Monday, September 28, 2009

Reading News

The library's hold system has come through with a whole pile of titles all at once. I have the newest mystery titles by Margaret Coel, Kenneth Abel, Peter Lovesey, Deborah Grabien, Harry Dolan, William Kent Krueger & Sara Paretsky to look forward to. (I'm an addict of the new. When I think I have nothing to read, I only mean that no brand-new mysteries I'm looking forward to are in hand.)

Plus three young adult titles, two juvenile fictions, Alastair Reynolds' newest, and three non-fiction titles. M is bringing me a pile of Wendell Berry's novels from her bookcase, which she is sure will feed my fiction hunger. Sunny Frazier is sending me a copy of her book. And really, it's time to take another run at Willard Bascom's Waves and Beaches : The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface, try to understand more about, well, waves and beaches.

The Kenneth Abel is a Katrina book, so I think I'll read that one next; last week I gobbled down Dave Eggers' Zeitoun in one long insomniac night, extraordinarily smooth nonfiction that proceeds like a Katrina novel—Katrina coming, Katrina happening, city drowned, aftermath (with unexpected further bad thing happening)— only it's truth. My bookmarks are in Kathryn Stockett's The Help and Scott Weidensaul's wonderful book about migratory birds, Living on the Wind.

The hold-for-emergency book is Katy Munger's new Casey Jones mystery, the first since 2001, which I think I will just go ahead and read, instead of saving it, the next time I am stranded with no new mysteries lined up and find myself neurotic with fear-of-nothing-to-read. Except once a few decades ago when I was in a broken-down Zen Center van in the middle of Market Street at rush-hour in San Francisco, I've never in my life actually had nothing to read.

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