Welcome to the first week of February! I am starting to feel a bit burned out on all the heavy history I’ve been reading, and am planning on reading some detective thrillers or other relaxing fiction this week.

Teaser Tuesday

“We don’t even know what our population is,” he said in answer to the question Cassie asked. “It’s growing that fast. A few months ago, I would have said thirty-five to forty thousand in the county. There are over ten thousand units in the main camps alone. But I was talking to the director at the water treatment facility and he says they’re handling sewage now for sixty thousand plus. Imagine that,” he said with a snort, “We guess how many residents we have by the sewage they produce.” – THE BADLANDS, CJ BOX

Don’t worry, I won’t be going on another multi-month long Box tear. There’re only six books in the Cassie Dewell series. That’s like, a week and a half of reading at most.

Classics Club Spin #43

The Classics Club Spin prompts us to take twenty of our upcoming CC reads, number them, and then wait for the spin to ‘pick’ a number. We are then compelled to read the book chosen. I have a slight problem in that I don’t have 20 books remaining on my list, just 16 or so, so I told Chatgpt to pick ten books at random: the way I’ll play with the rules is that if 1-10 are chosen, I’m fine; if 11 through 20 are chosen, I just subtract ten. It’s a bit like aces in blackjack, but without losing money. So, my list:

• Resurrection — Leo Tolstoy
• Paradise Lost — John Milton
• On the Nature of Things — Lucretius (trans. Anthony Esolen)
• The Shahnameh — Ferdowsi
• Ida Elizabeth — Sigrid Undset
• Cancer Ward — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier
• Mansfield Park — Jane Austen
• Angle of Repose — Wallace Stegner
• Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston