What are you reading this week?

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Now, the weekend has come and gone again and I'm sure most of you spent some of it reading. I did and I'm also already looking forward to the coming week as I'm still waiting for a package from Amazon. Yeah, it's like waiting for Christmas, I know. 

I didn't read any longer works this weekend but actually tried to work through a French book for once. Boy, it had surely been some time since I did that and I have to admit that my French has become quite a bit rusty. I read La vie celibataire by Yvonne Bruton which is not too demanding chick lit, perfect to get back into the language. The book had little exercises at the end of each chapter which made things a lot easier. It is thus an easy and fun read and I recommend it to anyone wanting to improve their language skills.

I also started out on Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet until the husband snatched it away from me. Ok, it really is his copy and I kind of "stole" it from his shelf. ;-) Well, he does want to read it first now, which means that I'll just have to wait til I can read on. It looked promising though and I hope it can live up to the raving reviews it received in the TLS.

I then gave in to my current passion for gothic narratives and downloaded Stephen King and Joe Hill's In the Tall Grass onto my Kindle. It is a borderline case of novella/short story and I'm glad to announce that King seems to be returning to his original voice. I used to be a big fan in my teen years, but never really liked his most recent stories. This story, however, touches on what initially drew me to his writing and, without giving too much away, it does raise the goose-bumps on your back while triggering your most elemental instinctive fears.

So, the books I'm still waiting for (Hurry, Mr Postman, will ya?) are Libba Bray's novel The Diviners and Krystyna Kuhn's seventh installment of the Das Tal books, a German series about the strange going-ons at a remote Canadian college for gifted students. The latter has been announced forever, but is continuously being pushed back by the publisher. I do hope they manage to bring it out soon. Life is just too stressful right now and I need some not overly high-brow literary food to unwind with. :-)