Recent reading
| 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 |
(155)
|
| 2025 |
(133)
|
| 2026 |
(61)
|
| * Partial year |
[Finished 12 September 2026] I just never connected with the book, I felt like maybe I was just too distracted while reading it or something, which is a pity because I think there might have been a brilliant read here which I missed.
[Finished 11 September 2026] A kaleidoscopic and frequently maddening book, running 600 pages and not always earning the length but sometimes definitely earning the length with the sort of crazed risk-taking that is both rare and unique for a first novel. I didn’t always like it, but I was thrilled to have the experience of reading it.
[Finished 4 September 2026] An interesting concept, although it ended up a bit disappointing in its execution. I felt like Maazel was trying too much to write something Pynchon-esque and we ended up with second-rate Pynchon instead of first-rate Maazel as a consequence.
[Finished 29 August 2026] A wonderfully delightful story of a young religious sister in a dying order and her encounters with the world. It’s a wonderfully drawn picture of the life with all the complications that arise from community and trying to distinguish God from the church.
[Finished 24 August 2026] Frankly, a bit silly of a book. The conceit is interesting, that Jesus was actually a woman living as a man, but then big chunks of the back story end up being completely implausible, like that patriarchal religion was only established within the lifetime of the elder characters of the book, and it was difficult to get past that. The plot was serviceable, but I felt like I was reading something written by someone whose knowledge of Jesus and first-century Palestine didn’t run much deeper than
Jesus Christ Superstar and Christmas carols. A better-conceived book on the subject would have worked much better than this one did.
[Finished 20 August 2026] Set in a near-future dystopian America, it started out feeling insufficient, but as the book continued, it felt better realized. The pointing out that America has long used separating children from their parents as a form of violence (whether with enslaved people or Native American boarding schools or the border separation by the Trump regime—the last when I learned of it sent me into a month-long depression) was a notable element of the author’s note at the book’s end.
[Finished 14 August 2026] The writing here was painfully mediocre (it had the same flat voice of other amateur autobiographies I’ve read) and the content had to be filtered through the understanding that Seraphine was writing his account with an agenda—to establish that he was a key creative wellspring for the band Chicago, but even with those caveats, it’s an interesting history of the band and the travails and triumphs along the way. One only wishes it were better written and the obvious bias was better managed.
[Finished 14 August 2026] I grew up in an area that had a mixed gang presence, some aligned with the “People” other with the “Folk.” Even so, as someone who was in the AP track at my high school, I had minimal contact with gangs (the only class where I would even have any contact at all was gym) and most of what I knew came from third- and fourth-hand conversations with my peers who were not much more educated than myself.
This book, with its in-depth history of the group which was essentially the founder of the People faction (and talks about the group that was the origin of the Folk faction), along with a look into the inner workings of what began as a neighborhood gang and ended up with delving in and out of respectability along the way. Overall, a wonderfully nuanced look at what the group was, is and how it changed along the way.
[Finished 13 August 2026] My copy, and, from what I see on Goodreads, most editions, barely acknowledge the translator, Peter Whigham, but it was clear reading the poems that this really should have been titled
Whigham’s Poems of Catullus given the liberties Whigham takes with the form and contents of the poems. The one poem I have memorized in Latin,
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
is relatively faithfully translated, but even there, Whigham deviates slightly from the literal meaning, rendering
excrucior as “torn in two” rather than “tormented,” “tortured” or “crucified.”
That said, it was still a pleasant experience, but not quite what I would have expected to find in the Penguin Classics series.
[Finished 13 August 2026] I “read” this book as an audio book, a gift from my ex-wife to listen to while on vacation. I saved it for the long drive I had from Bjargtangar to Akureyri after the eclipse and as a consequence, I’ve ended up with weird spatial memories of the contents of the book with different passages corresponding to different aspects of the Icelandic landscape at night.
The book has a somewhat familiar approach of mixing information with bits of humor which works reasonably well, although I think that I would have preferred the book on paper rather than audio if only to help keep track of the various Greek-derived rhetorical terms.