Aprille's First Thread 2026

Hi everyone,

This is my first thread and so I'm trying to figure out how it's done. I'm a retired archivist who lives in Michigan. I read a lot and keep a reading journal so I can remember what I liked about a book. I have a reading queue with about 80 books in it, and I generally alternate books off my shelf with new books. I read mostly literary fiction, historical fiction, plays, memoirs, and biographies, but a bit of everything from time to time.

January 2026
1) Seeing
2) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
3) The Heidi Chronicles
4) The Humans
5) Edith Wharton
6) My Great Arab Melancholy
7) Amadeus
8) Stone Yard Devotional
9) Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions
10) A Sportsman's Notebook
11) Kudos

February 2026
12) Death of the Author
13) The Damnation of Theron Ware
14) Sozaboy
15) The Classic King
16) Life After Life
17) Paradise
18) Marat/Sade
19) Young Mungo
20) Public Library and Other Stories
21) The Plot Against America

March 2026
22) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
23) Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
24) A Taste of the Sun
25) Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes
26) The Theory and Practice of Lunch
27) Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
28) Phineas Finn
29) SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical
30) Charming Billy
31) America, America
32) Laughter on the 23rd Floor
33) The Gathering
34) Singin' in the Rain: A Stage Musical
35) Corelli's Mandolin
36) Semele: A Musical Drama in Three Acts
37) The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

April 2026
38) Death Comes for the Archbishop
39) Uncle Vanya
40) Half of a Yellow Sun
41) True History of the Kelly Gang
42) Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812
43) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
44) The Sisters Brothers
45) Cassandra at the Wedding
46) Rhinoceros
47) Bog Queen

May 2026
48) Midnight's Children
49) The Good Soldier
50) The Learned Ladies
51) Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence
52) West
53) Saturday
54) The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch
55) Destroy this House: A Memoir
56) Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir
57) The English Patient
58) The Return of Martin Guerre
59) Lost Children Archive
60) Gaudy Night

June 2026
61) Crimes of the Heart
62) Clear
63) The Vegetarian
64) Annihilation
65) Sexing the Cherry
66) Waterland
67) The Red Badge of Courage
68) The Open Boat
69) The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
70) The Blue Hotel
71) Annie John
72) The Correspondent
73) Rainbows End
74) Shopgirl
75) Train Dreams
76) Commonwealth
77) Evelina

July 2026
78) Women Talking

welcome! there are lots of ways to put it together. youu introduction was perfect. I realized reading it we share reading type! I read Heide Chronicals but dont rememter it, should take a look alsor read seeing which I loved

the easiest is to set up is just list the books you are reading. and tell a little bit about them. there are some people who enjoy data and if you look at other threads (and you should to get ideas-)youll see some the what I mean you dont have to do that much, do what you are comfortable looking forward to see your result

Welcome to Club Read! It's nice that we're getting new blood this year and it looks like you'll fit right in :-)

How did you like Seeing? I loved Blindness, and tried two or three times to read the sequel, but could NOT get through it.

Edited to fix typo

>4 labfs39: I thought Seeing was impressive. The ironic humor is subtle and hard to describe, and quite clever. The plot concerns the government imagining a conspiracy and taking violent action against the capital city because 80% of its residents decided to leave their ballots blank. Everyone acknowledges that citizens were within their rights to leave a ballot blank and that they shouldn't have to disclose whether they voted. Living in a country where the right to peaceful protest is being brutally curtailed, I felt it was really relevant. On the other hand, Saramago's imaginary world has only one woman in it who has any agency and his chapter-long paragraphs felt aggressively unhospitable to this reader. I haven't read Blindness yet though I realize they are in sequence. Seeing was a cheap second-hand purchase. If I see Blindness, I will definitely pick up a copy. I did like Seeing more than Baltasar and Blimunda.

>1 aprille: Welcome! Love the picture of your reading journals.

Your reading journals are beautiful!

>5 aprille: Maybe the third or fourth time is the charm? Blindness is my favorite Saramago novel, followed by The Elephant's Journey. The Double was okay, but The Cave fell a little short as he beats the reader over the head with allusions to Plato's allegory of the cave.

>1 aprille: that picture! Those journals! They’re gorgeous and just beg to be paged through. And just so impressive. I think i’m in love with your journals. 😂 Seriously, I admire them

I think you will find what you want to do with this space. Maybe some of the stuff reading gets you thinking about, but no one in real life wants to hear. Maybe something like whatever is in your journals.

>5 aprille: I enjoyed this post. I find Saramago an odd one, mostly based off reviews i’ve read. I read one book, Cain, and didn’t like it. But it’s practically his least read book. (I was reading the Bible, so it made sense)

Happy New Year. I look forward to following your reading this year. I love your journals. They look very organized. Mine are NOT uniform, just in various blank books I've picked up over time.

>6 FlorenceArt:
>7 japaul22:
>9 dchaikin:
>10 BLBera:
Thanks for the journal compliments! I'm quite proud of them, actually ;)
Writing with my hand keeps me in the zone instead of being tempted to double-check things on the internet all the time.

>11 aprille: Writing with my hand keeps me in the zone instead of being tempted to double-check things on the internet all the time. Definitely one of the best things about long hand. Another is that it gives you time to think better.

>1 aprille: As everyone else has said, lovely journals. In this consumer society, how are you able to find the same format from year to year?

>12 SassyLassy: I just love the Leuchtturm1917 medium journals with dots on the pages. The paper is thick and smooth, there's an index in the front and a pocket in the back, and the colors are lovely. They come out with new colors every year and they have a bit of Pantone-esque current stylishness to them. The company is over 100 years old, so there's some security in that, I suppose.

>13 aprille: That's a wonderful site. Thanks so much. Now I know how to treat myself! Good to know they've been around 100+ years.

>13 aprille: they look gorgeous. Thanks for the link

>13 aprille: Thanks for that. I see some new journals in my future.

Hi Aprille—

i'm slooowly catching up on LT after being away for a few months. We have a lot of books in common, and I'm a huge fan of writing by hand—it's one of the reasons I haven't been here much, since I spend so much of my working day on the computer and online and it's really good to turn the thing off and just write or draw. Are you a pen person too?

I also have a fondness for archivists... I think I would have been one in another life (one in which I would have had the time to get two master's degrees, which was the gold standard for academic librarianship when I was getting my MLS 15ish years ago and which totally discouraged me from going that route).

>17 lisapeet: I'm attached to writing by hand because it makes me more thoughtful and deliberate -- I can't just cut and paste. I also really like to write about the ends of books and to be very honest about my reactions to the works without worrying about how others will judge -- so keeping it in a book rather than posting online works well for me. If someone asks, I can access the journal and remind myself what I thought of a book and frame a more custom response to that person.

It looks like you write LT reviews for much of what you read. I'll have to seek them out from now on. And I see you're a library journalist, so you're probably constantly looking at a screen during much of the day. What do you write (or draw) longhand?

Dropping a star. I’ve been looking for your thread. I agree with the writing by hand. Unfortunately, I have to use technology now for my writing because I have lost much of much sight..

But what you wrote about writing by hand being important gels with me. Because of my difficulty in typing, people often suggest I use speech to text, but I can’t write book reviews or anything meaningful by talking to a screen. I tend to break into conversational mode and my reviews become too lengthy and structured.

To me, it’s the equivalent of the step of riding by hand and going to an electronic keyboard. I noticed a number of writers still write hand.