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I tend to be a voracious reader, and I read widely. This list has its origins in an old signature file which I would update periodically with the current book that I was reading. That gradually transmogrified itself into the current massive archive with brief reviews.
| What I've been reading lately |
| Number of books read and reviewed each year | |
|---|---|
| 1995* |  (28) |
| 1996 | (47) |
| 1997 | (74) |
| 1998 | (61) |
| 1999 | (62) |
| 2000 | (27) |
| 2001 | (51) |
| 2002 | (60) |
| 2003 | (37) |
| 2004 | (36) |
| 2005 | (32) |
| 2006 | (46) |
| 2007 | (109) |
| 2008 | (78) |
| 2009 | (65) |
| 2010 | (68) |
| 2011 | (98) |
| 2012 | (129) |
| 2013 | (114) |
| 2014 | (101) |
| 2015 | (88) |
| 2016 | (82) |
| 2017 | (76) |
| 2018 | (67) |
| 2019 | (95) |
| 2020 | (90) |
| 2021 | (85) |
| 2022 | (101) |
| 2023 | (124) |
| 2024 |  (144) |
| * Partial year | |
[Finished 9 December 2024] A delightful post-modern novel about a group of translators of a Polish novelist presented as a translation from a Polish of one of the translators in the novel by one of the other translators in the novel. The translators engage in increasingly bizarre behavior, with the author herself also acting strangely and disappearing for a large part of the book. Plus footnotes. I love footnotes and Croft employs them to great effect.
Earthlings
by Sayaka Murata
[Finished 7 December 2024] It was a bit of coincidence that led me to reading two books by Japanese authors in close proximity. I found this delightfully weird and more than a little disturbing, never going in a predictable direction from one chapter to the next.
The Final Martyrs
by Shūsaku Endō
[Finished 6 December 2024] A collection of Endō’s short fiction. Several of the stories I had already read in Five by Endō, but they were worth a revisit, particularly “Japanese in Warsaw.” The title story was also a great read.
Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith
by Robert Barron
[Finished 4 December 2024] OK, I’ll write a contemporary novel set in the city where I live about Catholics. I won’t need to do any research. Until I realize that my protagonist would need to read some rather recent introduction to Catholicism and a bit of Googling put this book into my awareness. Barron is one of those figures who’s lingered at the fringes of my consciousness and I wasn’t sure what he’d be like. As it turns out relatively centrist in his presentation of the faith, although it is a bit disappointing that he focuses so much on priests and religious in his account of the faith and largely ignores the laity (although Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin do manage to score some attention even if his understanding of the origins of the Catholic Worker are a bit muddy). Overall a better book than I expected.
The Lost Writings
by Franz Kafka
[Finished 3 December 2024] A selection of Kafka’s fragments which have largely been untranslated prior to the publication of this volume. A mix of the rather nice and the banal, but overall pretty cool. I have some ideas about where my next story might come from after reading this.
This Time Tomorrow
by Emma Straub
[Finished 1 December 2024] The novel begins with a slow start and if I hadn’t stumbled across a note that talks about the time travel aspect of the story it would have come as a complete surprise, entering as late in the story as it does. I did find myself wishing I could go back to my 16th birthday and make some changes in the trajectory of my own life, although it’s not entirely clear, given the rules of time travel from this book what I could have done to make things different (not to mention that I have absolutely no recollection of my 16th birthday, or for that matter, most of my birthdays).
Twisted Tales From Shakespeare
by Richard Armour
[Finished 30 November 2024] I first read this in high school courtesy of a copy that my brothers had apparently liberated from the school library. When my kids were born, I was disappointed to discover that I had pruned it from my library so I found another copy to re-read it and discovered that it’s the source of some of my favorite jokes of forgotten provenance. Some of the humor is a bit dated, but it’s still very much how I came to know the stories of these plays.
Kinder than Solitude
by Yiyun Li
[Finished 28 November 2024] I rather enjoyed this story with its shuffling through time and geography to leave us wondering what exactly happened with the mystery at the heart of the story which seems to have left the central characters all broken in their own ways.
Three Women
by Lisa Taddeo
[Finished 27 November 2024] I didn’t read the descriptions of the book before reading this so I didn’t know it was to be about three women’s sex lives specifically and from the prolog about Taddeo’s mother being followed to and from work by a masturbating man, I had expected it more to be about living as a woman in the modern world and I think that book would have been much more satisfying and interesting.
Conversación en La Catedral
by Mario Vargas Llosa
[Finished 26 November 2024] Not my favorite Vargas Llosa, although I find that I’m better able to grasp his Spanish now that I’m two thick novels (and one slender children’s book) into reading his prose.