As of last week's reading of Prophet Song, I'm finally ready to give a final ranking of the 2023 Booker Prize nominees as I experienced them for myself over the past few months. Obviously, my final ranking reflects only my personal experience with the nominated books. I took one final look at the list of nominees, and ended up doing a bit of last-minute juggling that I hadn't expected to be ..read more

Seldom does my week go as far off course as this last one did, and it all started just two days after I posted my reading plan for that week. A routine doctor's appointment turned into two days of outpatient testing that I won't be getting answers from for another two weeks, but at least there was enough sitting around time in waiting rooms during the week for me to get a fair amount of reading ..read more

 Crow Talk is one of those books that sneak up on you as you read them. I was slow to warm up to Mary Francis O'Neill, the young woman at the heart of Crow Talk, and early on she is so geographically and socially isolated that I began to wonder if I ever would. It's not that "Frankie" is an unimpressive woman. As noted in the novel's very first paragraph, Frankie is first in her University ..read more

 I can hardly believe that finally, after weeks and weeks of waiting for my turn at a library copy of the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, is in my hands.  I even managed to make a good start on it last week, and it looks like Prophet Song is going to have been a novel worth waiting for. Right now, I don't see it moving all the way up my personal 2023 Booker ranking list to the ..read more

 I'm a regular reader of crime fiction and I especially enjoy police procedurals, so when I began combing through the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist Ordinary Human Failings was the one that first caught my attention. On its surface, the novel does not sound all that unusual: an Irish family has moved from Waterford to 1990 London hoping for a fresh start but find that the ..read more

My reading reached a milestone one day last week that I never expected to attain. And it all started with a book list I've somehow managed to maintain since February 18, 1970, a list that started out as simply one to record the title, author and date read for every book I complete. When it all started, I was 21 years old and about to get married, so I must have been thinking about all ..read more

 Despite being left with the feeling that I had squandered every minute of the time I spent reading one of the three books I finished last week, the week ended up having more pluses than minuses in the end, and that's all about any of us can hope for these days. I finished The Storm We Made, A Death in Denmark, and Ordinary Human Failings, and was very pleasantly surprised by Ordinary Human ..read more

 Again and Again is the story of an 1100-year-old man who by this point is pretty bored with life, but then who can blame him for feeling that way. Honestly, I suppose most 1100-year-old people are probably feeling the same way Eugene feels right now. Eugene's latest body, he tells us, is 106 years old, and he's feeling every one of those 106 years deep down in his bones. He's been living in ..read more

 That A Death in Denmark had so much potential going for it compared to what it actually delivers is what makes this book so disappointing to me. The basic premise of the novel is that an ex-Copenhagen policeman, as a personal favor to someone once close to him, agrees to look into the case of an Iraqi refugee who has been convicted of the murder of a prominent right-wing Danish ..read more

 I'm not real sure where last week disappeared to so quickly, but it's already time to start another reading week. I finished two books last week (Sociopath and Again and Again) and made some good progress on a couple of others, but it sure doesn't feel that way. I'm almost done with The Storm We Made and have gotten to a couple of twists in this story of Japan's WWII occupation of Malaya ..read more