Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[issybird]

Originally Posted by issybird

OK, I bit. I also started An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski, a bildungsroman about growing up under Hitler. I'm liking it. And, The Reef Girl by Zane Grey as an audiobook which was recommended to me by a neighbor. It's awful. I've only ever read Riders of the Purple Sage by him and I did like that. But this is horribly written to the extent that when I read a review suggesting that Grey's wife finished it/wrote it (it was posthumously published and about 40 years later) I thought that was plausible. But I'll keep listening for now, as it kills the time when I've got insomnia.

What I bit on was A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer. I'm enjoying it; I wish Heyer wasn't always so aggressive about showing off just how very much research she's done. I can read Austen and nothing in the vocabulary jumps out at me but with Heyer, I'd be looking up cant phrases every page if I bothered.

I abandoned The Reef Girl, which was way too much passionate love with sultry native.

I've started one last book published in 2024, Robert Harris's Precipice, about H.H. Asquith's romance with Venetia Stanley. The whole business strikes me as pretty plodding, way too much about washing hands and locking doors and looking in mirrors. And, one of my pet peeves, he gets titles wrong! How could he do so much research and still refer to Winston Churchill's mother as Lady Jenny, instead of Lady Randolph? But, it's holding my attention for a book to listen to while in bed, where the bar isn't all that high.

The good news is that I'm hopeful of clearing the decks by year's end, which would be fantastic.

[Bookpossum]

I finally have a little bit of time for reading again after moving house. I have decided to give up trying to read any more of my MobileRead TBR Challenge books for this year, having got so far behind, and have inserted them into next year's categories quite satisfactorily.

Meanwhile, I have just started reading Fifth Business, Book 1 of the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and am enjoying it very much. Thanks for the recommendation issybird!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Now: Death on the Downs by Simon Brett. the second in this series.

It was fun. I have the third on pre-order, as it was also on offer.

Next up: Island Nights' Entertainment by Robert Louis Stevenson. Three shorter works.

[astrangerhere]

I'm getting a head start on my 2025 challenges by starting these (and I know I won't finish them until the new year):

• Private Rites by Julia Armfield - I introduced my wife to Armfield this year with Our Wives Under the Sea and she immediately purchased Private Rites as soon as she finished it. She is now waiting for me to read it so she can discuss it with me.
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey - this was on my eTBR list, but I was gifted a physical copy by a well-meaning in-law yesterday, so I'll read that version instead.
• Selected Letters by Virginia Woolf (2008 edition collected by J. Trautman Banks) - I know there are more complete editions, and I have feelings about editors who "condense" letters, but this seemed like a manageable place to start with Woolf's letters.