After a whopping 7 MONTHS, I can finally say that I finished Anna Karenina. That’s about all I have to say about that one. I finished it.
…moving on, I’ve started A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and I’m already enjoying that a lot more! Planning to start Return of the King once I’m done with this!
I’ve definitely read books like that, where my main takeaway was just that I had read it.
I just finished “Dead Astronauts” by Jeff Vandermeer…and I don’t know how I feel about it. It’s very surrealist I guess, and a lot of the times I felt like the words were whooshing past without making an individual impact, but I was still sort of getting the picture of what was going on? I also found out after I finished it that it’s sort of a companion book to another novel but it sounds like reading that first wouldn’t have made this book make any more sense.
And now I’ve just started “The Guinevere Deception” by Kiersten White, which I have pretty high hopes for…I’m a sucker for a King Arthur story.
Just finished I’ve Got You Under My Skin, which I picked up after hearing that Mary Higgins Clark had passed away. My plan is to read the other books in that series.
Just started The Call of the Wild (and the other stories in the same book) because 1) Harrison Ford and 2) need to read before watching whenever possible.
I just started Trail of Lightning and I’m loving the protagonist so much!
I’ll toss one out there that had me sneaking in reads while at work, especially near the end: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (she also wrote Night Circus). Hidden libraries, doors to barely imagined worlds, and stories that are more real than real life (or at least, for the protagonist, grad school). There are an incredible number of resonances with TMP.
Warning: Might not be for you if you’ve ever drowned in a sea of honey. On the other hand, very definitely for you if this sounds like a good night:
He sits at the bar, feeling like a failure and yet overwhelmed by all that has happened as he attempts to catalogue the entire evening. Drank rosemary for remembrance. Looked for a cat. Danced with the king of the wild things. Excellent-smelling man told me a story in the dark. Cat found me.
I just finished ‘Let’s Pretend This Never Happened’ by Jenny Lawson and it was fantastic and hilarious!! I definitely recommend it if you’re a fan of cool ladies, awkward stories, weird taxidermy animals, or just funny anecdotes!!
@Psychopomp is currently reading me Dragonfly in Amber (the second Outlander book) for my bedtime story. And my current bathroom book is Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure Folk Magic from Appalachia.
To give myself a break from heavy reading/heavy everything right now I’m starting to read children’s classics I missed. Right now it’s Anne of Green Gables and the prose is so good will make this a book to read to future children, mine or babysitting
I think I might start the next Outlander book I haven’t read soon too! I think I’m up to A Breath of Snow and Ashes, but I can’t remember.
I love alternating children’s books with adult books. I just finished The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James by Ashley Herring Blake and it was just delightful. There’s something about middle grade novels that just warms your heart a little extra.
I always feel a little weird telling people I read middle grade books all the time but I totally agree! There’s something so heartwarming and comforting about them, and many of them have just as hardcore plots and concepts as YA or even adult fiction! Plus it can be nice to reread stuff you read as a kid and feel that comfort and warmth.
Anne of the Island is my favorite in the series!
I’m currently reading Havenfall by Sara Holland and I’m loving it! It has all kinds of really clear but not overly emphasized LGBT+ rep, including a bi main character and her gay uncles! It’s been kind of hard to find LGBT+ sci fi or fantasy that doesn’t treat that kind of representation in a weird way, like it’ll net them points or they have to be really obvious about saying “in this world being gay is cool”. Havenfall has been really good about showing that acceptance rather than telling, making it a story about fantastical stuff that happens to characters that happen to be gay and not about gay characters that just so happen to also be navigating a fantastical world.
Also it has a motorcycle-riding, landscaping lesbian and Im not afraid to say I have a major crush.
I finished The Secret Commonwealth a couple of days ago and am going to catch up on my podcasts before starting a new book. HOWEVER, one of my podcasts is a book, The Flower of the Cedar, being released in episodic form via podcast.
Description:
This is a tale of dryads, from a time long before human history began.
Lara, a young dryad, once had three hearts (as with all her kind). To recover them and bring them to life, she must set out on an unknown journey. Fearing the god of the land, who reportedly devours hearts, and inexplicably drawn to the lamia (who, stories say, revive hearts by an ominous method called guttings ), she leaves her home, embarking on the heart-finding quest.
Ugh a book being released as a podcast sounds like my current project I am inspired and need to look into this
I’ve been alternating between the Wheel of Time (rereading still at the moment. I got like 9 or 10 books in before I had caught up when I was reading it the first time, and there was enough of a gap between books that I couldn’t follow the story by the time I got my hands on the next one. Currently about halfway through The Fires of Heaven on audio.)
It’s been interesting rereading these, the things I’ve picked up on that I missed before. Robert Jordan did many things well, but write a character who wasn’t some sort of male-gaze stereotype of a woman wasn’t among them. I’m still enjoying the story as a whole, but I’m not looking forward to the fan-service section I know is coming, where the protagonist gets all the pretty women as prizes that I remember, even reading it as a much less “woke” teen, being cringey.
What are everyone’s comfort reads right now?? I’m realizing I just don’t have the brain power for anything too long or dense with everything else going on, so I’ve been listening to Pride and Prejudice on audiobook while I knit and I just started reading Death on the Nile. I found a box of old Agatha Christie paperbacks on the street a couple months ago and I have a feeling I’m gonna be getting into a biiiiig murder mystery phase.
I’m alternating among Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux’s original pulp novel) and a really cheesy urban fantasy (every third post in my Facebook feed is an ad for one—something sort of blew up over the last month in that regard).
But I usually read at night to fall asleep, so mostly it’s just having the iPad bonk me on the nose when I doze off.
I didn’t even realize Phantom of the Opera was a novel! And I can see there being a fantasy bump right around now, everybody’s looking for a little extra escapism 
I had started reading an impulse pick from my library called “Song of the Abyss” by Makiia Lucifer (and really enjoying it)…got about 40 pages in and noticed on Goodreads that it was listed as the second book in a series. It seemed like maybe more like a book set in the same world, not necessarily a sequel, but I put it down and ordered the first one. In the meantime, I started reading this book that’s a translation of a novel that’s cited as “the Chinese answer to The Lord of the Rings”. I’m not super far into it yet, so not quite sure if it’s going to be too dense for the moment, but I’m very intrigued.