What are you reading now?: March 21, 2026

Slightly earlier than normal because I know that it'll otherwise slip my mind.

Engineering America and Orbus are the main books this coming week.

Wrapping up the week with Dust.

I'm still reading The Heike Story, a long modern (1956) retelling of an ancient Japanese epic. I'm about 375 pages into the book's 617 pages.

starting this audio via Libby ~

The Restaurant of Lost Recipes (Kamogawa Food Detectives novel, #2)
by Hisashi Kashiwai

I’m working my way through Don Quixote and have hit a stretch that feels like a series of “and then this happened” episodes. Not sure if I just need to adjust my expectations or if it starts to cohere more later on. Would love to hear how others approached it.

>4 gemmacraven: I read the English translation of Don Quixote by Edith Grossman from the library. Hers is considered the definitive translation of the novel.

Currently reading Poisoned by Gilt by Leslie Caine

>4 gemmacraven: I read Don Quixote a few years ago. I found it helpful to listen to the lectures on Cervantes in the Yale Open Course lecture series at https://oyc.yale.edu/spanish-and-portuguese/span-300.

My brain was hijacked by a jigsaw puzzle this week, so there wasn't a lot of reading. Still, I've made it a third of the way through Kalevala.

I'm reading We Solve Murders by Richard Osman, which is, of course, fun. I just finished Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Hnery, which was terrific.

Hey everybody, I finally finished Never Whistle at Night!

Now I'm reading Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao, and I feel like I'm flying through by comparison!

The Daisy Children – Sofia Grant
1.5*

From the book jacket: In this novel, inspired by true events, a young woman peels back the layers of her family’s history, discovering a tragedy in the past that explains so much of the present.

My reactions:
Meh.

I would really have liked to learn more about the actual explosion in 1937 that flattened the New London School and killed nearly 300 people (mostly children). But instead, this is a typical historical fiction / family secrets / dual (or triple) timeline story.

I had some sympathy for Katie, whose husband is increasingly distant, and who leaps at the chance to escape Boston for a short while to deal with her recently deceased grandmother’s estate. On the other hand, I pretty quickly lost patience with Scarlett. Yes, I realize she has limited education and limited opportunities, but her “devotion” to a ne’er-do-well boyfriend made me want to shake her. On the other hand, she was kindness personified. And I liked how her relationship with Katie developed, despite their being virtual strangers at the outset.

The back and forth timelines though, really threw me. Maybe because I really didn’t care about any of these people (Katie’s mother, grandmother and great grandmother). I’m sure part of my disappointment was because I kept expecting more information about that 1937 disaster, and never got anything but the fact that it happened and that a lot of couples had “replacement” babies within the next year.

Well, it fit a couple of challenges, and it’s off the tbr now.

The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema
Paul Fischer
4/5 stars
A wonderful and interesting book about the modern-day kings of cinema which include Stephen Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. A must read for movie fans!
Books On Entertainment /Biographies

I've finally finished The Heiké Story by Eiji Yoshikawa (1892-1962), a modern (1956) retelling of the The Heiké Monogatari, a Japanese epic from the thirteenth century that related the feudal wars that had raged throughout Japan during the previous centuries between the powerful, Heiké, Fujiwara and Genji clans. Yoshikawa brings the story to a personal level, following the lives of several characters in both the dueling Heiké and Genji clans, also portraying the subservient lives that the culture's women were forced to endure. My longer review is on my Club Read thread.

Next I'll be reading The Yellow House, a memoir by Sarah M. Broom, about African American/New Orleans family history and dislocation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I've been looking forward to this memoir for quite some time.

The new thread is up over here.

I'm two-thirds of the way through Kalevala which I'm enjoying, but I do have to take it in small doses or I become lost. The poem switches points of view often. It's easy to forget that the narrator has switched from the author telling a story to a character in the story telling a story.

>7 fredbacon: Oh, very interesting, I will delve, thank you!

Is there a specific translator you suggest for kalevala?