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16 Comments
Finished:
**The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, by Matt Dinniman**
&
**Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan**
Started:
**Voyage of the Damned, by Frances White**
Finished
**Dogs of War, by Jonathan Maberry**
**Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, by Colleen Dulle**
Continuing
**Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, by Isaac Asimov**
**The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson**
**The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones**
**The First Lady of World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Daring Journey to the Frontlines and Back, by Shannon McKenna Schmidt**
Started
**Shock Induction, by Chuck Palahniuk**
Still reading: Last Argument Of Kings by Joe Abercrombie
Finished: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
Started: The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa
Started: Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Finished:
**Arrow’s Fall, by Mercedes Lackey**
**The Adventure of the Demonic Ox, by Lois McMaster Bujold**
**Pain and Prejudice, by Gabrielle Jackson**
I finished reading Happy Place. I started Slewfoot.
Just started “Voyage to the Whales” by Hal Whitehead (1990) (nonfiction)
-It’s a first-person narrative of a graduate student and his crew that took a sailboat from Greece to Sri Lanka in 1981-1983 to search for and record the elusive Indian Ocean Sperm Whales (then barely known)
Started Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Not an easy read but Infinite Jest beat me so I’m sticking with this.
Still reading
**Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon**
Started:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
Katabasis by RF Kuang (audiobook)
Finished:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
**The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett**
**War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy**
**Black Bottom Saints by Alice Randall**
**Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem, by Tim Severin**
Had a pretty slow reading week, but still managed to finish:
**I Am Not Your Eve, by Devika Ponnambalam**
**Ru, by Kim Thúy**
Disliked the former, quite liked the latter, although not as much as her novel Em.
The main issue with I Am Not Your Eve is that it purports to ‘give a voice’ to the Tahitian ‘child bride’ (i.e. Teha’amana, the 13 year old Indigenous Tahitian girl he married) of the artist Paul Gauguin, but it just… doesn’t? The book is told from multiple perspectives, including a lizard on the ceiling of their hut, and the few pages told from Teha’amana’s perspective are frankly a bit bizarre; she’s supposed to be 13, but all of her internal monologue reads like a middle-aged poet, with no attempt to explore how she would feel about the situation as a literal child, or what she would actually understand. There’s also some weird stuff going on with the Indigenous rep; the author is not Tahitian, and it all reads as faintly exoticised, with lots of Tahitian words in italics, and everyone speaking in a very mythologised register. Not a fan, alas.
I’ve started:
**Beloved, by Toni Morrison**
*Finished*
**Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid**
Finished: **A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman**
This was my first Backman novel, and while I can see the charm in it, I guess I’m too much of a pessimist to really enjoy books like this.
Started: **Aflame: Learning from Silence, by Pico Iyer**