Book notes

Reading

These are the books I am actively reading.

• Hell and Other Destinations, by Madeleine Albright, which started off great. It’s impressive when a memoir has you as engaged as a good piece of fiction. I read and enjoyed her Fascism: A Warning in 2019 and I’m feeling like I’ll probably start working through her others.
• Dead Lions, by Mick Herron, the second in The Slough House series. A rare case in which I watched (Slow Horses, Season Two) the story before reading. But now I want to get caught up with a few of the books before season 3.
• Watt, by Samuel Beckett, recently at night before bed, which makes for some strange bleary eye moments. Maybe I’ll know what it’s about by the end; right now I’m in the middle of a very long monologue and looking forward to the next section.
• Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I end up reading 10 pages or so every few nights. It’s been good, I’ve just been slow.
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is back! It’s been silent for a couple months, but earlier this week A sat with me for 6 pages and then actually requested it this morning! We’re on page 107 and Stephen is getting dark.

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.

• After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz
• Bright Magic, by Alfred Döblin
• English Magic, by Uschi Gatward
• Complete Short Stories, by Graham Greene
• Limber, by Angela Pelster, in what’s become an annual reread.
• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, because it’s so long and I had it checked out of the library and now I don’t. This will probably end up as a restart one day.

Recently finished

These are the books I’ve finished since last time. Wild that one of them was in progress and two were on deck. I’m never that organized!

• Sidetracked, by Henning Mankell, the next in the Kurt Wallander series. It’s comfortable.
• The Trees, by Percival Everett, our book club’s most recent read. It was very good and extremely readable.
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, was an excellent book and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone born within 5 years of me.

On deck

• God, Human, Animal, Machine, by Meghan O’Gieblyn, is our next book club pick. I’m looking forward to a reflection on AI written right before large language models became widely available to the public.

Added to the long list

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

• The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, by Olga Ravn
• The Long Take, by Robin Robertson
• The Magician, by Colm Tóibín
• The Fifth Woman, by Henning Mankell
• Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
• Babel: An Arcane History, by R.F. Kuang
• Remarkably Bright Creaturs, by Shelby Van Pelt
• Saturday Lunch With The Brownings And Other Stories, by Penelope Mortimer
• Ice Candy Man, by Bapsi Sidhwa
• Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack
• Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray
• Soldier Sailor, by Claire Kilroy
• King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig
• Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, by James E. Lovelock