What Are You Reading, And What's Next on Your List?

[porcupine]

I've got to finish Runaway (Munro) and Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) before I begin anything else. Both books are literally six inches away from me right now, and I won't even touch them tonight. I have a curious "tick" where I must finish what I begin, before I start anything else.

I often have two (or three) books going at the same time.  Currently I'm reading

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing)

The Road  (Cormac McCarthy)

both tales of incredible grit and courage.  Unlike Rocks, though, I'm willing to put down a book forever before finishing it.  Life is too short to slog through bad writing.

Still on the "read before putting away" shelf:

Into Thin Air and Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)

Unbroken (Lauren Hillenbrand)

Surfacing and The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)

Runaway (Alice Munro)

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

The Presidents Club (Gibbs and Duffy)

The Future (Al Gore)

Cooked (Michael Pollan)

...how about you?

---

[The following posts have been split into separate threads:

Endurance (DonRocks)]

[Pat]

I have a lot of books on my Kindle (some samples I'm not committed to buying) going on right now.  Too many to start listing.  The two books I have most recently finished reading and would recommend:  The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt), which just won The Pulitzer, and Wild (Cheryl Strayed). I chose the latter because one of the best books I read last year was Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things.  She is an awe-inspiring writer.  Another favorite I read last year was Stephen Fried's Appetite for America, about Fred Harvey and his restaurants.

I have not read any of the books on Porcupine's list .

The Goldfinch is really long, really long.  It took her 11 years to write it.  It could have used a little more editing.  Some parts just had a few too many layers of description.  I loved the book, though.

[DaveO]

I'm not reading anything.  Its a disgrace.  And its so easy.  I have to load up my tablet.  I'm ashamed.  I read business and news and analysis and I scarcely read books anymore.  How sad.  I'm mortified.

But I am going to put in a plug for a first novel by a person with whom I'm friendly:   The Grave Blogger   Its fast, its enjoyable, its suspenseful, and its an eminently readable first novel by a very talented, smart, nice person.   Cripes its only $2.99 on a tablet.  Its the best $2.99 you'll spend...and you'll enjoy it and probably want to read a sequel.  Get it and give it as a gift.  Its so worth it.

[SeanMike]

Currently I'm working on "Robot Uprisings" on my Kindle, and "The Algebraist" in paperback (usually when riding my exercise bike, though that's been pre-empted by watching Game of Thrones recently). I've got a bazillion books coming up on my Kindle, so it'll be whatever I feel like...

[Barbara]

I've got two stacks of unread books (I don't do the Kindle thing) going back at least three years. Before the intertubes came long, I read at least a book a week. Now? I can't even get through the New Yorker in a week's time and they start piling up, too. I've started Unbroken at least twice, before putting it down for other things--and I just Laura Hillenbrand's writing and back story. The last books I sat down and read until the end as soon as they arrived were the latest biography of Julia Child- Dearie and all three volumes of Call the Midwife.

[LauraB]

A book that I read in recent months that I found both enthralling and disturbing was We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.  I liked this book so much that I gave it as birthday gifts to several friends.  I don't want to say more about it because I feel this book is best enjoyed if the reader does not know 'the secret.'  I was very happy to see that it won the PEN/Faulkner award recently.  Very much deserved.

[ChiantiandFava]

The Road  (Cormac McCarthy)

Still on the "read before putting away" shelf:

Into Thin Air and Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)

In case you get addicted to McCarthy like I did after reading The Road--

In order of readability, easiest to most challenging (of what I've read)--

No Country for Old Men

The Road

Blood Meridian

Suttree

Just realized that list is almost in order of latest to earliest writings, very interesting.

Re: Into the Wild. I enjoyed how harsh Krakauer was on McCandless at times--the film glorified him way too much.

As to what I've read recently, I get trapped in the sci fi genre for half-years at a time. Greg Bear is a talented writer (Forerunner Trilogy, part of the Halo universe), Iain Banks (Culture series) was a bit disappointing--way too descriptive for me.

[porcupine]

In case you get addicted to McCarthy like I did after reading The Road-- 

I dunno, The Road is the bleakest thing I've ever read, and I really like bleak.  Two of my favorites are 1984 and On the Beach.  I'll make the argument that 1984 is the bleaker of the two.

