What are you reading the week of May 8, 2021?

I finished The Misty Harbor, the 16th Inspector Maigret novel which was excellent. This series keeps getting better.

I'm now reading The Sumerians: A History from the Beginning to the End. It's a relatively short book that sketches the history of Sumer in broad outline. Given the constant ebb and flow of empires across Mesopotamia over thousands of years, it's nice to have succinct summary of the sequence of events. It would make a good starting point for anyone wanting to learn something of the history of that time and place.

I have just finished reading the novel THE FIRM by author JOHN GRISHAM

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Enjoying this Kindle/Audible combo ~

Save Your Breath: Morgan Dane, Book 6
by Melinda Leigh

85% done with "The Human" by Neal Asher and 45% done with Two Armies on the Rio Grande. A History of What Comes Next will be started this week.

I'm reading The Dark Tower by Stephen King and I imagine I'll be reading it for a few weeks as it is 842 pages long. But I am so excited to finish the series and it's been really good so far!

Just finished Creatures, and as usual our book club organizer has allowed himself to be "sold" by rave reviews and given us something arty and experimental. (I think he's trying to improve our minds.)

Evie grows up on a small island off the California coast, with an absentee mother and drug-addled father, considers herself unlovable, drinks too much, and marries a man she can't commit to. It's all dressed up in really very fine writing, but it's a dreary story, and how many times can you witness beer & bong parties, throwing up, and skull-busting hangovers in pursuit of a story?

Next up is Michael Connelly's The Last Coyote, which may take a while, as there will be house guests for the next week and a half, so not much reading time.

I'm reading this month's selection for my reading group, which is Isabelle Allende's latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea. There are some harrowing descriptions of the Spanish Civil War near the beginning, but I'm about 90 pages in and all in all I'm finding the narrative kind of flat. It's a 300-page book, though, so still plenty of time for it to pick up.

Still reading Six of Crows, The Mists of Avalon, and Closed Circles.

I haven't been reading much. Lack of concentration.

Brief personal note: I had not dated in years. At all. Then I ran into an ex-boyfriend who is the love of my life and we picked up where we left off around six years ago. And the same week I met a really nice, intelligent man, who is good-looking and has a foreign accent. The same week! And unable to decide, I made a non-decision and now I'm dating both of them. So my concentration on books is just gone. I sit around thinking to myself "Allie, WTF are you doing?"

I'm attempting to read Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil - The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda but am only 22 pages in after an entire weekend.

To quote Danny Glover's character in Lethal Weapon: I'm too old for this.

>9 ahef1963: Feast or famine! Enjoy yourself!

I'm giving up on The Last Coyote. After two days of blah response to it, I'm 80 pages in and simply not interested in hanging out with Harry Bosch. Looking back at my book journal, I see this is the second Harry Bosch novel I've bailed out on. Must remember not to acquire any more.

Will try Kathy Reichs' Monday Mourning next.

>9 ahef1963: Sounds like you’re having a good time! :)

I just started Rules of Civility. I loved A Gentleman in Moscow so I’m looking forward to getting into it.

Finished listening to the excellent short story collection, Vampires In The Lemon Grove.

Next up for listening is Midnight In Chernobyl: The Untold Story of The World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham.

Anxious People
Fredrik Backman
4/5 stars
This is a story about a bank robber who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time but is helped by the people who have been taken hostage by the robber. As the situation occurs we learn all about the hostages, the robber and the father/son policemen who show up to solve the crime and try to apprehend the criminal. Backman never disappoints in this unusual story.

More short fiction. Jumping around last week in:
The Roald Dahl Omnibus
The collected stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Selected Stories by Alice Munro

Reading lots of plays lately. Last week:
The Shadow Box - Michael Cristofer
Dutchman ; and, the slave : two plays - Amiri Baraka
Take me out : a play - Richard Greenberg

Right now I'm into
Cymbeline - William Shakespeare
The Play About the Baby - Edward Albee
Funerals are Fatal - Agatha Christie

Enjoying this thought-provoking OverDrive audiobook ~

When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel
by Paula McLain

Just finished good girl's guide to murder by Holly Jackson.
Now reading a crooked tree by Una Mannion.

