Despite the best laid plans, the butterfly has flapped its wings, and instead of hitting up that list of nonfiction books I’d planned to tear through, I’ve found myself with a fiction-craving, which is similar to a fast-food craving for me these days. It doesn’t come as often as it used to.
It started with a re-reading of ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. I followed that up with a re-reading of Bag of Bones. I forgot how good that book was and I enjoyed it much more the second time around (I think I first read it in 2012). Last night I bounced around quite a bit, even reading half of Hell House by Richard Matheson before giving up on it (it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be). Late last night (or very early this morning), as I had trouble drifting off, I decided to switch to Harry Bosch, and started where I’d left off, with Trunk Music. That seems to have stuck for now.
I enjoy character novels like the Bosch books. I think my favorite of this type is Craig Johnson’s Longmire books, which I absolutely love. But the thing I like about Bosch is that they are set in L.A. and having lived in L.A. for nearly 20 years, many of the places are familiar to me. I can see them that much more clearly and that makes for a better over all story.
Michael Connelly has to be a fairly prolific writer and that kind of thing impresses the writer in me. I always wonder how some writers can be so prolific and still maintain what I consider to be high quality in their writing. There are, by my count, 23 Bosch novels that have appeared between 1992 and 2021, a period of 29 years. Consider, however, Connelly wrote 15 additional books in the overall “Bosch” universe making for a total of 38 books in a 29 year period. I guess that’s what it means to play in the big leagues.
These are great books to read over a long holiday weekend like the one that begins at 5 pm local today. After a spate of great (and sometimes very hot!) spring weather, things look cool and dreary this weekend with lots of rain. Reading Bosch novels, at least I can imagine I am in a place with some better weather than what we’ll be having on the traditional opening weekend of summer here on the east coast.
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