After reading On the Beach I thought it would be interesting if the tale were told with a different slant: what if people lost all sense of civilization instead of retaining it in the face of the inevitable?  Voila!  The Road.  oof.

...is McCarthy's style always so chopped?  The Road is written largely in fragmented sentences, with very little punctuation - none for dialogue.  Is that his normal style or did he do that deliberately for this particular story? It's very effective in this context but hard to read.

[ChiantiandFava]

Yes. A few of McCarthy's defining characteristics that spring to mind-- sparse/brutal syntax, layered/complex imagery, half-disembodiment/third person exploratory or three quarter's view. Regarding that last one, his characters are known as "the kid", "the man", "the boy", "the fisherman." Generally, you see what they see but not what they think--commentary seems to conjure itself ephemerally, rather than from an opinion/experience. Three quarters view is what's used in video games in which you see over your character's shoulder and control his/her actions but presumably not their thoughts.

_{"The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness."}

[porcupine]

As to what I've read recently, I get trapped in the sci fi genre for half-years at a time. Greg Bear is a talented writer (Forerunner Trilogy, part of the Halo universe), Iain Banks (Culture series) was a bit disappointing--way too descriptive for me.

I read Bear's Blood Music when it came out, and re-read it a few years ago.  A powerful book in some ways.  Haven't read anything else of his, though.  Like you, I'll go on a SF kick from time to time.  I have a love-hate relation with the genre, as I've written elsewhere.  You're familiar with Sturgeon's Law?

[smithhemb]

Just finished Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (came late to the party, but enjoyed both), and the most recent (in English translation, at least) Jo Nesbo --The Son (not his best, but not bad either).   I typically don't read much fiction, but real life (civic activism in DC) got bleak enough that I needed the escape and went on a binge.  (Not that executions and murders cheer me up or anything, LOL!)

Back to non-fiction shortly -- Dear Abigail (about Abigail Adams's correspondence with her sisters), The Counter-Revolution of 1776:  Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, and some early-ish writings of Harold Lewis (the consultant who supervised DC's last major zoning overhaul in the late 1950s) are all vying for my attention.

[porcupine]

And you should realize, after eight and a half years of knowing me, that if I'm inspired by something I'm a quarter-decent writer (if I bother to edit), and that if I'm not inspired, I suck. 

Endurance was very well told, but in a mostly chronological fashion and a very reportorial style.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but was not inspired to write anything.  One thought did occur to me when I finished it: if it had been a work of fiction, I would've been rolling my eyes and saying "this is too unbelievable to work".  Knowing that the story is entirely true... wow.

I had only a general notion of how it was going to end (didn't know any details), so I wouldn't say it was ruined for me in any way.

In contrast, I recently finished Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about the climbing disaster on Mt. Everest in May of 1996, and am currently halfway through his account of Christopher McCandless' life, Into the Wild.  I'm finding both of these more compelling than Endurance, but I am not going to try to argue that they are better in any way.  For some reason the stories resonated better with me, and I'm enjoying the writing.

For one thing, in both books Krakauer does not write chronologically.  It's particularly compelling in Into The Wild.  He tells the story in pieces and then takes breaks to flesh it out in other ways, for example by telling the stories of the auxilliary characters, or by telling the stories of others in 20th century America who did more-or-less what McCandless did, or by relating his own into-Alaska experience.  As a result I get a much greater sense of immediacy reading his books, though I know that sounds counter-intuitive.  Maybe I should say that I'm getting a deeper understanding.  The characters are very three-dimensional and real to me.  In Endurance, I couldn't keep the players straight.

Into Thin Air is made much more exciting because the author was actually there as a journalist on assignment, so his deeply personal accounts coupled with exhaustive research and a dose of speculation (and he never fails to say when he's speculating) made it a thrilling read.

I've read a little of the controversies surrounding Krakauer as an author, and I don't get it.  I think in both accounts he's been excruciatingly fair and honest, maybe slightly pulling his punches to avoid needlessly hurting survivors of the victims.  The breadth and depth of his research is impressive.

Anyone interested in journalistic ethics should read his addenda to Into Thin Air, including his self-defense and rebuttals of Boukreev's accusations.

ps Rocks - I just saw that you edited my post about WWII books, adding links (thanks!).  Now you need to read A Higher Call.

