The Sunday Salon: This Week's Books

Today I've been thinking about my summer reading list, and also taking stock of what's come in during the last week. Even though I keep promising myself that I'm going to cut way back on book acquisitions, I'm a champion back-slider, so the promise keeps getting broken. Well, promises to oneself are made to be broken, don't you think?

My actual reading today has been really scattershot. I've dipped into several books without really settling down with any of them. There were the Sunday papers and book review supplements to be dealt with, and then shopping, and then the U.S. Open on TV, and then a bit of a Sunday snooze. And tonight we'll be watching the NBA finals again and the Tonys, too. So it looks like this isn't going to turn out to be one of those Sundays when I get a lot of reading done.

But about this week's haul. Three of the books were free books, so it's not quite as bad as it seems. I received ARCs of The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman; The Fires, a book of novellas by Alan Cheuse; and Howard S. Smith's reworking of I, robot. I've heard good things about The Aviary Gate, so I'm looking forward to reading that one – don't know much about the other two. But they'll all be in my summer line-up.

James Lasdun's The Horned Man is another book I'm planning to read this summer. It's actually a book I already owned, but had lost track of. I've been looking for it for months now, but somehow it got stuck on the wrong shelf, and I never would have found it if I hadn't been going through all our books as I list them on LibraryThing. So I guess all that cataloguing has been good for something besides feeding my neurosis.

Of the other books that made their way into my life this week, one is another Library of America book – Poems, Prose, and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop. Not on my immediate to-read list, but I do like her poetry (especially "One Art"). But Summer Reading by Hilma Wolitzer is just that – part of my summer reading stack. Well, with a title like that, how could it not be?

The two John Dunning books (The Bookman's Wake and The Bookman's Promise ), and Michael Crichton's Sphere are very nice, very reasonably priced first editions for my mystery and science fiction collections. And Graham Joyce's Requiem is a book I'm thinking of reading for the Suspense & Thriller Challenge that I'm participating in – it should be perfect for the Religious Thriller category.

So I guess that's about it (one of my mother's favorite phrases). But speaking of the S& T Challenge – I'm also looking for a "Locked Room" mystery to read. The only idea I've come up with so far is Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia which I think is a variation on that theme. But I believe I've actually read that one many years ago, and I'm really trying to read all new stuff for the challenge. So if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful to hear about them.

And if anybody's interested, Playbill is once again blogging the Tonys here.