Summer Reading

So what do you do in the middle of summer in the middle of a pandemic?  Well, if you're a reader, writer, librarian like me, you, of course...read!  After all, theaters are closed, sports are on hold, and TV sucks, so...
I started off with Jo Nesbo's latest thriller, Knife.  Nesbo is Norway's best crime writer, and most of his novels feature the on-again, off-again alcoholic detective, Harry Hole.  He's back on the bottle in this one, but it doesn't stop him from tracking down, through Oslo's sordid underbelly, the notorious murderer and rapist Svein Finn.  Great fun, with lots of splashing blood and Nordic noir. 
​

Next, came the gentler, humorous essays by Rick Bragg, Alabama's best living author.  My Southern Journey:  True Stories From the Heart of the South contains short articles and reminiscences that first appeared mostly in Southern Living where Bragg writes a regular column entitled Southern Journal on the magazine's back page.  Anyone who knows Alabama will recognize the familiar truths in these homespun tales of country living in a kinder, less troubled time and place.

Next, I read Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita, an expansive, witty novel of obsession and American life in the 1950s.  It is at the same time funny and heart-breaking, as well as masterful in its meditation on love and the depths of madness.
​ 

A new first novel, My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell, has been compared to Lolita, since it deals with the same subject matter:  the psychological dynamics of a romantic relationship between an under-age girl and an older manipulative man.  While Lolita is told from the perspective  of the male seducer, Humbert Humbert, My Dark Vanessa is recounted by the victim herself, and is all the more sad and troubling because of it.  Warning:  neither is a light read, but both are well worth the ride.
​

After that pair, I needed something more on the escapist side, so I turned to one of my favorite authors, James Lee Burke, and his latest detective novel, The New Iberia Blues, that features, as most of his novels do, New Iberia Parish's crack detective Dave Robicheaux who, regardless of what evil lurks down in southern Louisiana's bayou country, is forced to confront the region's many ghosts, its racial complexities, and the ever invasive incursions of the New South.  This is Burke's 37th novel and thankfully Dave and his faithful sidekick Clete Purcel have not aged or eased up a single lick.

I next read Sierra Crane Murdoch's Yellow Bird:  Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country.  This one is the true story of a 2012 murder on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.  But more than a murder mystery, it's the story of one woman's obsession (Lisa Yellow Bird) and the history and study of the Native Americans in the Northwest.  Coupled with Michael Powell's Canyon Dreams:  A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, that I read a few months ago,  you'll find a fascinating exploration of Native American culture today and the historical antecedents that led to it.
​

Finally, I just finished Lauren Wilkinson's debut novel, American Spy, that updates the espionage thriller in unusual and original ways, since the spy in question is both black and female and, as you might imagine, at continuing odds with her identity.  Reminiscent of Sam Greenlee's classic 1969 novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, this book is about African political drama, romance, family, and what it's like to be a black women in America today.  Read it!