It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I finished Fallen Land, Patrick Flanery's new book out last month, and enjoyed it a lot. It's a fever-dream of horror and suspense. Flanery seems really interested in issues of paranoia and safety in a suburban landscape; his book Absolution covered this ground in a different way and I really enjoyed the way he raised these issues in both books. I think Fallen Land will be more relatable as it's set in America in a milieu more familiar to American readers, but he distorts it not unlike Margaret Atwood distorted America in The Handmaid's Tale. The trick with Fallen Land is it's not technically a dystopia. Or is it?

I'm still in the thick of The Son, Philipp Meyer's future classic about the Comanche wars and Texas. I also started Swimming to Elba, a coming of age story by Silvia Avallone set in a gritty Italian town not far from the eponymous island.  It was a finalist for the prestigious Strega Prize.

I also started Ruth Ozeki's dark and delightful A Tale for the Time Being, about two women, one in Japan and one in America, one of whom communicates with the other via her diary which washed up after the tsunami of 2011. It's a wonderful book and I can't wait to finish and tell you more.

On the audio front, I've started How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill, which I'm enjoying also. I wanted to get in some extra Irish history before my trip in the fall. It's delightful!

What about you? See more at BookJourney.wordpress.com.