Friday Reads — March 6th, 2026

It's Friday again, and time for Friday Reads!

This week, LibraryThing staff are reading:

Abby / @ablachly: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
Lucy / @knerd.knitter: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
Zeph / @ZephCraven: The Spectacle by Anna Barrington

What about all of you? What are you reading this Friday?

I'm continuing with A Daughter of the Huguenots and finding it so much more enjoyable than the previous book in the series.

Monday, I finished The Best of All-Story Love: 1929 and have felt a bit bereft all week. If anyone knows of similar anthologies of light love stories from a variety of authors, I'm in need! I can find novellas and novels, short story collections from single authors, but I'm not sure where to look for something like those pulp magazine stories.

I'm also continuing Sacred Liberty but several glaring errors about Catholicism has me questioning whether I should trust statements about other religions, and if I would be better off dropping it and moving on. :(

The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for A City's Soul, by Scott W. Berg. One of my book clubs is reading it (we always read books about Chicago or by Chicago authors).

Also Building A Legacy: The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park Home and Studio, by Zarine Weil

Light reading: The Long Game, by Rachel Reid

Commute reading: Echo of worlds by M. R. Carey. Carey is a masterful storyteller. This is brilliant, intelligent SF entertainment.
Bedtime reading: Sayonara september : perfect edition 1 by Åsa Ekström. A manga about a group of young people studying to become comics artists. I've just begun it.
Listening to: Gösta Berlings saga by Selma Lagerlöf. A classic, but I must say, what an awful lot of digressions. She's rambling about much more than she's telling the story.

The Starseekers by Nicole Glover. Latest in her excellent Murder and Magic series. Cynthia Rhodes is an arcane engineer at NASA who moonlights as "Miss Luna" on a magical educational TV show. Curses, the space program, and black historical fantasy/mystery.

I just finished Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey, which was amazing but very dark. Now I've started City of Others by Jared Poon and a reread of The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard.

Via Kindle:*
The Maniac / Benjamin Labatut
The Red and the Black / Stendahl; translation Burton Raffel; notes James Madden
Via Kindle app:
The Gene: an intimate history Pt 6, p 417- / Siddhartha Mukherjee
Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) p 100- / Marcel Proust; translation, notes, & intro Ian Patterson
Hardcover remainder:
The Obscene Bird of Night Pt 3 Ch 19- / José Donoso; translators Hardie St. Martin & Leonard Mades

Bedtime reading:
Everyman hardcover:
The Romany Rye. Everyman's Library No. 120 / George Borrow**
Trade paperback:
Kristin Lavransdatter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Bk 2 ("The Wife"), ch 1 p 297- / Sigrid Undset; translation & notes Tina Nunnally

*Just starting these; may switch one or the other to the app; the app allows for different highlight colors so it's good for bringing out contrasting sentences in a paragraph plus it's easier to navigate -- essential for reading Proust. The regular Kindle is better for immersion reading, e.g. the recently completed Color Purple, & I read Charterhouse of Parma on the Kindle; don't remember which device I used for Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, though I'm guessing the Kindle. Incidentally, I haven't been tagging my ebooks though I do add the titles to a "Kindle" collection. Current reading is a little top heavy since I just finished the Alice Walker novel & expect to finish the Mukherjee book this weekend.

**LAVENGRO (EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY) ended rather abruptly; The Romany Rye. Everyman's Library No. 120 is the continuation; the eccentric characters & their stories Borrow introduces toward the end of the first novel/memoir reminded me of Arabian Nights w/out the fantasy elements -- I'm thinking of the more "anecdotal" stories, & the way one story leads to another -- so definitely looking forward to the sequel.

Currently Reading Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

I started The First Woman this morning, and I also have a couple of books about Mexico on the go. One is a cookbook (Taqueria), and the other is a cultural guide (¡Viva Mexico!).
Oh, and I've been fitting in stories from the Decameron between other reads since January.

Currently reading Bound for destiny by James R. Trammell Christian historical fiction