I haven't been sharing my library finds lately as I have been feeling guilty about them. It's a constant shift back and forth: library-home-back to library again. I just can't read them as fast as I borrow them, so I hate to talk about them generically and then not follow through later with a proper post. However, I've noticed a variety of tags on Goodreads and one of them is "marked as to-investigate" (which I am snagging from Teresa at Shelf Love!). I like the sound of that. A book you might check out at the bookstore on your next visit or look at when you go to the library as a possible read. Whether or not you actually read them is another story. So I have chosen a selection of recent library books that I am going to "investigate". I may read them now, I may get in line for them again to read later or just make a note of titles or maybe even send a few back unread knowing they're just not the book for me. So it seems fair to share my reading possibilities with you, right?
The top two books are from the library where I work and the rest are from the public library. Two of them have long lines, so I need to decide quick whether I'm going to attempt to read them or not.
Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories by Giovanni Verga has been on my wishlist for years. I ran across a reference to his stories recently and decided to look him up in the library catalog--why didn't I do this to begin with? "Love, adultery and honor are the recurring themes in stories set against the scorched landscapes of the slopes of Mount Etna and the Plain of Catania".
Since I've been reading crime novels and mysteries set in Italy, I guess the setting has spilled over into my other reading. When I went looking for the short stories by Verga I came across Teresa by Neera. I had never heard of the author or book before but the spine peeking out from the shelf caught my eye. The setting of Teresa is the Po Valley near Cremona, which is the exact setting of Valerio Varesi's River of Shadows. "Through Teresa and other women characters, Neera addressed the social injustice of such societal restrictions in nineteenth-century Italy. Neera's narratives are noted for their subtle psychoanalytical presentation of feminine states of mind as well as for their unflinching examination of the contemporary social system."
Deceptions by Rebecca Frayn is the story of a child who goes missing and after weeks of a police investigation appears to have vanished in thin air. Years later a phone call reveals the child's fate, but the mystery of his disappearance has only just begun.
Ryan David Jahn's Good Neighbors won the CWA John Creasey Dagger Award. It was the comparison to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window that made me request it, however. A woman is murdered outside an apartment complex and no one comes to her rescue. Frayn explores why.
City of Ash by Megan Chance -- "When the great Seattle fire of 1889 leaves them with nothing to lose, two very different women discover a mutual passion for revenge." This sounds like a fun sort of romp, and I like the idea of reading about historical Seattle.
Another Italian setting by a British author--The Mermaid Garden by Santa Montefiore. "Spanning four decades and sweeping from the Italian countryside to the English coast, this new story by Santa Montefiore is a moving and mysterious tale of love, forgiveness, and the past revealed." This sounds like very pleasant escapist reading--I'd love to try and squeeze it in.
As I am reading Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz at the moment, and it is as bleak as you would expect, the thought of reading a novel with a WWII setting about Polish refugees didn't appeal to me as much as it did when I got in line for Amanda Hodgkinson's 22 Britannia Road a while back. Somehow fiction pales when you're reading about the real sufferings of someone who endured what Levi did. But Fleur Fisher's review makes me think I should at least give it a try.
And last but not least is Jane Bradley's You Believers, which is another story of a missing woman. I believe the story is told from the different perspectives of each person involved in the crime from the victim to the culprit and everyone in between. It's been called a gripping and intense read.