August 2025: What are you reading?

Another month has gone by. What 1001 books are you reading for this third month of summer/winter?

I'm readingBroad and Alien Is the World and hopefully will stop avoiding A Void.

I am finishing the third volume of 1Q84 and getting bored with Billy Budd.

Chipping away at Old Goriot and listening to The Radetzky March. I loved 1Q84- i hope you're enjoying it!

>4 amaryann21: yes, it's weirdly hypnotic.

>4 amaryann21: Balzac writes beautifully -in French anyway, never read him in translation.

>4 amaryann21: >6 paruline: Must admit that I did not much care for Old Goriot. On the other hand, The Radetzky March was fantastic.

I am reading nothing but mystery novels currently. There is one Agatha Christie on the List, so perhaps I should get that.

I finished The Rainbow by DH Lawrence which, while I appreciated the themes it was tackling, due to its exhausting repetitiveness, I thought it could use some severe editing which would have made it a stellar novella instead of its frustratingly tiring 400 pages.

>5 paruline: that's such a good description. I find most of Murakami's book that way.

>7 annamorphic: Just finished Old Goriot and while there were slow bits, the last 100 pages moved much quicker! This was my first Balzac. I think I'm reading The Radetzky March a little too close to Buddenbrooks- feeling some similarities.

Now that I'm through with the Von Trottas, I've started The Master and Margarita.

I'm reading A Void and enjoying the various references to other 1001 books and authors.

I am listening on audio to Tess of the d'Urbervilles and I have to say that it's very, very annoying. A big disappointment after Far From the Madding Crowd that I read relatively recently. Looking at a chronological list of Hardy's works, I see that his late books, like Tess and Jude the Obscure, are the depressing and heavy ones. Has anybody read The Woodlanders? It's on the list and it's the book before Tess so I need to know just how grim it is.

>14 annamorphic: I gave Woodlanders 4 out of 5. My summary “A nicely written story that threatens to end happily but being Hardy has tragedy, loss and poignancy”

>15 puckers: THat's a relief. Tess is so predictably disastrous, I'm having trouble coping with it.