Fantasy picture. Isn't sunshine and sand a nice idea? Someone somewhere is living this scene, but it is not me! But let's pretend. I have no right really to complain considering how awful some people have had it this winter, but cold is cold, and it is cold here and promises to be so all week long. So let's think about reading instead.
I am at the pivotal moment/the halfway mark or further in a number of books and just need some uninterrupted quiet time to be able to add the books to the finished pile. So a quick little run down of this week's reading and then I am off to sit and get on with it.
(I keep telling myself no more new books until I finish at least three, so the pressure is on).
I'm nearly finished reading a new book by Helen Humphreys called The Evening Chorus. I tend to get on very well with her writing and it has been no different with this slender novel. I don't want to say too much about it since I am planning on writing about it in just a few days, but I will say she revisits WWII in this newest book. When I first started reading I had this urge to reread one of her earlier books, Afterimage, and so have pulled it from my shelves. The novel was inspired by the life of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. I have this idea for a new reading project and Afterimage would work perfectly as one of the reading choices, but must catch up with my other reading first.
I must say Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange has been very . . . colorful? I saw the movie years ago so nothing that is happening is much of a surprise, but reading the story rather than seeing it has been an interesting experience. I should probably be careful when I say I do like it, but less for the what happens in the story than the way it is told and why it is told. I can only read this in short bursts, however. I've not much left but I'll keep going at my measured, though not terribly fast, clip.
I've already told you about Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular. I've got a bit of time to read it still before my class discusses it, but I find I don't want to put the book down and have been reading it in tandem (literally) with Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata. I have quite mixed feelings about Tolstoy. I do love his fiction, but I don't always like how women fare in his stories. He is a complex individual and I guess it is reflected in his writing. Anyway this is such an intriguing reading pair--so glad I found the two books.
Hell and Good Company by Richard Rhodes has been very compelling reading and I'm down to those last hundred pages, which sound like nothing at all but when it comes to nonfiction it always takes me twice as long as I expect. Knowing that I get to pick a new nonfiction when I finish is always a great motivator, though. I know I should be reading A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany by Sigrid MacRae next (it's a library copy, so a little added pressure), but there have been a few other temptations lately that seem to be stacking up next to my bedside.
And then there is my usual lunchtime/meal reading. Do you have books you read while you eat? Just like gym reading, I have meal reading. Certain books just pair well with certain activities. For me, Laura Lippman's Baltimore Blues (the first Tess Monaghan mystery) and Jane Harris's Gillespie and I have been my books of choice of late. Both are completely engrossing for different reasons. I like Tess (for me she feels like a cross between Stephanie Plum and Barbara Havers). She's fun to spend time with--however weird that sounds.
And as for the Harris. I was recently bemoaning how thrillers these days all seem to be compared with Gone Girl (which I have still not yet read and wonder if I am the last person who likes to read thrillers has not yet done so), and while I know why publishers do and normally don't mind--lately it has been wearing thin on me and I want something different (but still suspenseful). Well, strange as it sounds, Gillespie and I has been marvelously suspenseful and even comes with an unreliable narrator. Yes, this is what I want in a suspenseful novel. The right idea and a fresh idea--even though the book is several years old now. And not a book you would typically think would be suspenseful.
One other reading note for this week. I am on the mailing list for the weekly Library of America short story. It arrives in my email inbox each Sunday, and while I often think I should read this one or that one . . . I think I do want to read this week's story--A Matter of Principle by Charles W. Chesnutt.
"In this satirical tale, a debutante seeks a husband who will meet with her parents’ approval and who, in particular, is “as fair of complexion as she."
I feel as though I have been talking about and reading the same handful of books for ages now, so hopefully very soon I will have some 'fresh blood' to share bookwise.