The first book I read was "The Ultimate Good luck", by Richard Ford. This has been on my bookshelves for many years. It was a story about a man and his wife trying to get the wife's brother out of a Mexican jail. There was quite a big body count. Smoking a lot of dope clouded and distorted their minds
Next I moved onto reading the hanging garden by by Ian Rankin. I must have read most of the Rebus novels, but I had been saving this story for a special occasion. There was a gang land war and Rebus's daughter was run over.
I picked up a collection of three early Philip K Dick novels, that I not read before. The books were: the man who japed, Dr. Futurity, and Vulcan's hammer. The stories were not as confusing and paranoid as much of Dick's later work. The Dr Futurity novel reminded me a of stories by A E Van Got, because there was a lot of time travel. The book called Vulcan's hammer was the most paranoid of the books, with conspiracies inside conspiracies.
Last week I listened to a radio program about Thomas Paine. This motivated me to actually read my copy of "Rights of Man". This was Paine's book defense of the french revolution (with a bit about the American revolution as well). It was a vigorous argument, and gave the best argument for abolishment of the House of Lords.
Trouble is, with all that reading I didn't fully relax, even after a full week away.