This is actually a belated sequel; I got these books in a used bookstore the last week of August, when I was on vacation. But I had something else already in the "Reviewing the Mail" slot for that Sunday, so these books got bumped.
Used bookstores are always random and serendipitous, but I find I'm grabbing fewer things each visit as I get older - there are so many books that I'm pretty sure I already read, or have a copy of, and so I skip over them if they're not on my list (which is probably not as accurate as I'd like). But I did find a few book-shaped objects, and I'll read them eventually. This is what jumped out at me:
Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Kate Atkinson's first novel; it won the Whitbread Prize back in the mid-90s. I've read three of her Jackson Brodie novels - they're not really mysteries, though Brodie is a private detective, and the the mystery audience has embraced them- one of them very recently (so recently, in fact, the post about it going live later this week), and found she has a great novelist's power and vision. When a writer hits you like that, it's time to go back to the beginning and make a project of it - so here I am, at the beginning.
The Midnight Library is, I think, Matt Haig's most famous and/or popular book. I read his
Dead Father's Club (a contemporary riff on
Hamlet) way back in my SFBC days, and liked it a lot...and then didn't think of his work for a decade or more. I thought about Haig again, for reasons I can't now recall, a couple of years ago, and found his nonfiction book
Notes on a Nervous Planet. But Haig is mostly a novelist, and seems to be usually somewhere in the hinterlands of fantastika, so I both feel like I
should read his books and that I'll like them. So now I can at least read
this one when the mood takes me.
Vacationland is what I still think of as "that new John Hodgman book." But it was published in 2017, and what I now have is a decent condition but still clearly used trade paperback. As far as I can tell, Hodgman hasn't published a book since, so I'm still
technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. This purports to be a book of stories about travel; I don't know if it's really that or if it gets more Hodgmanian, in the ways of his very quirky earlier books. (Either way, I'm interested.)
Barking is a random Tom Holt book I found on the shelves; it was his new novel in 2007. I recently read his
When It's a Jar, and enjoyed that book - and it looks like his books are mostly all the same sort of thing, with a few very vague, very loose "series" recently - so I figured I might as well grab another, to have it on hand. I gather this one has werewolves in it, from the title.
And last is
Snow Angels, a Stewart O'Nan novel I didn't have. I've been reading O'Nan's books - more slowly than he writes them, I think - for years, and have always been impressed. He's a fine novelist who does something different each time out, while still keeping a core psychological focus and knack for precisely true phrasing. What I found, randomly, was a 2007 movie tie-in edition (I had no idea there was a movie, nor do I really care) of this 1994 novel.
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