Three for the price of one today, or, I just feel like reading tonight rather than thinking too hard on a blog post. I've got several books lined up to read soon, but I am trying to be good and actually finish something before diving into these. So as I rotate books out of my reading pile, these are at the top of the TBR pile to rotate in. In anticipation, here is a little taste of each.
My next classic is going to be Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. I attempted it once before, and I actually found the bookmark I used stuck in between pages 84 and 85. It's based on an actual criminal case that occurred in upstate New York in 1906. Did I already mention it has over 800 pages filled with tiny print (I think I did...). I want to start reading and have it be so engaging that I can't put it down.
"Dusk--of a summer night."
"And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants--such walls as in time may linger here as a mere fable."
"And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six,--a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant-looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers. And with him a woman perhaps five years his junior, taller, not so broad, but solid of frame and vigorous, very plain face and dress, and yet not homely, leading with one hand a small boy of seven and in the other carrying a Bible and several hymn books. With these three, but walking independently behind, was a girl of fifteen, a boy of twelve and another girl of nine, all following obediently, but not too enthusiastically, in the wake of the others."
I'm wondering if there is enough time this year to salvage my very optimistic reading plans I made at the end of 2010? I was so certain that this year was going to be my year, but here it is rapidly approaching the halfway mark and I have very little to show for it. Well, little that resembles anything in my reading plans, that is. I have some great books on my list of to-reads, but they are mostly very long or a little on the challenging side. Maritta Wolff's book Night Shift was published in 1942 and quite popular when it first came out. It fits in well with the other books I've been reading lately, and I feel like reading it, so now's the moment. Or very soon anyway.
"The personnel manager dropped the telephone back in the cradle, the radiator behind her made a little whistling sound and right after that there came a buzz from the inner mechanism of the electric clock on the corner of the desk. Wham! Whistle! Buzz!As if there was some idiotic relationship between the three noises, leading through a brief climax to a finality, Virginia Braun thought. And she almost laughed out loud."
I've been racking up the ILL requests lately, so I have a stack in the order I need to read them (I think I've mentioned I try hard to read my ILL books since the library went to special trouble to get them for me). I'm nearing the end of my current book, so next up will be Camilla Ceder's Frozen Moment. Ceder is a new to me Swedish crime author featuring Inspector Christian Tell. Tell is a "world-weary detective with a chequered past". It sounds as though this is going to be a detective/reporter set up much like Mari Jungstedt's novels (Unseen and Inner Circle) that I read a couple of years ago.
"In the old days, when they were both working, Åke Melkersson liked to get up an hour before his wife--she was more of a night person--just to indulge himself for that hour with a cup of coffee and the crossword in the morning paper. A quarter of an hour before they were due to leave, he would wake Kristina; she would get dressed more or less in her sleep, then stumble her way to the garage and collapse in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees. She would sleep all the way to the timber factory gate, where he would get out and she would drive the short distance to Hjällbo and the post office where she had worked for so many years."
Since I've got my work cut out for me here, I'd better go read!