Sunday, April 25, 2010

Light reading catch-up

I have been reading a funny hodgepodge of things, really; nothing too demanding. (Brain otherwise occupied in thinking about how to get started on the ABCs of the novel, navigating the inevitable wave of end-of-semester stuff [even on sabbatical!], pondering the complexities of readying my apartment for subletters and packing for 6 months of writing and triathloning and lounging and conferencing and socializing in various climes.)

Two young-adult novels, out of mild curiosity to see what the fuss was about: Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Christina Stead's When You Reach Me.

Two paperbacks I bought for lack of anything better at the newsstand in South Station in Boston, Mary Higgins Clark's just-about-adequate Just Take My Heart and Preston & Child's ludicrous Cemetery Dance.

I belatedly realized that all of the books in my pile of mostly Scandinavian crime fiction were about to be due back at the library, so I did triage and read one each by the three major remaining authors as yet untrawled: Kjell Eriksson's The Princess of Burundi (so-so), Ake Edwardson's Sun and Shadow (superb) and Asa Larsson's Sun Storm (perhaps not as accomplished as the preceding book, but extremely compelling in its main character and also in the Kiruna setting, which I loved). Under other circumstances, I am sure I would be perfectly happy to read more Eriksson, but given the constraint of library due dates I think I will go ahead and return those ones and prioritize reading the other two instead...

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