It's Monday! What am I reading?

It's Monday again (dear me, how the week does fly by), and time to report in on my reading week.  First, my thanks to Sheila at bookjourney for hosting this fun activity -- I actually look forward to chiming in each week.

So....last week I started my topic for March which is "A decade of prize-winning fiction." What I've done is to choose 10 books that have all won some kind of literary award from 2000 to 2009.  Out of those ten, last week I finished two: Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee and A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss.  I also had Ian McEwan's Solar (which will be released at the end of this month) to review for Amazon Vine.  I liked it, but it's not flying well with regular McEwan readers because it's so very different from everything else he writes. Oh well. Moving on, I also finished Peter Straub's A Dark Matter, which was okay, not great.  If you're considering tackling this one, just be aware it's also unlike anything he's written before. And finally, just yesterday I finished The Beast, a Scandinavian crime fiction novel that was so tough to read, not due to the writing but because of the subject matter.  

Currently I've started reading Spies, by Michael Frayn, which won the Whitbread best novel award in 2002.  I started it very late last night but didn't get far because I was so tired I fell asleep with the light on. 

This week: Well, here's the thing. Starting Wednesday, I'm off on a short cruise until Monday, where I'm going to have a LOT of reading time, so I hope to get a lot done. There's absolutely nothing like laying on the lounger chair on my balcony with the sun and the breeze for company while I'm reading.  Anyway, I plan to finish Spies,  then start on Minette Walters' Fox Evil, which won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 2003. After that I think I'll keep going with 2004's winner of the Dublin IMPAC award, Tahar ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light.  If somehow I get through those, then I'll read Akinti's Forest Gate.  We'll see. 

Ambitious, probably, but who knows?