Currently reading: Table for Two by Amor Towles 📚

Finished reading: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis 📚 Who knew a book about Chess could be so intense! This was a great, great book. ★★★★★

Finished reading: City of Glass by Paul Auster 📚 A strange meta-detective novel with an unreliable narrator who slowly dissolves into insanity. I followed maybe half of the literary and Biblical allusions. Not at all what I expected, but oddly satisfying.

Currently reading: The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant 📚

Finished reading: The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant 📚 My quest to read all eleven volumes of Durant’s Story of Civilization continues. Volume VII has returned to the shelf with hundreds of scribbles and notes and many, many exclamation marks. If you think the world is crazy now, you ought to …

Finished reading: Here is New York by E. B. White

Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚

Finished reading: Move on Down to Mexico by 📚

Finished reading: Real Tigers by Mick Herron 📚

Currently reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚

Currently reading: Real Tigers by Mick Herron 📚

Finished reading: You Like It Darker by Stephen King 📚 This is a wonderful collection of short stories and novellas by our generation’s master storyteller. I enjoyed every piece, but particularly liked Rattlesnakes, a sequel of sorts to Cujo. It’s meditation on the persistent grief of …

Finished reading: Dead Lions by Mick Herron 📚 My second Slow Horses book and just as good as the first. There were a few more departures in this book frm the TV version, which kept me guessing. Herron is a talented writer.

Currently listening: The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚 How could it be that my wife of 27 years, a bookworm like me, has never read The Lord of the Rings? We’re heading out on an extended roadtrip in our little RV, and we were struggling to …

Finished reading: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt 📚 I enjoyed the setting of the fictional small town on Puget Sound. I liked the premise of the story. I loved the octopus. But, in the end, the author was too young/naive to be inside the head of a grief-stricken 70-year-old woman. It …

Finished reading: Consolations by David Whyte 📚 Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiousity, Heartbreak, and Forgivness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month: Beauty is the harvest of presence. Whyte often …

Currently reading: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt 📚

Finished reading: The Regulators by Richard Bachman/Stephen King 📚★★★☆☆ Continuing my quest to read every Stephen King novel … The Regulators was published on the same day as Desperation. Many of the same characters bedeviled by the same evil spirit Tak, but set in a parallel universe. The …

Finished reading: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 📚 This book was nothing like I expected. Frankenstein (the scientist) is arrogant, self-absorbed, and makes incredibly bad decisions. The story itself is unbelievably far-fetched. There were times I wanted to throw my Kindle on the floor at the …

Currently reading: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 📚 Slow to post this, but I’m doing a group read of this classic on BlueSky (#hotfranksummer).

Currently reading: The Regulators by Richard Bachman 📚

Finished reading: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 📚 I had an idea that this was a story about the trials of an orphan in Dickensian London. It was about that, but so much more. This novel has warmth and sadness and joy and despair. Characters that will stick with me for a long, long time. I’m …

Currently reading: The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant 📚 One of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world. Barnaby Rich, known …

Reading a Book in 15 Minutes

Interesting and humorous article by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker about the book summary app Blinkist: Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?. We’re reading fewer books as a society. Our ever-fascinating smart phones aren’t helping the cause: The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without …

Finished reading: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff 📚 I know I’ve read this a long time ago, but it was nice to be reacquainted with Helene, the zany book-loving American, and Mr. Frank Doel, the reserved British bookseller. The abrupt ending catches you off guard, but it’s also …