Here's a partial list of what I've been reading lately, and am still reading in several cases; I have that habit, some call it good, others call it bad, of reading many books simultaneously:
Wendy's diaries. I'm up to 1985; sometimes these diaries make me laugh, sometimes they make me cry
Cloud Messenger draft #2 by my friend Karen Trollope Kumar; a beautifully written account of Karen and Pradeep's courtship and marriage and their subsequent 10-11 years in the foothills of the Himalayas. A clever blend of lyrical travel writing, insightful descriptions of Indian family life, intimate glimpses of Karen's own family, and her endurance of horrific events including murder and a major earthquake. I hope she can persuade Penguin to publish this!
Ragnorak, or The End of the Gods, A S Byatt's retelling of the Norse sagas, a beautifully written and quite brief account that skillfully blends the "Twilight of the Gods" saga with modern, apocalyptic thoughts about collapsing ecosystems and the implications of this for the future of life on earth.
Victoria Nicholson's Singled Out, social history about the 2 million women in Britain with no mate because of the slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918. Sad, and not as good as Nicholson's later book, Millions Like Us.
Margaret Atwood's new collection called In Other Worlds, mainly elegant essays on science and speculative fiction, dystopias, etc.
The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
Sex and Samosas by Jasmine Aziz
Oliver Sacks's latest, In the Mind's Eye, about the onset of his own blindness, among other things
The Emperor of Maladies, a scholarly study of the social and cultural history of cancer by an oncologist; I'm enjoying this and taking it slowly.
Articles and reviews in The Guardian, Walrus and New York Review
Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt, probably the best of the books about the present age of greed and widening economic gaps between the haves and the have-nots. Most appeared as essays in NYRB. Tony Judt's history of Europe since the end of the 1939-45 world war, called simply Postwar, is the best history of this period I have ever read.
Several thrillers by Henning Mankell, translated from Swedish -- far better than the 3 massive door-stoppers by Stieg Larsen about Lizbeth Salander, although these had their moments.
Several charming books by Alexander McCall Smith, about Bertie, the gifted 6 year old who lives with his appalling mother Irene and inoffensive father and baby sister at 44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh; and the other series about Elizabeth Dalhousie and the Edinburgh in which she lives with her lover Jamie who becomes her husband, and her baby son Charlie, not forgetting Brother Fox who frequents her garden and walks along the top of the garden wall. I've just finished the latest of the latter series on my Kobo e-reader, The Perils of Morning Coffee. I don't know how he does it, churning out several books a year, all of them good to excellent. Like many who know and love Edinburgh, I'm addicted to Alexander McCall Smith's books set in Edinburgh
Curiosity, by Joan Thomas, a Winnipeg writer; this is a splendid novel based on the life of Mary Anning, the barely literate village girl from Lyme Regis who founded the science of paleontology and an imagined love affair with Henry de la Beche who drew excellent pictures of some of her discoveries in the chalk cliffs that were full of fossils.
Three books about "The Big Questions" in physics, mathematics and philosophy that I picked up as remainders. Excellent way to get up to speed again in these three domains. I've posted remarks about some of these books on my blog
There are quite a lot more that I've read in the past few months, and many that I've reread wholly or partly, including Winnie the Pooh, Pride and Prejudice, Richard Feynman's essays and Charlotte's Web.
What a weird mixture! I spend a lot of time reading. It's much more rewarding than TV. I'm sure I'd be able to add lots more if I stopped to think.
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