Book notes

Reading

These are the books I am actively reading.

• American Prometheus, by Kai Bird, is our current book club pick. I think it’s the most capital-B Biography of anything we’ve read so far.
• The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I first added to my list because Phil said at some point it was his favorite book.
• A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, edited by Jack Fennell, which I started reading on January 19, 2019 after a Stan Carey thread on Twitter and somehow let it sit at half-finished for 3 years on the Kindle.

Less actively reading

I’m always “reading” a dozen books, some of which I haven’t actually touched in months. These I’ve at least opened at some point in the last month or are collections that I’m working through slowly.

• Catch 22, by Joseph Keller, has been sitting on the pile. I somehow lost momentum. Our current book club book is long, so this will wait.
• After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz
• Bright Magic, Alfred Döblin
• English Magic, Uschi Gatward
• Complete Short Stories, Graham Greene

Recently finished

In progress on many, finished with none. Slacker!

On deck

• The Storyteller, by Dave Grohl, is still on the nightstand.

Added to the long list

These are the books I’ve run into over the seven weeks and added to some sort of “to one day read” list that is ever growing and will never shrink.

• The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple, which has been on my long list for a while, but I saw Temple mentioned and looked him up again.
• Trillion Dollar Triage, by Nick Timiraos, but with some hesitancy about whether I really want to know.
• Got ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing, by Robin McLean, via this Guardian review.
• Against Heaven, by Kemi Alabi
• Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, by Eduardo Galeano, via a great review on Goodreads by Nikolay.
• The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, by Jeff Pearlman, because of this article.
• The Complete Saki, by Saki
• The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, by Matthew Hollis
• Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank
• Parallel Stories, by Péter Nádas
• Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, by Lars Mytting, because Goodreads showed me that Eric liked a review and I thought: how could I pass up a title like that.