There is always another book around the corner. Do you find that to be the case, too. I mean there are books like these temptations, but then there are those that come, not entirely unexpectedly, but not exactly planned either. I will never complain about bookish mail, but I do often feel the weight of all those stories. Not in a bad way, mind you (save for my lack of really good reading time at the moment), but they always hover on the periphery. And usually that is what gets me in so much trouble.
The good news is I am quickly approaching the end of one of my RIP reads, and hope then to pick up my other one and get to it in earnest. I wonder if I can squeeze in a good ghost (short) story still this month or not. Maybe a reread of a favorite. A short story post is in the making (in my mind anyway, and hopefully soon "on paper"). And then I think I will call it good for this year's RIP season. October is just chugging along and seems to be on a very quick downward slope.
My October NYRB subscription book has arrived. I can't think of a book I have read, lately at least, translated from Chinese, but I will have an opportunity with Ge Fei's The Invisibility Cloak. It is a comic novel with a "likable loser" at its center. "Inspired by the music he loves and the city he knows so intimately (Beijing), modern master Ge Fei combines trenchant bitterness with humor and detail with dark ambiguity in a brilliantly original work of social fantasy." I'm intrigued. And it happens to be a slender novel of 144 pages. You can read an excerpt here.
I've been reasonably good about sticking to the same three or four books every day (very slow but somewhat steady progress), but I do find myself getting the tiniest bit fidgety. As the NYRB is so short I might let it cut in line ahead of (or during as I am now past the halfway mark) of my Vicki Baum read. Sometimes interjecting a nice quick book or novella into my daily reading is just what I need to feel a small sense of accomplishment and that I really am making progress. I've also grabbed a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Femists after reading Stefanie's post. I meant to read it when it first arrived at my library anyway, so not much prompting needed here.
And if you signed up for the Season of Stories, you could also be enjoying a short story (in daily installments!) by Elizabeth McCracken. It is even set in a library. Nudge, nudge, go sign up. It will take you ten minutes to read the daily serials and you will feel so good at having read a short story this week. Really!
And I hope to tell you a bit about Elizabeth J. Church's The Atomic Weight of Love, which the kind people at The Fourth Estate sent me for review. It will be published in the UK in just about a week now (already available here in the US). It was already on my wishlist and sounds most promising. "In her sweeping debut novel, Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era." Church's UK publicist thought it was "beautifully written and terribly moving" with a wonderful narrator. Yay for good books.