The Eternal Question: What Are You Reading? 2025

New Year/New Thread.

I received O Sinners which I will be starting as soon as I finish typing this (thanks, Lauren).

I finally finished a book! In the Blink of an Eye is no heavyweight, but it's not exactly fluff, either. The storyline grabbed my attention. A recently widowed DCS is teased back to the force to head an AI pilot program. She accepts because she wants to prove that substituting human detectives with AI is a terrible idea as so much of the job depends on judgement and instinct. However, the device's developer holds a major (and valid) grudge against the police, and she's determined to see AI replace the biased/racist human forms. AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) Lock appears in the form of a steel bracelet that DCS Frank wears, and it's equipped with 3 modes: audio, temporal, and visual. The visual form is a tall, imposing black man. Frank's supervisor refuses to experiment with live cases, so the first test is on some missing student cold cases. The plot isn't bulletproof, but mostly believable, and the characters are well drawn for this type of read. It's not as technical as I'd hoped, but everything it describes is either already available or just a stone's throw away. All in all, except for the medical stuff (which is problematic), it's very readable and I enjoyed it.

YAY! Enjoy, Pat.

I really liked the new Anita Desai - a lovely novella about an Indian student in Mexico who meets someone who knew her mother. Under 100 pages, you can read it in an afternoon and the writing is exquisite.

I am slogging through the new Madeleine Thein The book of Records It's so researched and overly complicated, it's just lifeless.

I started O Sinners, haven't got far into it, yet, as I've had to attend to estate stuff (had no idea how complicated and work intensive it would be), since my dad's passing, but I'm finding the writing impressive. It's going to have to be to keep me interested as anything to do with cults is usually a non-starter for me. Unlike many who find that subject fascinating, I think efforts toward "understanding" cultists is so much wasted time. IMO, they're basically collectives of mental illness and not that hard to figure out. It's the other elements in the story that Lauren described which intrigued me.

Pat, I had read Nicole Cuffy's earlier book about an African American classical ballet dancer and while it's good, the writing and the scope of O Sinners is light years better. And yeah, I love reading about cults.

I really enjoyed Women's Hotel - it has some Dawn Powell, some Mary McCarthy but also a quiet wit of its own. I did find the first few chapters on the stodgy side- Lavery's style is a little circuitous - but I stuck with it and very glad I did too - it's a novel that really builds and becomes more and more satisfying. The dénouement - and that's what it feels like - is deliciously shocking and surprisingly touching.

I also read David Diop's Beyond the Door of No Return. Another novel with a slow beginning but I really liked the story of Michel Adenson, a French botanist who traveled to Senegal in the 18th century on a trip of botanical discovery and became involved with a woman who had escaped attempted rape and enslavement . I wished that the story of Maram didn't have the taint of fetishism and thought that the final chapter was a great corrective to that- nothing Adenson really did, despite his good intentions interrupted the slave trade and in fact, he admits to capitulating and defending the French government in their efforts. A very unique novel.

Is anybody reading?

Read two things that came my way from my son who is at University of Mississippi for a Southern Studies masters Behind the Big House about the creation of a program that focuses on the stories of enslaved peoples in heritage tourism which was excellent and Like Unto Like which was a 19th novel set in Reconstruction-era Alabama. It's a coming -of-age novel with a spirted heroine and an older abolitionist suitor. It doesn't quite go the way you'd expect - he's sort of a jerk and even though her politics are questionable, there is something about how she rejects his bossiness that is appealng. The author Sherwood Bonner grew up in Holly Springs Mississippi and left for Boston where she was mentored by Longfellow. there is something of the Jo March in her heroine Blythe. A precursor to Kate Chopin and Ellen Glasgow.

Now reading - Red String Theory. I think I have become someone who occasionally reads romance novels.

