What are you reading the week of November 12, 2022?

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What are you reading the week of November 12, 2022?

1fredbacon
marraskuu 11, 2022, 10:32 pm

I read Maigret Afraid last weekend. This week I've been reading Stalin's Empire of Memory Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination by Serhy Yekelchyk. This is another text for Timothy Snyder's History of Ukraine course at Yale. I have about 30 pages left to go, but I've been spending most of my time watching videos from the liberation of Kherson. I'll finish it tomorrow.

2rocketjk
marraskuu 12, 2022, 12:14 am

I finally worked through a few items in the way and have started The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The book details the many ways in which the Federal government promoted, and in many cases mandated, segregation in the U.S. It's important history, all right, and depressing as all get out.

3fredbacon
marraskuu 12, 2022, 2:29 am

4Shrike58
Muokkaaja: marraskuu 15, 2022, 8:31 am

Okay, started out my morning by finishing up A Demon-Haunted Land, next up will be Rain of Steel and Italy in the Era of the Great War.

Moving Madness Rules the Hour to the head of the que.

5enaid
marraskuu 12, 2022, 3:47 pm

I'm reading the excellent Wilkie Collins short novel, The Haunted Hotel and I picked up Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour at the library. Darkly funny which I love.

6Copperskye
marraskuu 12, 2022, 8:42 pm

>3 fredbacon: Thanks for posting that, Fred!

I just finished one of my holiday themed books, Santa’s Little Yelpers by David Rosenfelt. The title is pretty silly, but it was actually a fairly solid legal mystery.

I think my next book will be Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.

8PaperbackPirate
marraskuu 13, 2022, 9:29 pm

I'm reading Strange Tombs by Syd Moore. I love a good series you can slip back into at any time.

9Aussi11
marraskuu 14, 2022, 2:07 am

Started on One Hundred Years of Dirt by Rick Morton a fascinating memoir.

10diegobasedgod
marraskuu 14, 2022, 2:14 pm

I'm halfway through Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. I love it so far!

11enaid
marraskuu 14, 2022, 4:40 pm

I picked up Louise Erdrich's The Sentence this morning and I'm flying through it. She really captures the quirky folks who work in bookstores- myself included. This novel is a pleasure and one of the best I've read all year. :)

12BookConcierge
marraskuu 14, 2022, 7:46 pm


The Deal Of a Lifetime –Fredrick Backman
1*

Book on CD read by Santino Fontana. DNF - zero stars
I quit after about the equivalent of 30 pages. Didn't seem like the feel-good Christmas story I was expecting. I hated the narrator / main character. And thought the whole idea of "the woman in the grey sweater" was creepy and ridiculous.

Santino Fontana’s performance on the audio didn’t help. His voice seemed distant and detached. Perhaps that’s because it’s the way Backman wrote the character, but the result was the same: I didn’t want to continue.

For me, there are too many other great books out there to waste time on this one.

NOTE: After writing this review and returning the audiobook, I picked up the text just to check something and wound up finishing the story. Still didn’t like it but I’d give it 1 star.

13BookConcierge
marraskuu 14, 2022, 8:17 pm


Evan Help Us – Rhys Bowen
3***

Book two in the Constable Evans series has Evan looking into two seemingly unrelated deaths. Colonel Arbuthnot has wandered the area around the village for some time and, an amateur archeologist, he’s come across what he believes to be a credible ruin that could bring great attention to the village. After boasting to one and all at the pub one night, he leaves to go to his lodging house, but he never makes it home. He’s found the next day in the river; apparently having slipped off the footbridge while inebriated and drowned. A few nights later prodigal son Ted Morgan, who’s returned to the village from a successful career as a real estate developer in London, is found dead in his study, an apparent suicide. But both deaths are eventually deemed to be murder. There is no obvious connection between the two of them, so does this mean there are two murderous persons about in the small Welsh village?

I like Constable Evans, but this one dragged a little. Still, I enjoy spending time with the colorful residents of Llanfair. CP Evans’ slow-burn relationship with Bronwen is ever-so-slowly inching along. But Betsy the bar maid isn’t about to give up hope for a romance with him either.

14BookConcierge
marraskuu 15, 2022, 11:00 am


The View From Penthouse B – Elinor Lipman
Digital audiobook performed by Mia Barron
3.5*** rounded up

Gwen-Laura Schmidt was unexpectedly widowed when her beloved husband suffered a massive heart attack. Her older sister, Margot, invites her to move into Margot’s luxurious Greenwich Village apartment. Margot was divorced amid scandal and then lost her money to a Ponzi scheme, so this is a chance not only to help her sister in her grief, but to make ends meet. Margot also takes in another boarder – handsome, loves-to-bake, Anthony.

What a charming comedy of manners, reminiscent of Jane Austen, but updated to the 21st century. The scenarios and the characters are believable and relatable. Their dialogue sparkles. I love how they support and encourage one another through thick and thin. And trust me, there’s considerable thin here. And many complications relationship wise. But all these plot twists are handled with grace and humor and compassion and delight. I want to be friends with these people … all of them. I want to have dinner with them on a Wednesday night and hear about their adventures and what they think about the latest political scandal, and whose kid got into a good school, and what they’re reading lately, and whose sister is getting divorced.

Mia Barron does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. There are a lot of characters to handle and she’s up to the task.

15rocketjk
Muokkaaja: marraskuu 16, 2022, 2:41 pm

I finished The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. The Color of Law is another frustrating, infuriating and absolutely crucial study of racism in America. Richard Rothstein's central thesis is that most Americans (or at least most white Americans) believe that the widespread segregation of American cities and suburbs happened relatively naturally, the result of racism, yes, and of the economic forces that that racism produced, but not due to any overt official program of separation and exclusion, at least in the Northern states. Rothstein calls this the theory of de facto segregation. But as Rothstein proves convincingly and forcefully in his book's 240 information-packed pages, what we have had in America is and has been, in fact, de jure segregation, a condition created and maintained by over a century of overt governmental policies. My longer review is up on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next up for me will be The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller. I've never read any of Miller's works and I'm more or less simply curious to try one. That and the fact that I recently bought lovely copy published in Paris by the Obelisk Press. Beautiful old books like this one always add somehow to my reading pleasure.

16Aussi11
marraskuu 18, 2022, 1:23 am

17seitherin
marraskuu 18, 2022, 11:01 am

Finished The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves and started Telling Tales.

18JulieLill
marraskuu 18, 2022, 11:23 am

Twisted Twenty-Six
Janet Evanovich
3/5 stars
Stephanie Plum is back and now and has to look after her Grandma Mazur who decided to marry a local mobster who dies soon after the wedding. The problem with that, is that her dead husband supposedly has the keys to a large fortune, and his mobster associates think she now has the keys. Plum has to keep an eye on her grandma because the mob wants that money, and she is a target. I still get a kick out of these characters plus her books are a fast read!

The American Association of Patriots Presents: How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety
Zachary Auburn
2/5 stars
I saw this book and thought that this might be quite funny but after a few pages it started to drag and the jokes got old. However, it was a short read so no harm, no foul.

19snash
marraskuu 18, 2022, 8:44 pm

I finished the LTER Every Awful Thing. It is a collection of flash fiction and poetry giving a broad and frank picture of the author. Several of the poems especially were very insightful, One of my favorites was Matchstick Girl Part 5.

20PaperbackPirate
marraskuu 18, 2022, 9:01 pm

>16 Aussi11: I love The Bean Trees! You might as well buy/borrow Pigs in Heaven now.

21fredbacon
marraskuu 18, 2022, 10:19 pm

The new thread is up over here.