WHAT ARE YOU READING?

New year, new group, new reading goals...

In some cultures, the holidays continue well into January. In some cultures, the year start at a different time and the end of December is not really very festive. Regardless of how your holiday season runs, I hope you had a relaxing end of the year, managed to finish what you wanted to finish and are ready for new adventures.

So while you are settling into the new group, why don't you come over and tell us how your reading year starts - do you start with a fresh book or do you just continue on with one started last year. And don't forget to visit the thread often to tell everyone what you are up to reading-wise :)

I try to use the holiday season as a time to reflect on what I have been reading and if I want to be more intentional about expanding into different genres or taking on a classic that I have always wanted to read. I was working on reading all the books that are mentioned in the book Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy in 2024, but I only made it about halfway through so I will be continuing that goal in 2025. Some of my favorite books of the year came from that list like Lost Children Archive and The Lazarus Project. And I am currently reading When the Emperor Was Divine from that list and loving it. The descriptions are beautiful and the story just sweeps you in. When I finish that book list, I am hoping to find another work of literary analysis that I can use as a guide to make a list of books that I might not discover on my own.

I certainly won't drop a book just because the new year starts...I do _try_ to finish a book on December 31st so I can start a new one on January 1, but I'm likely to still be reading my current series then. So not much of a change. Currently reading The Case Files of Henri Davenforth by Honor Raconteur - a fun series, it's a portal fantasy crossed with police procedurals (with magic). And talking almost-cats. And PTSD, and dealing (more or less realistically) with settling into a new world...good story, great characters, very slow-burn romance (he suggested courting in book 4 or 5). This is a reread...possibly a third or fourth reread, it's a great series and I always find something new.

I don't normally start a new year with a new book but maybe I will start a new tradition this year 🙂.

Now that I've finished what should be my final book of 2024, The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila, MD, I can set my sights on 2025. I'll continue reading The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, an epic multigenerational novel set mainly in India during the first ¾ of the 20th century which is absolutely superb, and I'll start South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray, one of the six books contained in the Library of America edition Albert Murray: Collected Essays and Memoirs that I intend to finish this year. Murray was born in Alabama in 1913, and in South to a Very Old Place he revisits major Southern cities that are newly integrated in the late 1960s and compares them to the Jim Crow South of his earlier years.

ETA: On second thought, and after reading the Prologue to South to a Very Old Place, I think I'll read The Omni-Americans, the first book in the Library of America collection, and then read South to a Very Old Place.

>2 teatreetiffany: what list is this? And I adore Lost Children Archive. Wonderful, powerful novel

I plan to finish two books I'm currently reading before the end of the year, which mean some marathon reading this weekend -- Murder on the Orient Express and Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer. But I'll carry over two other books I started in 2024 and want to finish -- Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human by Richard L. Currier and The Comanche Kid by James Robert Daniels.

>7 janoorani24: BB (book bullet) for Unbound - sounds fascinating.

I am reading This is Happiness by Niall Williams. The prose is stunning but the plot is very slow- in fact I am reading this novel for the language.