New Books in the House and a Reading Calendar

Before I wax on about new books, I have to say that it has now become necessary for me to plot and plan future reading on a calendar, to make sure I have time to read what I intend to this year. This does sound like over-kill and may sound onerous, but I'm looking forward to doing this as a helpful tool, especially because I think it may ensure that the books I most want to read are not overlooked.

I'm still at the very beginning of A Woman in White. I got totally stuck there while household havoc abounded. And did it ever!  I plan to pick up the pace with this one, starting Sunday (tomorrow) morning.

In the meantime, to help divert my mind from an overflowing washing machine, flooded laundry room, etc.,  I purchased two 2019 fiction titles for the Nook. I've already finished The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, a debut novel and a thriller that packs a punch. Yes, it certainly has received a lot of hype, but it is the best thriller  I've read since last January's The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. As it turns out, A.J. Finn is a pseudonym for the author Daniel Mallory. He has recently been accused of plagiarism for this book, by the way.  In any case I recommend The Silent Patient, if you find the premise appeals to you. It's about a wounded psychotherapist and his patient, accused of murdering her husband, but did she, really??

The second novel is English author Tessa Hadley's recently published Late in the Day. I made it to page 50 and began to question if I wanted to continue. It's a story that involves two closely-knit London families, the parents of which met at university and before marriage, and who dated each other all around. On the second page of the book, deep into the couples' middle age, the most charismatic of the foursome has died very suddenly.
The novel has received stellar reviews from The New York Times, whose reviewer said it was the best book Hadley has ever written. As I've mentioned before I simply loved her novel The Past.
I do think I will finish this novel, but with our household crises, I may not have felt in the mood for it.

And lest I forget, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham, published last week by Simon & Schuster, finally arrived at our home last night. I say "finally" because even though UPS tracked the package as "delivered" to our location, there was no book to be found on our property. Come to find out, the rookie UPS employee had wrapped the package in a plastic bag and tied it to a tree on the road on a neighbor's property, a quarter of a mile from our house. I will spare you further details.
What's new and unique about this book about Chernobyl is that the author studied never-before-released Soviet records from that time period--which was April 1986 and the months and years following until the downfall of the Soviet regime. Higginbotham received an excellent review from Anne Appelbaum, whose books relating to Soviet history are very well-known and are prize-winners.
This is a scholarly book, so I'm reading it very slowly, checking the notes, eager to learn more about  this terrible event that is so instructive about nuclear power and its limitations. It is set in Ukraine, so it will count toward The European Reading Challenge.