[DonRocks]

And you should realize, after eight and a half years of knowing me, that if I'm inspired by something I'm a quarter-decent writer (if I bother to edit), and that if I'm not inspired, I suck. 

Endurance was very well told, but in a mostly chronological fashion and a very reportorial style.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but was not inspired to write anything.  One thought did occur to me when I finished it: if it had been a work of fiction, I would've been rolling my eyes and saying "this is too unbelievable to work".  Knowing that the story is entirely true... wow.

I had only a general notion of how it was going to end (didn't know any details), so I wouldn't say it was ruined for me in any way.

In contrast, I recently finished Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about the climbing disaster on Mt. Everest in May of 1996, and am currently halfway through his account of Christopher McCandless' life, Into the Wild.  I'm finding both of these more compelling than Endurance, but I am not going to try to argue that they are better in any way.  For some reason the stories resonated better with me, and I'm enjoying the writing.

For one thing, in both books Krakauer does not write chronologically.  It's particularly compelling in Into The Wild.  He tells the story in pieces and then takes breaks to flesh it out in other ways, for example by telling the stories of the auxilliary characters, or by telling the stories of others in 20th century America who did more-or-less what McCandless did, or by relating his own into-Alaska experience.  As a result I get a much greater sense of immediacy reading his books, though I know that sounds counter-intuitive.  Maybe I should say that I'm getting a deeper understanding.  The characters are very three-dimensional and real to me.  In Endurance, I couldn't keep the players straight.

Into Thin Air is made much more exciting because the author was actually there as a journalist on assignment, so his deeply personal accounts coupled with exhaustive research and a dose of speculation (and he never fails to say when he's speculating) made it a thrilling read.

I've read a little of the controversies surrounding Krakauer as an author, and I don't get it.  I think in both accounts he's been excruciatingly fair and honest, maybe slightly pulling his punches to avoid needlessly hurting survivors of the victims.  The breadth and depth of his research is impressive.

Anyone interested in journalistic ethics should read his addenda to Into Thin Air, including his self-defense and rebuttals of Boukreev's accusations.

ps Rocks - I just saw that you edited my post about WWII books, adding links (thanks!).  Now you need to read A Higher Call.

Roger that. And you should read "Doctor On Everest" by Kenneth Kamler to broaden your perspective about the 1996 disaster. Member #1 gave me this as a gift, and at the time, it was the only climbing book I've ever read, so I have nothing to compare it to - if nothing else, I think it's an important historical perspective, a second perspective, of the same disaster that you read about. The surprises, i.e, "the tale" will be gone, but it might add some depth to the story for you, and the part about Nima Tashi sticks with me to this day: "I go get" haunts me even now.

I honestly don't see how "Endurance" isn't universally regarded as the greatest non-fiction book ever written, precisely because it was told journalistically, in chronological order - but learning from other people's opinions is what broadens you as a person, and I do respect your opinion. Damn you.

I would have read every single book that demi-goddess would have ever given me, and vice-versa: I read Doctor On Everest because she gave it to me; she read Endurance because I gave it to her. I loved my emails from her which always began: "This book is stressing me out, D!"

Incidentally, her mother (magdalena) and aunt are with me for another two weeks, so it anyone wants to meet them, please consider yourselves invited over for a meal. Along with MattRocks, they are the 2nd and 3rd people in the world I would take a bullet for without even blinking.

[porcupine]

Have you read Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri? It a similar collection of stories, beautifully written with themes of loss and regret, yet to me, her characters are more fleshed out than Munro's characters. It was her debut work, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 2000. It is one of my four favorite books.

I was curious to see if there was a connection between the two, and indeed, Lahiri says Munro is one of her heroes. I found an article in which a young writer lamented that Lahiri's critically acclaimed novels that followed Interpreter of Maladies lacked something found in her first book. Rohin Guha wrote about Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, "It was as wonderful as an Alice Munro book: A collection of well-constructed sentences, embedded with a modicum of anguish, and the vague sense that important things were happening, but without any real urgency."

You are right, there is a sameness to all of the stories. Regret, loss, searching for a sense of home and the dealing with the expectations placed on women of a certain era--are themes Munro repeats throughout these stories.

