What are you currently reading?

[SimonNZ]

[Elgarian Redux]

I'm a great admirer of the wood engravings of Gwen Raverat, and when I discovered that she'd designed the jacket for the original edition of Elizabeth Goudge's The Bird in the Tree (1940), I bought one mainly for the sake of the dust jacket (though it is not typical of Raverat's work).

But now I'm halfway through reading the novel, and it's quite unlike anything I've ever read.  It's written in lovely, lyrical prose that took me 20-30 pages to get used to, but I have the feel of its rhythm now, and I'm reading more slowly than I normally would. Certain sentences stand out, and I have to stop and think about them, and the insight they offer. The tale itself seems to be about a special house, a family who've made it a deeply loved home, and an intrusion into this seeming perfection by one member who has fallen for a woman who, in a number of ways, does not fit. How it ends I can't say, but it is a haunting read. Not quite unputdownable, but I carry it away with me in my head in between reading sessions.

[Florestan]

Anatole France - The Red Lily.

Between The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, The Gods are Athirst and this one, my favorite writers list has a new entry.

[SimonNZ]

Finished:



Started:

[AnotherSpin]

A high-stakes thriller that plunges reader into Russia's latest covert attempt to destabilize the West, a campaign born of the chaos of a failing state grasping for relevance. At the center of the storm stands Mitch Rapp, relentless and unflinching, striking back against the Kremlin's shadow games with surgical precision.

A quote from the book: "The Russians aren't people who play to win. They play to make everyone else lose. They don't do anything useful. They don't make anything useful. If you gave a Russian a Ferrari, he wouldn't drive it — he'd use the key to scratch the paint on everyone else's car."

Another one: "Rapp couldn't help but smile. Russia was unique in that it was an almost entirely destructive force. The human race would be infinitely better off if the whole country just slid into the ocean."

[Todd]

Hemispheric Defense Is Back, by Joseph Ledford and Ryan C. Berg.

[Mandryka]

[hopefullytrusting]

[Spotted Horses]

Douglas Adams, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.



The main character, Dirk something, gets his now broken. Now for the rest of the novel his dialog is intelligible because of his broken nose. This lead to the metaphysical question, "why am I reading this crap?"

This is a one in a hundred books that I can't find the motivation to finish. Abandoned about 1/3 of the way thoough.

[steve ridgway]

Douglas Adams, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.



The main character, Dirk something, gets his now broken. Now for the rest of the novel his dialog is intelligible because of his broken nose. This lead to the metaphysical question, "why am I reading this crap?"

This is a one in a hundred books that I can't find the motivation to finish. Abandoned about 1/3 of the way thoough.

LOL it clearly raises at least one very important question .

I am reading Matt Kaplan, David Attenborough's First Life about the history of life on Earth, that I found in a charity shop. Three cheers for reality .

[Elgarian Redux]

Started:

Kott's discussion of The Tempest (recommended to me back in 1998) gave me food for thought for many years to come.

We have a room in our house whose walls are almost entirely covered with pictures relating to The Tempest, and the artist who made them was the chap who recommended Kott to me. Brilliant.

[Spotted Horses]

I've read a lot of Roth, but not that one.