What are you reading now?: April 18, 2026.

Wrapping up Courage Above all Things. Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me and Reggiane Fighters will follow.

Today I'll be finishing Spycatcher: the Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer by Peter Wright. I'll have a review up soon. The book is Wright's memoir about his career has a high ranking member of MI5, the British counterespionage organization tasked with rooting out spies and traitors during the Cold War. It was interesting and nicely written, if somewhat overburdened with detail.

Sticking with nonfiction for a bit, I'll next being reading a baseball biography, Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx, the autobiography of a ballplayer who was an important part of the New York Yankees teams I rooted from from junior high through college.

>2 rocketjk: As a lifelong Yankee fan, Roy White was one of my earliest "favorite baseball player". I might have to read that one.

>4 rocketjk: Yes, mine too. He was, I think, the only player who lasted from the "Horace Clarke era" far into the Steinbrenner/championship years. I'll let you know how the book is. A good friend of mine read it recently and handed it over to me afterward. He said it was good. I even heard Paul O'Neill talking about the book during a Yankee broadcast last season. It's relatively short and looks like a quick read, which I can use, as I've reading several long volumes so far this year.

Unless
Carol Shields
4/5 stars
Reta Winter's life goes into a upside down slide when her daughter Norah drops out of her life. I enjoyed it. 2002

Still reading London by Edward Rutherfurd a good book though very big.

I'm still reading When Trees Testify by Beronda L. Montgomery. I'm over halfway through. I love how all the information is presented.

I finished up 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline. It was an excellent read. It never oversimplified the situation. In fact, it went out of its way to point out the problems with the common, superficial explanation that it was all due to the "Sea Peoples". This was always an easy out for explaining the early 12th century BC (Late Bronze Age) collapse in the Near East. If you are looking for an answer, you will find plenty in Dr. Cline's book, but no favored one. There may simply be too little evidence remaining to answer the question definitively.

I'm currently reading Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction. A brief history of Syro-Palestine archaeology and what he have learned along the way.

I've finished a couple of books for a group read, so I delved into my TBR shelf and am now immersed in two lovely ones, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years and Wildwood Dancing.

I finished my third straight memoir, Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx by Roy White with Paul Semendinger. White was an important if often under the radar player for the New York Yankees from the mid-60s through the 70s. His memoir is more surface than substance, unfortunately, but I still enjoyed it. My review is on the book's work site and on my Club Read thread.

Next up for me will be Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, a history of a medieval village in the French Pyrenees, with much information, including interviews, taken from primary sources of the time. This was, according to the descriptions on the back of the book, a best seller in France when first published in its original 600-page version. The translated into English version was shaved down to around 350 pages, which is about all I think I'll need on the topic. :)

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature
by Adam Morgan
3/5 stars
Interesting book about Margaret C. Anderson who fought in the Twenties to prevent book bans and produced her own magazine, The Little Review, despite a backlash. Biography/Non-Fiction

The new thread is up over here.