When The Wife’s away, this cat will read

June 24, 2012 — books, Christopher Fowler, Jo Nesbo, Joe Huston, reading, The Sunday Salon

…at least, that is the plan.

My wife just left the driveway to go to a Christian music festival, Creation East, for a week where she is volunteering as an EMT. She told me now I could write about how much I missed her and I said, “No, I’m going to write about how much reading I’m going to catch up on.” She responded smartly: “Because I regularly smack books right out of your hands.”

No, she doesn’t. In fact, most of the time she works second shift and so is gone, leaving me plenty of time to read in the evenings. However, her schedule has had her off on Wednesdays and Thursdays for the last several months, which does affect the amount of reading time I have, especially on Wednesday. I don’t have to go to work at the library on Wednesdays until 3:30 p.m. and so could have the whole rest of the day to read. Now this Wednesday, I will have that, plus Wednesday and Thursday nights after I get home from work  at 8 p.m.

First up, today is Already Dead by Joe Huston, the first of the Joe Pitts Casebooks, about a vampire, with this being my first vampire book. The only reason I’m giving it a try is because I read Huston’s Hank Thompson trilogy (Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, A Dangerous Man) recently and also his stand-alone, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death just this past week.

Next up might be an e-book that I was just notified, as I was writing this, is available from the Free Library of Philadephia: Full Dark House, the first book in the Bryant and May mystery series, by Christopher Fowler. A coworker and I been wanting to read this one for a while, but unfortunately our library doesn’t have all the books in the series, and as regulars here at my blog might know, I am a super-stickler for reading series in order. Now I can let her know if it’s worth starting.

The only other book I know for sure to which I will be getting later in the week is The Leopard by Jo Nesbø, the latest available book in the U.S. in the Harry Hole series. I’ve been enjoying the series and really can’t wait for the next one, Phantom, but it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until…OCTOBER! That’s part of the reason I’ve been putting The Leopard off, because I know there’s going to be such a wait until then. However, now that I have the time, I think I’ll go ahead and get to The Leopard.

In case you missed it, earlier this week I gave my limited take on e-books, e-readers, publishers, libraries, which I probably should have saved for a proper Sunday Salon post but didn’t (as I put it on The Sunday Salon Facebook page, but should have waited until today to post it).

So if you have a significant other, do you plan your reading time around when they’re gone? Do you actually get any more reading done during that time? Whether or not you have a significant other, what are you reading today? What is on your pile of books to read this coming week, this last week of June?