 

Thanks for the recommendation, will check out Lahiri.  What are your other three favorite books?  One of these days I'm going to start a thread about my two favorite authors.

[DIShGo]

Thanks for the recommendation, will check out Lahiri.  What are your other three favorite books?  One of these days I'm going to start a thread about my two favorite authors.

You're welcome. Catch 22, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Hours. Don recently introduced me to the writing of David Foster Wallace. There are several stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men that I will never forget.

Who are your two favorite authors?

[porcupine]

You're welcome. Catch 22, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Hours. Don recently introduced me to the writing of David Foster Wallace. There are several stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men that I will never forget.

Who are your two favorite authors?

 

Ursula K. LeGuin and Margaret Atwood.

[DIShGo]

I have read Atwood but not LeGuin. If you are a fan of fantasy (I am not), check out author Sharon Shinn. We were editors together at an art magazine years ago. She has won several awards and has made a name for herself in the fantasy fiction world. 

[porcupine]

I'm not really a fan of fantasy, with a few notable exceptions.  If you're under the impression LeGuin is a fantasy writer, then I really need to write a post about her work.  She is beyond genre.  In some ways she's similar to Atwood, who for years railed against being thought of as an SF writer; she called her work "speculative fiction" (eg, The Handmaid's Tale), which is pretty much what LeGuin writes.  I need to look up an essay of hers to support that...

gah!  I thought this part of my life would be over once I got my degree. 

[DIShGo]

I am currently reading "Endurance," a book of poetry called "New Shoes on a Dead Horse," and "Troilus and Cressida."

porcupine, did you ever get around to reading "Unbroken?" It's a little slow starting, but I think it is a worthwhile read.

[porcupine]

Not yet.  I got halfway through Surfacing when a friend started a bookclub and chose The Goldfinch as the inaugural book.  Thankfully I'm taking a ten day roadtrip before the club meets; I'll be reading on the highway whenever Mr. P is driving.

[DIShGo]

Endurance was very well told, but in a mostly chronological fashion and a very reportorial style.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but was not inspired to write anything.  One thought did occur to me when I finished it: if it had been a work of fiction, I would've been rolling my eyes and saying "this is too unbelievable to work".  Knowing that the story is entirely true... wow.

I had only a general notion of how it was going to end (didn't know any details), so I wouldn't say it was ruined for me in any way.

In contrast, I recently finished Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about the climbing disaster on Mt. Everest in May of 1996, and am currently halfway through his account of Christopher McCandless' life, Into the Wild.  I'm finding both of these more compelling than Endurance, but I am not going to try to argue that they are better in any way.  For some reason the stories resonated better with me, and I'm enjoying the writing.

For one thing, in both books Krakauer does not write chronologically.  It's particularly compelling in Into The Wild.  He tells the story in pieces and then takes breaks to flesh it out in other ways, for example by telling the stories of the auxilliary characters, or by telling the stories of others in 20th century America who did more-or-less what McCandless did, or by relating his own into-Alaska experience.  As a result I get a much greater sense of immediacy reading his books, though I know that sounds counter-intuitive.  Maybe I should say that I'm getting a deeper understanding.  The characters are very three-dimensional and real to me.  In Endurance, I couldn't keep the players straight.

I recently finished Endurance. It was an amazing story and well told, but I agree with porcupine, the characters weren't fleshed out enough for me. With one or two exceptions, the men in the story seemed interchangeable and I had difficulty keeping them straight.

I also agree that had it been fiction, I would have found it unbelievable. It seems improbable to me that people living in those conditions could maintain such a positive attitude for that long a period. I wonder if the men who recounted the tale to the author didn't put a more positive spin on the events. Sometimes when people look back on things, this happens.

Nevertheless, it was a well-written account of an incredible story, and I am glad I read it.

I just finished reading The Royal Game and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig. Wow. This book is phenomenal. "The Royal Game" is without question the best short story I have ever read. The other stories in this book are noteworthy, too, especially "Letter from an Unknown Woman." Zweig studied philosophy and this is apparent in his work. He has an uncanny way of presenting the inner workings of the minds of his characters. You don't just read about what they are experiencing, you feel it.

[DIShGo]

Today I am going to start One Hundred Years of Solitude again. I began reading it on a plane several months ago, came home, put it down and forgot about it. I'm going to give it another go.

