Finished reading: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin 📚
What a fun, creepy book! I loved the slow build of suspense and the unexpected twists. And the ending … Whew. ★★★★☆
Reading
Check out my separate reading blog for an index of book reviews and ratings.
Finished reading: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald 📚
a professor with a background in amateur falconry retreats from public life after the death of her father to train a goshawk. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li 📚
A heart-breaking memoir about losing two sons to suicide. There’s often little you can say to parent who’s lost a child. But sometimes the words from a fellow sufferer can get through. This book was one of those. ★★★★★
Finished reading: The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll 📚
Yes, it’s about bullet journaling, but also how daily reflection can help you make time for those important but not necessarily urgent things in your life. ★★★☆☆
Wednesday, November 19, 2025 →
Finished reading: A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker by New Yorker Magazine Inc 📚
I’m wanting to read more short stories and what better source than this mammoth treasure of short fiction from the New Yorker Magazine’s first hundred years? Some terrific stories here. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: New York Sketches by E.B. White 📚
A collection of witty commentaries, short stories, poems, and essays, all originally published in The New Yorker, and each an ode to what I’m sure White would agree is the greatest city on earth. ★★★★★
Finished reading: The School of Life by Alain De Botton 📚
A crash course in emotional maturity through art, literature and philosophy. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: Bag of Bones by Stephen King 📚
A reread of a classic ghost story set on a remote lake in western Maine. Like most King novels, the true horrors are all too human. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner 📚
I’ve read four Stegner novels, saving this one, his Pulitzer, for the last. I thought Crossing to Safety was his best, and Big Rock Candy Mountain absolutely gutted me. Still, this one will stick with me for a long time. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates 📚
Joyce Carol Oates might be the least likely person ever to write a book about boxing. And yet she did. Like me, she developed a lifelong appreciation for the sport, ultimately growing to love it, by watching fights with her father as a child. But it’s clear that she feels a natural disquiet with her own fascination with the sport, and the essays in this book circle and dance around that central premise: why, in our modern, civilized society, is boxing still a thing? ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 📚
What a treasure. I’ve read most of these essays before, but never so deeply or with such illumination. Emerson’s wisdom is simple to understand, yet difficult to practice in a world of popular opinion and distracted thinking. Trust in your own thoughts; be yourself; don’t try to impress or copy others; cherish your friends. Most of all: be present, here and now. ★★★★★
Finished reading: We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough 💙📚
The premise and setting had terrific potential, but one-dimensional characters, plot holes, and poor editing hobbled the story. It felt like a book written under the pressure of an unrealistic deadline. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: The Best American Essays 2024 💙📚
I’m on an essay kick, and the latest “Best American” series provided a wide range of thought-provoking takes and introduced me to some new voices. I share my five favorite essays in the full review. ★★★☆☆
Nancy Pearl’s Revised ‘Rule of 50’:
When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number is the pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book … When you turn 100, you are authorized (by the Rule of 50) to judge a book by its cover.
💙📚
Finished reading: On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle 💙📚
It’s Groundhog’s Day but with an existential slant on the meaning of self, time, mortality, sustainability, and the inevitable progression of love and marriage. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder 💙📚
A concise summary of the tactics used by totalitarian governments to suppress freedom and democracy. Clear examples from twentieth-century despots support each of the twenty lessons. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer 💙📚
I’m glad I read this hefty tome. I can put current events and government decisions into the context of what happened in Nazi Germany. I know better what to look for. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard 💙📚
A recent New Yorker article by Anthony Lane prompted me to read this one, my first Elmore Leonard book. I enjoyed the pacing and dialogue and colorful cast of characters, all set in languid south Florida.
★★★★☆
@amylouise on Madame Bovary:
I hope that when you pay attention to the world, see every flower on every oat-stalk and every bumbling country doctor, you find that you can look them into loveliness. I hope that even being bound to a dull community of foolish people could bring unexpected graces. I hope that reality has a richer romance than fantasy.
I loved every word of this review. 💙📚
Finished reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 💙📚
See my review for notes and favorite highlights. Still and always ★★★★★.
Finished reading: Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney 💙📚
McInerney’s great American novel: flawed characters grappling with timeless themes, set in what is arguably the greatest city on earth. I loved it. ★★★★★
See my full review for notes and favorite highlights.
Finished: Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King 💙📚
★★★★☆ Not King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.
Finished: London Rules by Mick Kerron 💙📚
★★★★☆ Another brilliant volume in the wonderful Slow Horses saga. Jackson Lamb is as disgusting and brilliant as ever, with his Slow Horses saving the day yet again from ineptitude of the intelligence service bosses. These are comfort books to savor.
Finished: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck 💙📚
★★★★☆ A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.
Finished: Gerald’s Game by Stephen King 💙📚
★★★☆☆ Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.
Finished: Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell 💙📚
★★★★☆ Another great Malcolm Gladwell read. I think I’ve read all his books now and even took his Masterclass on writing. I listened to the audiobook, which was the perfect format for this one. Gladwell has an engaging reading voice and employed his podcast artistry by including recordings of his interviewees in the audiobook. I love how we weaves together diverse topics into a central theme.
Finished: Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 💙📚
★★★★★ Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
Currently reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer 💙📚
Seems timely.
Finished: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 💙📚
★★★★★ What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Finished: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 💙📚
★★★★☆ Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.