What are you reading now?: September 20, 2025.

Currently working on Watching Darkness Fall. Russian Aviation Colours 1909-1922: Volume 2, Great War and The Fourth Consort will follow.

While on vacation this month I read The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis and Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner. Both were enjoyable (The Betrayers particularly so) and both, coincidentally, had to do with Russian emigres, The Betrayers emigrants to Israel and Vaclav & Lena emigrants to Brooklyn. Review for both can be found on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

I'm now finishing up the excellent The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker.

I'm reading Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick with a group on Litsy. I'm only on the second chapter but I have a good feeling about this one.
I'm also still reading Language City by Ross Perlin a few pages at a time.

I'm reading Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield. For the most part, I'm enjoying it, although its slow pace is sometimes trying. I'm listening to The Butterfly House by Katrine Engberg, a Danish Nordic crime novelist whose works I have started reading this year.

fwiw, my review of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker, is viewable on the book's work page and my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Starting this audio via Libby ~

Typewriter Beach: A Novel
by Meg Waite Clayton

Reading Madness and its taking so long!

Just finished
WOODS RUNNER by Gary Paulsen
Now reading
THE INNKEEPER’S SONG
by Peter Beagle

The Gas and Flame Men: Baseball and the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I
Jim Leeke
4/5 stars
This is the true story of the men who went to WWI to work in the Chemical Warfare Service and who were baseball players. Some of them lost their lives in the service. Sports

The Night We Lost Him – Laura Dave
Book on CD performed by Julia Whelan
3***

From the book jacket: Liam Noone was many things to many people. To the public, he was a self-made hotel magnate. To his three ex-wives, he was a loving if distant family man, who kept his families carefully separated. To Nora, he was a father who loved her from afar – notably a cliffside cottage on the California coast where he fell to his death. The authorities rule the death accidental, but Nora and her brother Sam have other ideas.

My reactions
I am Sooooo over the dual timeline device, and this one isn’t even done all that well. The reader knows that Liam has had a long-term relationship with a woman he never married (he asked; she refused). Nora and Sam, have no idea. So, as they try to investigate the circumstances involving their father’s fatal fall, they stumble across clues here and there, but get gaslighted by their uncle or their father’s office staff.

The fact that Liam was pushed is on page four, so that’s no surprise to the reader, though the culprit is unknown. But the result was that I felt Nora and Sam’s efforts to uncover the truth were just tedious. By the time they are certain he was pushed I had lost interest in who did the pushing.

And let’s not forget the other timeline … starting when Liam is in college and meets the girl he will love forever. Dave interrupts the mystery of what really happened to Liam on the night he died to give the reader various meetings between the two lovers over the years, despite both of them being married to other people. I never felt any great love there, but Dave definitely told us (over and over) how much they meant to one another.

If it hadn’t been a selection for my F2F book club, I may have just abandoned it without finishing.

Julia Whelan is one of my favorite audiobook narrators, and she does her usual stupendous job performing the audio in this case. Too bad she didn’t have better material to work with. Still, her performance at least entertained me enough to keep me going, and elevated my rating by a full star.

>9 JulieLill: Gas and Flame Men looks very interesting to me. I assume Christy Mathewson figures relatively prominently in the narrative.

Yesterday I started Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: a Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, written by journalist William Riordan, based on talks by George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall politician in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This ties in nicely with The New York Game, which describes the workings of Tammany Hall in some detail.

>11 rocketjk: Matthewson is definitely in the narrative!

Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television—and America—Forever
Alan Siegel
4/5 stars
I thought this book was so interesting and the author did get a great job writing this book. Highly Recommended! Film and Entertainment

The new thread is up over here.