Don’t worry, I won’t write here about all the books I am currently supposed to be reading. I just want to mention a novel I actually finished (this happens all too rarely lately with novels) and one I am reading avidly.
The one I finished is The Missing Shade of Blue, by Jennie Erdal. The Guardian liked it, but not as much as I did. It was the strong review of it in the Economist that I read some weeks ago that made me get it in Kindle ebook form, and I think of the book as highly as they did. Then again, I always fall for discursive books on philosophical topics, which is not to imply that this book has no action at all. It just has a lot of thought-provoking observations and dialog, in addition to action, and paints vivid pictures of characters, moods, and locations. I brought the book to Bermuda on our recent trip along with many others on my Kindle, but only read about half of it there; today was the day to finish it, made propitious for this by the necessity of spending more than three hours at the car dealership waiting for some routine car maintenance to be performed.
The one I will be finishing soon is The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. I got that at the airport in Bermuda, right before going in to board the plane back to Philadelphia on Thursday. It caught my eye in the little airport bookshop. I remembered having seen good reviews but having thought that the title promised too weird a book. Well, I was wrong then! This is a fabulous book! Nabokovian use of language joins an intellect well-versed in literature, painting, linguistics, anthropology, and even economics to make a book so marvelous and unique that “unique” is rendered an inadequate descriptor, as is “marvelous”. I can see that I will be finishing it before the weekend. I will also have to stop myself from starting it all over again when I finish. There is work to be done this summer, after all, and work I very much want to do, at that!