Currently reading: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans 📚
Currently reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor 📚
Finished reading: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar 📚Excellent novel, reads like 2025 in a nutshell. Interesting characters, sweet love story which might not be traditional and makes perfect sense, and a good story of addiction and recovery.
Currently reading: The Kurdish Bike by Alesa Lightbourne 📚
Finished reading: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher 📚Not my favorite by this author, a little too close to her horror style. But she is so good at characters, pacing, suspense, and humor. Best not to read this one if you like horses.
Currently reading: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar 📚
Finished reading: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden 📚I like the ideas in this novel but not the actual novel. The characters were somehow flat. It’s about 1960s Netherlands, dealing with the country’s good and bad history of helping/hurting Jewish people during the war and afterwards.
Finished reading: A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst 📚True but kinda weird story of two dysfunctional people who sail, get shipwrecked and survive 100+ days on a raft, sail again, but then get bogged down with real life.
Quit reading: The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1) by R.F. Kuang 📚Gave up even though I had put 14 days into it. Too violent, too endless. If I’d felt like I was learning something about Chinese history, I might have kept going.
Currently reading: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden 📚
Finished reading: A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny 📚My first Louise Penny book! A bit gruesome for my taste, but great characters and a fascinating Quebec setting.
Currently reading: A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst 📚Our December book club pick.
Finished reading: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer 📚Good though disturbing non-fiction about the science of airborne diseases and the mind-boggling stubbornness of the CDC to not acknowledge airborne transmission of COVID-19.
Currently reading: A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny 📚So many of my neighbors love this series. I’m not starting at the beginning – this is the one I bought for cheap at the library book sale last summer.
Finished reading: The Ravenmaster by Christopher Skaife 📚Fun little book about the Yeoman Warder who takes care of the ravens at the Tower of London. I was most interested in his life as a soldier who entered the military when he was 16 years old. The ravens were cool, too.
Currently reading: The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1) by R.F. Kuang 📚
Finished reading: Necessity by Jo Walton 📚The last in the Thessaly trilogy, interesting, almost sci-fi, novels about living according to the rules of Plato’s Republic amongst Greek gods. I found most interesting the way the Republic does not use money. People maximize “Excellence” instead of profit.
Finished reading: A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbins 📚Quite good non-fiction, it achieves the aim of its title. From ancient Egypt and Greece, to the Vikings, Tudor England, Dutch East India Company Netherlands, and WW2, it focuses on the people in their sea-going context.
Currently reading: The Ravenmaster by Christopher Skaife 📚November book club pick.
Finished reading: Endling by Maria Reva 📚Excellent novel about Ukraine, snails, family, war, and life in the modern world.
Currently reading: The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton 📚
Finished reading: The Just City (Thessaly, #1) by Jo Walton 📚I’m enjoying this series, not least because I can see the threads that eventually lead to her book Lent, which is a masterpiece.
Currently reading: Endling by Maria Reva 📚Very excited to dive into this book that I heard about on the “Write Now with Scrivener” podcast Write Now with Scrivener Episode 55: Maria Reva, Booker Longlisted Author of Endling.
Finished reading: A Home in Percival by Paula Berman 📚A cute romantasy set in Oregon about a world where magic is kind of like software development. In a good way.
Currently reading: Thessaly by Jo Walton 📚