Summer Reading

Today the radio announced that Frederick is the hottest spot in Maryland, at 99 degrees. Same here, 25 miles north. The heat index is over 100, with a consequent health warning about going outside.

I was out this morning, watering the tomato plants and running errands, but now I'm hunkered down in my bedroom -  a cave with the shades drawn against the afternoon sun.

I should be reading Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter, which I need to read for the Freshman course in the fall. But I can't get into it.  Will try again in a day or two.

What I did finish with no trouble was Denise Mina's mystery/thriller  The End of the Wasp Season. Mina is from Scotland, and the novel is set primarily in Glasgow.  I couldn't put it down.  Am happy to have found her; this was the first of her novels. Now I have her Field of Blood from the library- have two others in process before I start that one ( not even mentioning Hannah Coulter.)

The other two, which are unabridged books on CD, are Martin Cruz Smith's Stalin's Ghost and Stephen King's  11/22/63 .  I have read three other novels by Smith:  Gorky Park, Havana Bay, and Wolves Eat Dogs.His detective is a Soviet, then Russian policeman, and the course of the novels reveals much interesting detail about life in the USSR as it dissolves into its present chaotic state.

I haven't read a Stephen King novel for a while, and listening to this one is revealing how wordy he is -  when I devoured  The Stand and The Shining and The Dead Zone and Firestarter ( my favorites) I did so skimming a lot of the verbiage to get to the meat of the plot.  It's his plots that grabbed me. So I'm not sure about this one yet.