteland in July 2020. That one was followed almost exactly one year later with Razorblade Tears (which, looking back is my favorite of the two). I've linked the titles shown here to my original reviews of the books if you are interested in learning more about each. These were followed last December by a reprinting of the novel Cosby wrote before he hit it so big, My Darkest Prayer. I have not read this one yet, but I do also have it on hold, and from what I understand, it's very good if perhaps not quite as gripping in the books that followed it.

All the Sinners Bleed features a black sheriff who dedicates his life to keeping the peace in a small southern, mixed-race community. As such, he is just as surprised as anyone that he got elected to the job in the first place, but not really surprised that neither the blacks nor the whites seem to trust him. Although it was just published on June 6, 2023, this one is already garnering major accolades from prestigious critics, reviewers, and newspapers around the country. Stephen King has even reviewed it for The New York Times, from what I understand. So far, at least, Cosby has written only standalones, but I'm kind of hoping that Sheriff Titus Crown turns out to be the character around which he can build a series of books. 

I even listened to a podcast based in London just this morning called Simon Mayo's Books of the Year that this week featured a forty-minute interview with Cosby about the new book. Mayo is calling it his favorite of 2023 to this point in the year. A click HERE should bring you to a simple way to find the podcast for a quick listen.