Finished reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 📚 Ugh. The book is made up of five smaller books. I was quite interested by the first three books, thought-provoking tales which made me consider the nature of reality. But book 4 is horrific, to the point of being sick. Is this a novel about the awfulness of men? Perhaps.
Currently reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚
Currently reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 📚
Finished reading: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan 📚A fascinating, thought-provoking, and beautifully written novel. Highly recommended, especially for all of us techies here. There’s an interesting alternative history subtext: “what if Turing hadn’t been essentially murdered by the uptight Brits?”
Finished reading: Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot 📚 Definitely worth reading. The story of a black woman, the only one in her class at Cornell in the 1930s, who goes on to medical school and becomes a renowned child psychiatrist. Useful perspective both from her daughter (the author of this book) and herself about living while Black in America. We have wasted so much energy on racism and prejudice in this country. You can see it in the energy her white male bosses put into thwarting her, and of course the energy she has to waste on being allowed to do the work she is so good at.
Currently reading: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan 📚
Currently reading: Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot 📚
Stopped reading: Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America by Eliot Pattison 📚 Started and stopped in the same night. Read the first 30 pages, skipped to the last 10, said “Nope I don’t want to read this.”
Finished reading: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin 📚And Nabokov as translator redeems himself in my eyes with his excellent notes. Now I need to find a version in verse in English.
Finished reading: Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike 📚
Currently reading: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin 📚
Started and stopped reading: Hyperion by Dan Simmons 📚 When the 6 main characters were introduced and 5 were men and the only woman was immediately subjected to the male gaze, I said “life is too short to read this garbage” and quit.
Finished reading: The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd 📚 I didn’t love it. The main character is so self-absorbed that she barely seems human.
Currently reading: Gertrude and Claudius: A Novel by John Updike 📚
Finished reading: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri 📚 Excellent book. More sad than uplifting, but definitely worth the read. Crossings of cultures, crossings of politics, crossings of children. The ways in which history does and does not matter.
Currently reading: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri 📚
Finished reading: The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik 📚
Currently Reading: The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik 📚
Currently reading: The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd 📚
Finished reading: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov 📚 Quit reading is more like it. Awful, awful book. It sure has not aged well. Trigger warning: Nothing like lots of child rape to make one have to stop reading.
Finished reading: Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield 📚 Five stars, I loved this book. A little bit magical, with a lot of history of mid-19th century England. There are some disturbing scenes of abuse which are awful and which remind us of what was considered acceptable at the time. The overall story is marvelous.
Finished reading: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 📚
I loved it. It’s a great thought piece about the importance of initial conditions. It’s a love letter to New Yourk City.
Since much of it takes place in the 1960s, it’s also a sad indictment of how little we have progressed away from racism.
Finished reading: Deacon King Kong by James McBride 📚
Currently reading: Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield 📚
Currently reading: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 📚