What are you reading?: November 23, 2024

Plugging along with Foch in Command. Starting Devil's Gun.

Starting Meet Me by the Fountain. Lords of Uncreation and Warships of the Soviet Fleets 1939-1945, Volume I: Major Combatants will follow.

Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell

This week I finished my 2024 reading goal of 80 books!

I finished my audiobook last night and have not yet picked a new one.

In the world of paper books, I'm enjoying Bone: One Volume Edition, a compilation of Jeff Smith's Bone comics.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Antony Beevor's exhaustive (and excellent) WW2 history, Stalingrad: the Fateful Siege.

>3 ahef1963: Congratulations!

I'm still reading and loving Invisible by Paul Auster. I have next week off so I'm looking forward to more reading time.

I am reading Lovely One: a Memoir by Ketanji Brown Jackson. I love it so far!

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones – Alexander McCall Smith
Book on CD performed by Robert Ian Mackenzie.
3***

Book number five in the 44 Scotland Street series, featuring the residents of a particular apartment building in Edinburgh, as well as a few of their neighbors. All the regulars are here: Bertie, his mother Irene, his dad Stuart, Matthew, Elspeth, Brian, Angus (and his dog Cyril), Domenica and Big Lou. There’s a wedding, a possible romance, and a breakup. Bertie joins the scouts, but still can’t get away from Olive. Angus tries to help Domenica with a neighbor dispute and just gets in deeper. And Cyril, that scamp, has fathered a litter of SIX puppies!

I really enjoy reading these books; they are just a lovely summer delight for me. It’s like visiting with old friends. This one, like all the episodes in the series, bounces around from character to character, so the reader gets a glimpse of Bertie, then of Angus, then of Matthew, etc. It’s the same way we frequently experience our friendships. You don’t learn someone’s entire life story in one sitting but get snippets here and there before you eventually truly feel you know him or her.

Robert Ian Mackenzie does a marvelous job of narrating the audiobook. He has a lot of characters to deal with and he is up to the task.

I've just started Cligès by Chrétien de Troyes and halfway through Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. And preparing to start The First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

Currently reading Madrigals and Mayhem in the Cambridge book shop series, and already there are several villains cropping up!

I'm 400 pages into Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. It's been a much faster and more interesting read than I anticipated.

I'm reading mostly Bhagwat Geeta. and seriously it's amazing for my life.

Tatkal Court Marriage in Thane
Christian Marriage Registration in Thane

The Lido – Libby Page
3.5***

Alternate title Mornings With Rosemary.

Eighty-seven-year-old Rosemary Peterson has lived in Brixton, England all her life and has seen many changes. The library where she used to work has closed. A former grocery store has morphed into a trendy bar. And now the lido (public outdoor swimming pool) where she has swum daily is threatened. A big-time developer of high-end apartment buildings wants to buy the property and turn it into a private club for his building residents.

Enter Kate Matthews, a new journalist who recently moved to Brixton and suffers from panic / anxiety attacks. Her editor gives her a chance at a feature story and sends her to interview regular users of the lido about the plans to close. The manager suggests she speak to Rosemary, the lido’s most faithful swimmer. Rosemary says she’ll answer questions after Kate has gone for a swim. And an unlikely friendship begins.

I really grew to love these characters. In the course of the novel we learn more of Rosemary’s background and what the pool meant to her and her late husband. We also meet many of the other residents of the neighborhood who will be adversely impacted by the plans of Paradise Living Developers. There are some humorous scenes to counteract the poignant, and even sad ones.

This is Page’s debut work and I’ll be watching for what she writes next.

I finished Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege - 1942-1943, military historian Antony Beevor's well-written, lucid, extremely detailed and horrifying history of arguably the most pivotal battle of World War 2, at least in the European theater. Having had access to new troves of information, including soldiers' diaries and letters home, Beevor is able to give us insight into the planning, execution and errors on both sides of the battle, and focus all the way down to moment-by-moment experiences of individual soldiers. A very grim read, but very much recommended for anyone with an interest in the Second World War itself and also the lengths to which human beings are willing to endure hardship, pain, misery and exhaustion in service to a cause or what they see as their duty. My longer review is up on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next up for me will be Into China, by Eileen Bigland, who traveled the Burma Highway during the Japanese invasion of China with an ammunition convoy and wrote about it in this memoir. Hmmm, didn't realize it but I guess I have a mini-WW2 theme going.

I finished and was amazed by Invisible by Paul Auster.
Now I'm reading When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky by Margaret Verble, historical fiction about a horse diver in the late 1920s.

Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Philip Gefter
4/5 stars
Interesting book about the making of the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This is quite an extensive look of the film made by director Mike Nichols. It was Nichols' first film. A Dozen Film and TV Books

The new thread is up over here.