I'm back to O, Sinners by Nicole Cuffy after many annoying interruptions. IMO, it needed better, more efficient editing. Some of the scenes are excruciatingly drawn out. I'm an unfair critic to this book, though. I spent some of my most formative years in S.E. Asia during the Vietnam conflict and interacted quite a bit with military/Air America (C.I.A.) offspring and young G.I.'s on R&R. So far, the Vietnam sections are disappointingly inauthentic. In spite of all that maybe too picky-ness, I'm totally invested in seeing where she goes with the cult section of the story, and that's surprised me.

Juggling a few things - taking my time with Karen Russell's The Antidote, which is BIG in a lot of ways and STRANGE in just as many; I have seen it called "Drylandia" which is a not-inaccurate joke. Odd and beautiful so far. Also The Salt Path, about a couple who walked a good hunk of England's South West Coast path. It's quite a book.

Oh, I forgot all about that one. Putting that in the Kindle cart right now

>6 laurenbufferd: "I think I have become someone who occasionally reads romance novels."

Hey then, Lauren, have you ever read any of Morgan Llywelyn's books? They're not technically
Romance, but they're the closest I've come to
that genre. She's often overlooked thanks to her
books' cover art, which is really awful, as in Fabio awful, but the covers are criminally misrepresentative of the books' content. She's an Irish storyteller in the old school bard mode. If you're not familiar with her, start with The Lion of Ireland (about Brian Boru, considered the first Irish king), The Last Prince of Ireland (which is like an Irish Trail of Tears), and Druids . IMO, those are her three best books. All of them are excellent sources of real Irish and Celtic history, legends, and myths conveyed via excellent storytelling. She spices each one with a fictional romance or two, also.

I used to frequent a hole-in-the-wall used book store when I was still in college and couldn't afford new or hardcover books. It was owned by a big, burly, middle-aged guy who noticed I usually gravitated to historical fiction. He was the one who turned me onto Llywelyn. I remember him telling me to ignore the covers, and that he'd refund my money if I didn't like the books (which was probably something like fifty cents a piece). They sat on my shelf for a long time. I don't recall what finally made me pick up The Lion of Ireland , but I wound up binge reading it and everything else she'd ever written, at the time.

Anyway. That's about as close as I ever came to reading Romance, but it sure taught me a good lesson about book cover art

I love that, Pat!

dg, i know you are over in Hardy country but remind me to tell you more about the Raynor Winn book - there's a gorgeous album by Peter Knight and the Gigspanner Big Band band that they did in collaboration with Winn - a prose and musical interpretation of her book with adaptations of folk music from the South west of England. It's very trad and folk forward so perhaps not quite your thing.

Knight is a fiddler who played with Steeleye Span (folk rockers) but also has collaborated with experimental and jazz musicians over the years.

https://www.gigspanner.com/saltlines

Red String Theory left me cold - I didn't like the writing and there was no spice. I am reading Bug Hollow which I love and still moving slowly through Behind the Big House and Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win Valenti is such a bad ass.

I'm reading Timothy Snyder's On Freedom verrrrry slowly because I have to stop and write down quotes every other page. I'm rereading parts of Roxana Robinson's Leaving for Sunday's book club -- really enjoyed it first time around but I retain nothing these days so a refresh is in order. Like so many, I'm having a hard time finding the focus needed to read much these days but I'm working on that. I've picked up a couple of short story collections to help jump start me.

>12 LuRits: Lu, this is me, too. I spent the last 20 yrs, or so, of my working life buying, storing, and categorizing books to save for my retirement. I've been blessed in that I'd traveled around the world, lived in different countries since adolescence, so traveling wasn't my goal. Having worked for a lonnnng time in a very high stress job, my idea of the perfect retirement was a cozy nook in my comfortable home, with my dog by my side, reading my final years away.

Heck, I used to be able to work a 14 hr shift, come home and do a an hour of online CEU's or coursework, then read a good 50 pp before going to bed. So the idea of extracurricular reading whenever and for as long as I wanted was my idea of Nirvana. While I blame a certain amount of my decreased ability to concentrate on the aftereffects of a severe bout of COVID (and am thankful for just surviving), I attribute most of my inability on extrinsic, currently infuriating factors.

