Goodness, keep up, wouldn't you?

9 went down very nicely, Night train to Lisbon (Mercier), a modern novel which instead of doing any clever show-off modern novel things, just told a story about someone who you ended up caring about, in a way that makes you (made me) want to go to Lisbon and learn Portugese, immediately. Such was the believability and the desire you were left with for it to go right for him, it was possible almost entirely to suspend disbelief about things like him being able to read a complicated and reflective memoir in portugese having only been learning it for a couple of weeks. Somehow, this doesn't matter. It was one of those read-in-a-day novels that feels like an excellent use of a Sunday.
Then I whipped through 10 John Harvey Jones's Troubleshooter which I'd suddenly had an urge to read having been spending some dry time reading about corporate governance at work. I'd really enjoyed his Making it work so I was fairly sure I'd like this too, and I did, though it was a bit short - not many pages per pound, which doesn't matter so much when you only paid a couple of quid for a beaten up second hand copy.
Finishing number 6 towards the end of the week has made me feel I'm no one without having read the Russians, so somewhat ambitiously I've started both 11 Crime and Punishment and 12 Chekhov, some collection of stories. I think I'll need a bit of leaven too but you've got to have reading ambition.