What are you reading now: June 14, 2025

I've read a good chunk of British Fiji Class Cruisers and their Derivatives and have just cracked The City and the City.

Just finished A Republic in the Ranks, and will be starting World's Edge today.

I've got about a hundred pages left in the 500-page novel Soul Mountain by Chinese writer Tao Xingjian. Long and often a bit slow, but quite enjoyable overall, and very, very good in some places.

Starting to read The Watchers by A.M. Shine It says they made a motion picture of it, so it probably is good. I have always thought the book is better than the movie.

The Unworthy
Agustina Bazterrica
3/5/2025
This was an unusual science fiction story set in a catastrophic world in a convent. As a nun delves into her past she must try to find her past history and how she got into the Sacred Sisterhood. Not my favorite book but interesting. Science Fiction

I finished The Women by Kristin Hannah yesterday. It was engrossing and interesting. I haven't started a new book yet; I've got a short list of about ten books and I'll make some sort of decision before I go to bed.

I'm not really listening to anything, either. I seem to be in a reading slump, although as I've read fifty books by mid-June, I'm not too worried about it.

I've been on the beach this week reading The Beach House by Mary Alice Monroe. I love the environmental message.

Saturday Night At the Lakeside Supper Club – J Ryan Stradal
Digital audiobook performed by Aspen Vincent
3***

Mariel Prager’s restaurant is bleeding money by the day. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in Mariel’s family for decades, but it also was the cause of a rift between Mariel and her mother, Florence, that has never quite healed. Her husband, Ned, is heir to a chain of homestyle diner, and he believes his family’s chain could provide a better future that The Lakeside. But these struggles pale in comparison to a devastating tragedy. Can they find a way to rebuild their lives?

I really like Stradal’s writing. He is spot on in revealing the small-town Midwestern vibe. These are ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, full of hope, dreams, hardship, fights, reconciliations, tragedy, and perseverance. His books remind me that we ALL have stories to tell.

I’ll admit that with all that is going on in real life right now, I sometimes lost the thread when listening to the book. I definitely caught the major plot points, but the novel is more about the characters and how they deal with what life throws at them, than it is about a particular plot point. I’m so glad that the supper club lives on in Wisconsin. And while relish trays are disappearing, the brandy old-fashioned is still readily available!

Aspen Vincent does a fine job of narrating the audiobook.

I've just finished, and enjoyed (with a few reservations), Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. Readers looking for anything like a standard plot, or even standard character development, should look elsewhere than this long (506 pages in my Perennial paperback edition), often intriguingly written, reverie on memory, history, and the mysteries, beauty, cruelty and absurdities of human nature. As the description on my copy's back cover tells us, Soul Mountain is semi-autobiographical. In 1983, Gao Xingjiam was diagnosed with lung cancer and given only months to live. Six weeks later he found out the diagnosis had been wrong. He had no cancer. In the meantime, the prolific playwright, novelist, painter and critic was under scrutiny from the Chinese regime. Says the book's description, "Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southeast China." Soul Mountain is the result of that journey, but this is much more than a fictionalized travelogue. The stories the fictional Gao relates have to do with his searches for remnants of the many layers of Chinese history, giving him a several thousand year deep territory to explore. He tells tales ranging from ancient history right up through the Cultural Revolution. He runs into very old Daoist priests and young archeologists, all of whom have stories to tell him and places to show him, or at least to point him towards. He tells tales of wars and famines, but also of love, friendship, devotion and courage. He adds in stories about his own life and family history as well, all the while exploring the importance of the natural world (as well as the environmental degradation he finds, mostly portrayed by the clearcutting of ancient forests). As one would expect from the book's title, mountains, and the climbing of mountains, fuel a recurring theme, as does the beauty of music, and especially singing and chanting, heard indistinctly and from a distance.

I've posted a longer review on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next up for me will be Charlie's Good Tonight, a biography of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts by Paul Sexton.

Working through The Golden Bough by James Frazer a classic in its genre.
I am also reading Phantastes by George McDonald about the fey and he was a Church Minister.
The Zap Gun by Philip K Dick.

The new thread is up over here.