And it totally sux.

I pass by my bookcases, glance at the hundreds of books I so meticulously collected and arranged, or sometimes when it needs charging, I open my Kindle and stare at all its unread books, and I just can't believe the one thing I so looked forward to seems to elude me.

But I'm not giving up. I'm hoping that by becoming more active online it will work as a virtual kick in the ass, but it's been incredibly frustrating.

This is beginning to look like a self-pity rant, so I'm gonna' stop now. Just saying you're not alone, Lu, and I'm thinking there's many like us right now.

Pat you are not alone! I have been dealing with the very same issue. There are a lot
of videos on you tube that discuss this issue. A lot of the posters say it's because our brains are being fried from too much social media. I'm really trying to put my devices away because I too find it very difficult to focus on reading.
I tried to start a new novella by Camus yesterday-it's for a group and I don't know if I'm going to continue with it. I read it a bit and then I thought-I'll check my social stuff before going out ,immediatly could see how my mood was changing. It's true what they say about those screens. I felt very agitated and impatient and it was all because of that doom scoilling I was doing. Being in Canada we are dealing with double stress right now as we are trying to fend off the occupation of our country by nasty people south of the border.So there is a lot of news to watch and it's all very depressing.
This might not be an issue for you but I do find if I am successful at putting away all of my devices then my mind feels clear to read. I even read we should not try and read on our phones. Anyways I am going through the same thing as you and I don't like it. I have to make a conscious effort to pick up a book and I know it's so much healthier for me then all of the chatter out there.

I try to keep my social media participation to just a few platforms now. For me, it's my health and the current affairs of this country that prevent me from concentrating. I have tried but just can't ignore the travesties being normalized. That old adage of "Don't worry about things for which you have no control," just isn't working, anymore.

Things are pretty ugly these days. I try and limit the amount of news I watch because it drives me crazy.

I'm re-reading The Last Painting of Sara De Vos for work book club and it's such a fun and engaging novel. Smith's best, imo.

I was in Holly Springs, Mississippi recently for Behind the Big House which is a tour of enslaved people's dwellings and the house we were at was the Hugh Craft house which prompted me to finally read Master Slave Husband Wife . Excellent account of enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft who escaped Macon in the 1840s by disguising themselves as a light-skinned master and his slave. They traveled together and apart from Macon all the way to New York, Boston, Canada and finally England. It's a thrilling story and Woo doesn't stint on the slightly purple prose- every train is an iron horse and every chapter ends in a breathless question. But it's meticulously researched and Woo asks all kinds of hard and thought provoking questions. I loved it.

I just finished Cocoon which was a fascinating novel about a Chinese man and woman who meet when they are young and come back as adults to uncover some significant secrets that link their families together. It's very much the 'sins of the father's' or grandfathers in this case - the brutality of the cultural revolution.

I was lucky enough to read Zhang's Women, Seated which is coming out this summer and has a gorgeous cover! I interviewed Zhang and her translator earlier this week and now I want to read EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD.

After being in Holly Springs, I went back and finished Behind the Big House which I really enjoyed and wish was a program that more historic houses would adopt, including here in Nashville. It really is the most extraordinary combination of living history and traditional tour with lots of opportunity for discussion.

I continued my dive into Mississippi with I Don't Like the Blues a case study of blues tourism in Clarksdale and how the African-American community feels/relates to it. Or chooses not to.

As a museum person, I think a lot about spaces where people are comfortable or feel welcome and why so there was definitely things to extrapolate from Clarksdale to my facility. I also liked the idea of not liking something being an autonomous quality.

I really enjoyed Foster's writing and even though I am so not a sociologist, I appreciated how transparent he was about his language, methodology and ideas.

I also read The Welcome, a reissue of a novel by Hubert Creekmore who among other things was Eudora Welty's brother-in-law but also a novelist, librettist, and translator.