For those of you thinking about reading "Unbroken," I highly recommend that you do before the movie comes out this December. I just read that the Coen brothers wrote the screenplay. I hope the movie lives up to the hype. This is an incredible story of an inspiring man that deserves to be well told.

[dcs]

You Can't Win by Jack Black.  A favorite of William S. Burroughs.

[porcupine]

Haven't updated this in awhile.

The Goldfinch was a freakin' waste of time that I would never have finished, but I was on a road trip so had plenty of time to read when Mr. P took a stint driving.  It could have been a good book if it had a good editor.  It was too long, largely because the author would simply retell things she told earlier in the same chapter, as if she'd set the manuscript aside for a month and couldn't remember where she'd left off when getting back to it.  It was maddening.  Oh, and this book won the Pulitzer prize.  What were they thinking?!

Surfacing was... interesting; I liked how the protagonist's voice and perspective would change as she (barely) interacted with the other characters, then her thoughts drifted away in random associations.  Being one of Atwood's earlier works, it lack some of her polish and finesse, and I didn't find the ending very satisfying, but I enjoyed reading it.

I just couldn't get into Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Got maybe a third of the way through before setting it aside.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North might be one of the most depressing books I've ever read.  Not that I dislike depressing stories, but damn.  Overall I didn't care for it, not because it was depressing, but because the author's voice wasn't consistent.  Some scenes were beautifully described, others incredibly clunky.  The story isn't told chronologically, which is fine with me (I like that technique, it keeps things interesting), but it is unbalanced.  Way too much time devoted to some sections, while others flew by and wanted more detail.  I'm glad I read it and would love to read someone else's opinions of it, but I didn't like it.  Oh, and what's this business of not using quotation marks for dialogue?  Is that the latest literary trick?

I'm one chapter into each of Unbroken (Laura Hillenbrand) and The Drowning Girl (Caitlin R. Keirnan), and don't know if I'll finish either before starting We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Karen Joy Fowler) for the book club.  Also on the list is The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.  And Stone Mattress by Atwood.

So, what are you reading?

[lperry]

^ I could never get into Unbroken.  I have trouble understanding why people find it so inspiring when it seems truly horrific to me.

I *finally* finished Inferno by Dan Brown, but I had to get the audiobook from the library and listen to it to get through it.  It did pick up toward the end, but getting there was difficult.  I don't know why I felt obligated to finish it.

[hillvalley]

Anyone else willing to admit that they are reading The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year?  I'm finding it frustrating that he name drops first names and just assumes we know who he is talking about.  Bruce comes up every few days but I have no idea which Bruce.  I'm assuming it's not Willis or Springsteen.  And if he is going to dish on the Real Housewives he needs to name more names.  

[porcupine]

I'm one chapter into each of Unbroken (Laura Hillenbrand) and The Drowning Girl (Caitlin R. Keirnan), and don't know if I'll finish either before starting We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Karen Joy Fowler) for the book club.  Also on the list is The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.  And Stone Mattress by Atwood.

^ I could never get into Unbroken.  I have trouble understanding why people find it so inspiring when it seems truly horrific to me.

I *finally* finished Inferno by Dan Brown, but I had to get the audiobook from the library and listen to it to get through it.  It did pick up toward the end, but getting there was difficult.  I don't know why I felt obligated to finish it.

lperry, the story of Louis Zamperini's life in Unbroken is horrific, indeed, but his tenacity is inspiring.  If you can slog (or skim) through the war years, you might be suprised by what comes after.  I have trouble understanding why people enjoy Dan Brown. 

The Drowning Girl is doing little for me - the story is kind of treading water, I think I appreciate what the author is doing, but I'm just not enjoying it.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a good book to read on a trip.  It reads easy, almost a little fluffy, but there are some serious themes and issues underlying the rather light tone the author employs.  I enjoyed it.

Recently I acquired a copy of a truly obscure book that I first read about 35 years ago: The Legacy by Arshavir Shiragian.  A few chapters in, and I'm again reminded that sometimes the telling of historical events trumps literary merit (see my thread about three World War II books).  The Legacy is the personal memoir of an Armenian who survived the genocide and went on to assassinate several Turkish officials.  It's fascinating in the way that only the first-hand account of atrocities can be.

