I read pretty solidly for most of Saturday and Sunday, so yesterday, I spent a slow morning putting away laundry and refiling the slides I sent away to be digitized and received back a few weeks ago, which have been sitting on my dining room table ever since. Around noon I showered, and then I ate lunch, and then I started The Last Policeman. And that was how I spent pretty much the rest of my day. I took a break for dinner, then went back to it. At around 8pm, I decided to stop for the day. If I had started earlier, I would have finished it yesterday. I was almost mad at myself, but what's the point. This morning, I got up and had my breakfast and did the Spelling Bee and studied my Italian and then did an online yoga class for good measure and then after yoga I had the strange idea that I should start preparing my lunch (it was 10am) so I wouldn't put it off until I was hungry. This, of course, meant that I sat down to lunch before 11:30 (which is undoubtedly why I have already eaten dinner and washed my dinner dishes as I type this at 6pm). And then I had to pick up one last item at the grocery store, which turned out to be a bigger errand than I anticipated. But I finally got home at maybe 1pm and sat down again with The Last Policeman. All that time, I think I was stalling because I didn't have all that much left to read in the book -- less than 100 pages -- and once I finished it: then what? So, as it happened, I finished it around 3pm and, yes, then what? I puttered around. I didn't clean or go for a walk. I briefly contemplated going back to Bosnian novel #2, which I set aside two weeks ago (and even more briefly considered going back to the other two novels that sit unfinished on the table by my couch). And then I started another book.
Anyway, The Last Policeman. It seems to me that it was recent, but I can't think where or from whom I got the suggestion to read it. I found a used copy a couple weeks ago and I remembered the title as something I wanted to read. And at that point, even as I was still at least two books out from getting there, I pre-selected it as the book I would read next when I was done reading my next book club selection. It seemed like just what I wanted to read at the moment, but it would have to wait. I could write now what I think I always write after reading genre fiction, which is that I don't read much genre fiction. That remains true. The Last Policeman is part of a sub-genre -- a cross-genre really -- that I'm now realizing particularly appeals to me: sci-fi mystery. The mystery drives the plot, but the context (in this case, a pre-apocalypse while earth's inhabitants wait for the planet's likely destruction by an asteroid) is what sets the mood, and that mood makes the book. Thinking this is a genre I'd like to read more of, I did a quick search and found this list of 23 best sci-fi mystery books, which includes the book I was most expecting to encounter -- The City and the City -- but also two other books I've read and enjoyed (The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Pattern Recognition -- though not, I should mention, The Last Policeman). All of these are rather light on the sci-fi (debatably sci-fi in fact), but I'm thinking this is a genre I should explore.
