Hi everyone. I hope you are enjoying your summer immensely. I’ve been supervising a lot of this:
And cracking up at this sort of thing:
And introducing Cormac to new adventures:
And generally feeling very busy.
And what have I been reading lately? Well, I wrote a review of Vanessa Blakeslee’s short story collection Train Shots, which you can find here. Also:
- Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her, which was satisfying long and great.
- Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which was a reread for me, although my first read was decades ago, so it was practically new. I loved it. Both the Christies I’ve read in the last few years have been fabulous.
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which I liked very much. It felt very … shall we say … loosely structured, but still, the story was good and the commentary on American and Nigerian cultures interesting.
- Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Glamorous Ghost, a Perry Mason novel which was just okay, kind of formulaic.
- Iris Owens’s After Claude, which was darkly, satirically funny and sad at the same time.
- Justin Hocking’s The Great Floodgates of the Wonder World, a memoir about surfing and Moby Dick. I liked it, even though those aren’t subjects I’m particularly interested in. Hocking makes them interesting.
- Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road on audio, which was devastating. In a good way.
I hope your summer has been full of good books too!
Of Books and Bicycles 