What are you reading now?: May 16, 2026.

First off, I probably won't be in a position to start the new thread for the next two weeks so feel free to step up.

Just started Jade Legacy. The Long Hangover will follow.

For the rest of the month my reading will basically be Walter Lippmann, A Brave and Cunning Prince, and The Regicide Report.

I finished Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, an very interesting history of an early-14th century village in the Pyrenees Mountains and their involvement with the "heretical" Cathar sect of Christianity that put them in peril from the Catholic Inquisition.

I'm now reading A Fool's Errand by Albion Tourgee, a semi-autobiographical novel about the post-Civil War Reconstruction period written by a man who moved from the North to the South during that period to help the formerly enslaved successfully integrate into mainstream society. Or so he thought. A fascinating period piece, very nimbly written.

Don Rickles: The Merchant of Venom
by Michael Seth Starr
4/5 stars
This is an in-depth look at the merchant of venom, comedian Don Rickles. I enjoyed and remembered his movies and comedy shows!
Books On Entertainment/Biography

Have started reading a mystery The Long Call by Ann Cleeves

I started listening to "One of us knows" by Alyssa Cole yesterday and I'm already almost halfway through which is very fast. I'm really enjoying it

It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake – Claire Christian
Digital audiobook narrated by Ione Butler
3***

Noni Blake is having a really bad time. Her long-term relationship has ended, and a person with whom she’s just had a fling has died in a tragic accident. Reeling, she flits from one-night-stand to one-night stand and finds that sex with any available partner just isn’t the cure for what ails her. She decides on the spur of the moment that she just needs to get away, examine her life, and take care of HERSELF. So, she takes an extended leave from her job and books a flight to England.

It's an interesting coming-of-age story for a thirty-something. I was somewhat turned off by the meaningless sex, and some of the more graphic descriptions, but ultimately I did like Noni’s journey of self-discovery.

Ione Butler does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. She sets a good pace and has clear diction. And she does a good job of the various accents from Aussie to British.

>1 Shrike58: I hope it's for a fun reason!

I'm reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub.

>7 PaperbackPirate: Vacation to the Outer Banks (NC) with my siblings.

>8 Shrike58: Sounds amazing! Have fun!

11/22/63 –Stephen King
Audio book performed by Craig Wasson, with an afterword by the author.
4****

Jake Epping is a high-school English teacher, who also teaches adults seeking their GEDs. One of those adults is Harry Dunning, the school janitor, who is obviously “slow” and walks with a limp. The essay he writes describing the “The Day That Changed My Life” stuns Jake. So when his friend Al Templeton reveals that there is a portal to the past in his pantry – a “rabbit hole” that will take the traveler back to Sept 9, 1958 at 11:58 a.m. – Jake decides to try to change Harry Dunning’s history. But Al has a larger, more important, historical event in mind; he just has to convince Jake to take it on.

The cover art and the title really tell the reader up front that the focus of this novel will be the Kennedy assassination. But King takes his sweet time getting there. Jake will have to live in the past from Sept 9, 1958 to Fall 1963 if he’ll have any chance to stop Oswald (or whoever it was who pulled the trigger, or conspired to do so). Among other things, he’ll have to actually determine whether Oswald was acting alone, or was just the “patsy” he claimed to be. But in those intervening years, Jake will find work and will meet and come to care for a variety of people – students, fellow teachers, neighbors, and one very special librarian.

I’ll admit I was a bit frustrated that it took King so long to get to the critical events of November 1963. I knew he had to have a good reason for this, but I wasn’t seeing it and I grew impatient. This is NOT to say that the book is slow. Far from it. King is a master at pacing a thriller to keep the reader turning pages. But if he told me one more time that “the past is obdurate” … well I was going to have to throw something at the CD player. However, I grew to care about all the events Jake experienced long before he got to Dallas. From the slang used to the fashions of the day and on to the small details, such as the price of gasoline, King immerses the reader in the “land of ago” and gives us a chance to recognize how very different that time was from 2011. He forces us to think about “what might have been” and “where might we be today” if only …

However convoluted and long the journey, I’m glad I went along. I was in tears (yes, in a Stephen King novel!) at the end of Chapter 31. I really wish he had ended it there. This is a novel that cries out for an ambiguous ending. The last chapter – Citizen of the Century – seemed like an afterthought, and while it was nice to have some of the loose ends tied up, for this reader the impact of Chapter 31 was lessened.

Craig Wasson was superb performing this audio. He even did a fair impersonation of real figures (Walter Cronkite and President John F Kennedy specifically), and had reasonably good regional accents. I also really appreciated that King read the audio of his afterword. The story was a sort of personal one for him, having lived through the events of that fateful day, and wondered “what if…”

The new thread is here.