It's a really interesting novel, set in a small Mississippi town in the 1930s. Although the word homosexual is never used (until the very end when a euphemism is used as a slur in anger and in a way to deliberately insult) , it is clear that Don and Jim had an emotional attachment in high school. Don goes off to NYC and Jim stays behind and marries a girl from a neighboring town, quite unhappily. When Don returns to take care of his 'invalid' mother (as a Southern friend of mine would say - she enjoyed poor health), it is clear that the feelings are all still there.

In some ways, the book is more an inditement of heteronormativity - the expectation that marriage is the norm and anything that deviates from that is problematic. What Creekmore doesn't see is how that affects women - the novel has a more of a touch of misogyny - as much as men, whether they are gay or straight. I did like the way the novel boldly ends with everyone married off - like a Shakespearean comedy when it's really a tragedy for so many involved.

The 'n' word does appear a few times and as mentioned above, there is some misogyny that had me rolling my eyes. But very worth reading. I was also predisposed to like this just because I bought it at Violet Valley, the only LGBTQ+ feminist bookstore in Mississippi. Y'all gotta get there. And because I've been to Water Valley where the novel is set, I could easily imagine the doings and goings on. Loved that.

I indulged myself and subscribed to the Smith & Taylor classics series and am very happily rereading Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

>18 laurenbufferd: Years ago, I binge-watched the British limited series based on that Gaskell novel. It was like a mix of Austen romance with Dickens-like dark stuff about the horrid conditions in early industry.

Yes, I'm going to check that out. I really enjoyed the re-read, the questions that come up are very relevant to today's labor issues. Is it better to have snacks and catered lunches than to give wage increases? Lots to think about and though I'd never say Gaskell was funny, there are moments of real humor in the novel.

Finished No Modernism without Lesbians which doesn't quite live up to it's title. There is a lot to like about 4 mini bios of Gertrude Stein, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Sylvia Beach, 4 women who had enormous impacts on literature and art. It's well researched with a super bibliography and has some great photos. I never quite got the tone - which occasionally felt like it was simplifying more complex arguments and sometimes gently mocking (to be fair, Barney and Stein are fairly large targets, they both seem like impossible people) I think I wanted something more rigorous that asked me to think more deeply about these women and their cultural impact.

I am reading one story a day from Katherine Mansfield's The Montana Stories and they are sublime.

thanks to reading the world in books*i read about Voltair and realized Id never read candide!so I started it and almost finished What a great satire on our world, the same after 400 years 1!!!!

*this a wonderful book of 52 non fiction stories from gilgamsh to present all of them western.....(would be good if some could write a book about 52 non fiction around the world ).....any way the author starts with firsr words in each essay, then give a summary , about the author, and suggest why the reader should read it and suggest furture reading. His writing is plain yet this reader felt each part was readable and interesting so when Voltair came up i realized I never read Candide I now have a list of books that I need to read Look our bookstore here I come!

I haven't read much lately. My focus is absolutely shot. But I'm half way through and enjoying Amity Gage's Heartwood. Going to the beach in a couple of weeks and I have a big stack of books going with me with hopes it helps break through this reading slump.

Last night I did something I almost never do: I gave myself permission to not finish a book. It's a biography of the Grimm brothers, and while I want to have read it, I don't want to read it. It's dense with information about 18th century Germany, and I know very little about that time and place, so I had to focus on every sentence like I was studying for a class. I just don't want to do that right now. Maybe someday I'll try again, but not soon.

Just finished my first Nicci French The Lying Room. It was very good but a bit too long. I can’t think of another mystery writer(s) that come so close to Ruth Rendell, my favourite.

I’ve finished my first title in this year’s Giller Longlist. It’s called The Sideways Life of Denny Voss. It’s very similar to The Curious Incident of the . I listened to the book on audio which was the best medium because the character is very whimsical. But I don’t think it’s literary enough to be a Giller nominee.

>25 alans: oh ill have to read that, Love Rendell