I feel I’m overdosing on crime fiction right now and need to read something else. I’m in the middle of Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls and whilst I think it’s a good story, I’m being sucked down to the dark side. Rebus is pessimistic:

…  once again Rebus’s speech had gone unspoken, the one about how he’s lost any sense of vocation, any feeling of optimism about the role – the very existence of policing. About how these thoughts scared him, left him either sleepless or scarred by bad dreams. About the ghosts which had come to haunt him, even in daytime. About how he didn’t want to be a cop any more. (page 17)

It doesn’t help that one of his colleagues has died after falling off Salisbury Crags – was it suicide or not? In addition as Mairie Henderson (journalist) says to him “I think something’s gone bad inside you.” He doesn’t disagree. There’s a paedophile who is being persecuted by his neighbours; an old girlfriend’s son has disappeared and he keeps wondering what his life would have been like if he’d not become a cop; he’s surveilling a killer who has returned to Edinburgh courtesy of the US government and he know it’s a waste of time; he has bad memories and is feeling guilty – he’s in a bad way.

I need to counter-balance this with something different, something unrelated to crime. But when I look at the other books I’ve started and those I’ve recently borrowed from the library I see they’re all crime fiction of one sort or another.

Back to my to-be-read piles, then. So, should I read … ?

• The Snow Geese by William Fiennes. Marina Warner on the back cover states “he has renewed the variety and wonder of the world.”  It’s a blend of  natural history, the snow geese migration, and autobiography, meditations and philosophy.
• The Pursuit of Happiness by Douglas Kennedy – but the back cover states it is a tragic love story of divided loyalties and the random workings of destiny. It’s set in 1945 in Manhattan. Not sure I want tragedy right now.
• The Warrior’s Princess by Barbara Erskine. Maybe I’m in the mood for historical fiction. This is a dual time story – the present and two thousand years earlier at the time of Caractacus, king of the British tribes during a battle with the invading Romans.
• An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. A friend gave me this one saying it’s a wonderful book. Again, (paraphrased) from the back cover – this is a book about love, music and loss – “the power of music to transform human experience.”
• Maybe romantic comedy with The Sex Life of My Aunt by Mavis Cheek – “a modern morality tale … about the age-old conflict between love and money.”
• Or how about Firmin: Adventures of  Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage. Fimin is a rat, a literary rat living in the basement of a bookstore, who develops the ability to read.