What are You Reading Now?: September 27, 2024.

Still working on The Fourth Consort. The Empress of Art and Beasts Before Us will follow.

Knocked off Tsalmoth. Began what will be a long read in The Silent Spring Revolution. The more immediate book is The Gilded Page.

I had the wrong date

I'm still reading Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick. I think I'll finish this weekend. It's been humorous and a fun adventure.
I'm also still reading Language City by Ross Perlin slowly but steadily.

Continuing to enjoy this audio via Libby ~

Typewriter Beach: A Novel
by Meg Waite Clayton

Re-reading Helen and Teacher by the late Joseph P. Lash; The Burning Time by Virginia Rounding, and for some light and easy reading a cozy mystery, The Silence of the Library by Miranda James.

Last night, I finished listening to Katrine Engberg's The Butterfly House. A Danish author, Engberg writes very good Nordic noir.

I haven't chosen a new audiobook, but I started reading a physical book today: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. I'm 66 pages in, and I'm not sure what to make of it, but I'm intrigued.

>4 Molly3028: Can you imagine the amount of sand that would get into the typewriter? By day's end, the typing would be going slowly!

I've finished the brief but interesting Plunkitt of Tammany Hall a series of infamous "talks" given by George Washington Plunkitt, a major operative of the infamous Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York City for decades. The talks, given from the seat of a shoeshine stand outside a New York City courthouse in the first years of the 20th century, were written down and published in 1905 by journalist William L. Riordon. Explanations and defenses of the machine/patronage system of government, they are often humorous on the surface, but the message is chilling. My full review is up on my Club Read thread.

I've now started Silas Marner by George Eliot for my monthly book group. I've liked the Eliot novels I've read previously. This constitutes one more "drop in the bucket" filling of the vast number of holes in my classics reading.

The Story Collector – Evie Woods
3***

Sarah and Jack’s marriage is ending. And though it’s Christmas, she decides to pack up and leave their New York apartment for her parents’ home in Boston. But after reading a story in an Irish newspaper about a “fairy tree,” and having drunk a significant amount of Irish whisky in the airport lounge, she instead boards a flight for Shannon, Ireland. Before she has a chance to rethink (or even to think for the first time), she finds herself renting a quaint cottage in the village of Thornwood, and finding a diary written a century before by Anna Butler.

This is a charming fable of love lost and love found, of superstition and faith, of family and community, of grief and recovery. Sarah was at times infuriating, but I came to understand her need to grieve and to face her demons. And I really liked the way her relationship with Oran developed.

I liked the historical timeline as well. Anna and Harold’s story is told through Anna’s diary entries. My only quibble is that I had a hard time believing that these were diary entries; it just wasn’t written the way I would expect a village girl to write in the early part of the 20th century.

The Heir by Darcie Wilde
New and 1st book in her new "Young Queen Victoria Mystery" series.
In 1835, Princess Victoria finds her doctor dead near Kensington Palace and is determined to solve the case.

Darcie Wilde is the same author of the "Rosalind Thorne/Useful Woman" series

The Peepshow
Kate Summerscale
4/5 stars
This is fascinating true-life story of the deaths of three women who were killed in London and found in a wall and another woman who was under the floorboards in a house in 1953. Reg Christie was looked into as a main suspect but nothing came of it. Harry Procter, reporter looked into it to see if he could solve the mystery of the murders. Non-Fiction

The new thread is up over here.