I read two very different books last week, The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves and In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch, and I enjoyed both. That I would enjoy an Ann Cleeves novel as much as I enjoyed The Dark Wives doesn’t really surprise me simply based on my past experience with various Cleeves-authored series. On the other hand, I didn’t know at all what to expect from Deutsch’s heartfelt praise of the bookstore, but I found much of it to be quite thought provoking – even inspirational. But as often happens in books about books, I found myself floundering several times while trying to keep up with the author’s thoughts. It’s not so much that I don’t at least partially understand what’s being said when that kind of thing happens, it’s more that I find myself “numbed” by the whole conversation. I’ll have more to say about In Praise of Good Bookstores later.
Still in progress are Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, two books I’m hoping to finish this week.
I mistakenly mentioned last week that this is a ten-story collection, but as it turns out there are actually twelve stories in Night of the Living Rez. An even better surprise to me, now that I’ve read nine of the stories, is how the stories connect to each other through two different sets of characters that appear in alternating stories. All of the stories are set on a single reservation, with every story focusing on a single family unit, so I don’t expect that the two groups will ever interact. This technique has the effect of making Night of the Living Rez read more like a novel than a short story collection.
I somehow made it this long without ever having read Brave New World, something I just realized while looking over one of those “Best of” lists last week. It’s the kind of book that you are sure you must have read sometime or another right up until the moment you realize that, no, you really haven’t. My curiosity finally got the best of me, so I read the first chapter online, was duly impressed, and hope now to finally complete it. As we become more and more dependent on high tech to take care of our every need, this may just be the perfect time to read a dystopian novel like Brave New World. That first chapter (in which artificial insemination is taken to its ultimate extreme) was certainly scary enough.
I’ve also been reading A Study in Scarlet, the first, and very short, Sherlock Holmes novel this week, but the book I really want to talk about is one that I hope to start in the next two or three days:
Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning was published in May 2010, and until yesterday I didn’t realize that I had a copy of it hidden on my shelves. (I sometimes place books behind a displayed row with the intention of getting to them a little later on.) I’m as taken with the cover now as I must have been when I purchased the novel, but it’s the plot that really caught my attention this time around: “Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in China…and heads south into the jungles of Burma…And then on Christmas morning, eleven of the travelers boat across a misty lake for a sunrise cruise – and disappear.” So now I’m just hoping that this one is half as good as its book jacket description makes it sound.
Another novel I unearthed during a complete resorting of the books on my shelves is The Moment Before Drowning by British author James Brydon. I have no doubt why I bought this one…it is set in December 1959 and focuses on a French Resistance fighter who has just returned from the fighting in Algeria. The man is a former detective, and while awaiting his own trial for a brutal crime (in Algeria?) he is asked to help investigate the murder and mutilation of a teenaged girl in the small French village he calls home. This is a 2018 novel.
I’m still recovering from spending almost all of yesterday resorting my bookshelves from top to bottom. That turned out to be much more a physical challenge than I expected it would be, so I’m taking it relatively easy the rest of the weekend. I’m way behind on catching up on all my favorite book blog reading at the moment, but I do hope you all have been discovering some great new books for the rest of us. See you soon.