[DIShGo]

I just bought Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Has anyone read it? I might start a thread when I begin reading it. For now it is merely sitting on my bookshelf, waiting. I want to be sure I am able to give it my full attention before I start it.

[porcupine]

Finally finished The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell), and must say that's one of the oddest novels I've ever read.  The writing is good, generally, but it's told by several different characters whose voices weren't as distinct as they should be.  I'm not sure how to describe the plot... there's this woman, Holly Sykes, who lives an extraordinary life due to a minor psychic ability (if you can call it that).  She's aware that there's another world of people who have psychic abilities, and it seems they're having a bit of a war, and their lives and hers keep intersecting over the course of 60 years.  That's an unsatisfactory description but about the best I can do.  I'm told it was perhaps not the best introduction to Mitchell's writing, but there it is.

Meanwhile I'm a third of the way through The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood).  It bogs down in details in some places, but is taking its own sweet time in revealing what's really going on - and I'm not yet sure what that is.  There are three distinct stories interwoven: the first is told by an old woman who seems to be haunted by her sister, a suicide (that's not giving anything away, it's told in the first sentence of the novel) and revered author of a book called "The Blind Assassin", which seems to be the second story, though it's hard to tell, and the third story is one being told by one of the characters in that story to the other character.  A little Arabian Nights-ish.  It's a complex tapestry but Atwood is a master weaver and a master wordsmith and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

edited to add: and a month or so ago I read a strange little novel called When Mystical Creatures Attack!  Being a pedant, I couldn't get past the thought that the author meant "mythical" creatures rather than "mystical".  If there was some deeper meaning in her choice of wording, I failed to see it.  But anyway, the story is told from multiple perspectives, which is a great technique in the hands of a talented author (my favorite novel is written that way), but the problem in this book is the mood jumped all over the place, which was inconsistent with the story and made the ending a little unexpected (not in a good way).  It suffered from lack of consistency.  A number of people wrote on-line that it's a collection of short stories woven together into a novel, which is bs.  A short story stands by itself, and not a single chapter in this book does that.  Overall I liked it enough to want to keep tabs on the author (Kathleen Founds) and check out her next work.

[curiouskitkatt]

I knew a thread of this nature was bound to exist in this forum. What are you reading currently? I need suggestions. I prefer autobiographies, and of course food lit is at the top of my list, but any suggestions are welcome. Please, and thank you.

[DonRocks]

16 minutes ago, curiouskitkatt said:

I'm halfway through the book. I would be interested in someone's take on the book. And yes, good point, all of these threads are "virtual" discussions.  I just need to occupy my thoughts with anything other than what  madness is currently going on. Also interested in what suggestions you/ and or the forum have for reading ?

Easy, Medium, or Hard? Short, Medium, or Long? Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, or Play?

[NolaCaine]

I'm an avid reader. For work, I read "hard stuff". Today I was reading about various chemicals and hurting my head trying to retain it. For pleasure, I read 2 or 3 books at a time. The difficulty of my day-reading is inversely related to the difficulty of my night reading. For example, tonight, I know I will read crap. The two books that I am reading now are:
The Witch Elm by Tana French. This is by far her worst book. All of her other books are wonderful for mystery lovers who don't like trite crap. This book is a mystery set in Irland, like the others, but turns out is more of a character study of a guy who is going mad, or healing from a head-wound, or both. It's depressing as hell and I need breaks from it often.

The other <I pause to think about truly revealing the real book's name and decide not to, and then change mind> is by Gail Carriger and is called Competence. I think it might be YA. Okay, fine, not only is it YA, but it's steampunk. Fine, you dragged it out of me, yes, there are many different types of supernatural creatures in this book. Happy? I'm slightly embarrassed so let me explain. Many books are about people doing things. Books too can transport. Sometimes I want to go to Ireland. Sometimes I want to float in a dirigible with a young British woman who is discovering her ability to be attracted to <clutch pearls> other young women and were-cats!  Sometimes I want science fiction to intersect with Victorian manners and Anne Rice got me hooked on vampires when I was about 12. 

I do read non--fiction. One about every quarter so I have something intelligent to discuss in polite society. 😉 Bad Blood, about Theranos, is keeping me in talking points for now.