Finished the book Life After Life: A Novel. The conceit of jumping through time and various versions of the same life, I found more irritating than illuminating. I did allow the author to present what life was like in both England and Germany from 1910 to about 1950. I suppose it was also an attempt to illustrate how differently a life would play out with just one small variation in events.

>10 LyndaInOregon: >11 Copperskye:

Thanks for the encouragement. I'll just try to enjoy the onslaught (well, two) of men!

I finished A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabel Allende's most recent novel. I expected to like it better than I did, alas. It is the story of two families, and in particular one member of each (one man and one woman who end up together; no shock, there), living through the Spanish Civil War. The protagonists end up in Chile (again not a spoiler, as the book's title refers to that country). The story takes the two through their entire lives.

The storyline, the times described and the characters are certainly interesting, so why was the book ultimately unsatisfying to me? One element was the flat nature of the narrative. We are in third person omniscient. And while we often touch down inside the mind of one or another character, particularly our two main players, I felt that too much of the book was spent in above-the-fray exposition and explanation, and way too much time in historical overview mode. Everything from the history of the Spanish Civil War through the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power and then on through the Pinochet dictatorship years, with long lessons on Chilean history in between, are doled out paragraphs, sometimes pages, at a time before we finally get back to our characters and their stories.

I've written more on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

I've now started Harvard Has a Homicide by Timothy Fuller, the first of Fuller's Jupiter Jones mystery series, because what I really needed was another mystery series to be in the middle of. Well, I pulled an old hardcover version of This is Murder, Mr. Jones down off my shelf to read, only to discover that it was the fourth book in a series, so . . . . Anyway, about 35 pages in, this first in the series, originally published in 1936, is fun.

Just finished Monday Mourning, which is part of the Temperance Brennan series. I had read one years ago, and enjoyed this one enough that I've requested a couple more through my swap group.

Started Dutch Girl, which was recommended by someone else on this list. Erm ... different tastes, I suppose. I will give it another day, but so far am not really motivated to finish it.

finished Closed Circles by Viveca Sten. liked it.

next into the rotation is I Thought You Said This Would Work by Ann Garvin.

>20 LyndaInOregon: Dutch Girl is probably the most popular book that is checked out for book club discussion groups at our library. I haven't read it yet so I can't comment on the writing.

Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, a Personal Biography
Charlotte Chandler
4/5 stars
Chandler, who had met and had conversations with Billy Wilder, discusses his life and his career as a director, writer and highlights his films. She also discusses his life, surviving WWI and the holocaust though he lost his mother and grandmother in concentration camps. His films and his relationships with actors are discussed. This made me want to re-watch all his films especially the ones I missed.

Finished listening to Midnight In Chernobyl.

Next up for listening is #16 in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King.

I finished Harvard Has a Homicide, the first book in Timothy Fuller's Jupiter Jones series, first published in 1936. Our man Edmund "Jupiter" Jones is a smart-aleck Harvard grad student, with, evidently, plenty of money and, you'll not be surprised to learn, generally the smartest person in the room. Or so he thinks. At any rate, when Jones is the first to discover the corpse of the recently stabbed to death Professor Singer, he can't resist butting in and "helping" the Cambridge police department's Inspector Rankin solve the case. Or, as Jones' girlfriend comments drily to another character, "He thinks he's the Thin Man." At any rate, this book is a lot of fun, with the strong caveat that it contains the sort of "jocular" condescending racism that would be taken for granted then but is very much irritating when read now. The antisemitism of the time and place (again, Harvard in the 1930s) is sidestepped.

I've written a bit more in my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next up for me will be a book I'm pretty much ashamed to say I've never read, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington.

Spent the afternoon reading, A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet.

Now back to reading Moonglow.

The new thread is up over here.