I’ve been reading slowly for the last six weeks because I’ve spent most of my reading time since Labor Day weekend watching Friday Night Lights. I don’t often finish TV series that I see so many raves about. I gave up on The Sopranos and Lost but finished Breaking Bad, but I’ve never really gone through a set of five seasons so quickly. I’m a sucker for teen angst, I loved a whole bunch of the characters, and the football obsession is a little removed from my daily existence. I am so fond of that show.
What I have managed to read in the last month is a lot of Canadian crime fiction as well as Exile, the second book in the Garnethill trilogy by Denise Mina. Exile grated on me when the main character Maureen kept getting herself into needlessly dangerous situations, but fortunately as I dipped into a couple early Joanne Kilbourn novels by Gail Bowen, the amateur detective didn’t risk her life needlessly so much. Both Murder at the Mendel and The Wandering Soul Murders were published in the early 1990’s, so I knew I could probably avoid the unreliable narrator thing I keep on coming across in recently published crime novels. What was striking about the books was just how dark they turned in the second half of each novel as Joanne found out that things were not as they seemed. Finally, I also finished Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead, which wraps up a lot of plot threads from the previous installment in the Inspector Gamache series, The Brutal Telling. It’s the only police procedural I’ve read recently, and it’s the rare book that I loved for its ending. The story involves the murder of an obsessive amateur archaelogist trying to find the remains of Champlain in Quebec, and the backwards-moving storyline involves Gamache involved in an awful police shooting that isn’t completely revealed until the last section of the book.
After this stretch of reading books in series I like, I think it’s time to try something new to me. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and I have a little time to dig around on my shelves and my Kindle, whose contents I frequently forget. Have a good weekend.