Books I read and am reading

December 18, 2024 • 11:45 am

It’s time to tell each other what we’re reading and what we think of the books. The object, of course, is to give all of us hints about what we might want to read.

I’ve just finished two books, both of them good  (of course both were recommended by a friend who knows good writing), and I recommend both, but especially this first one, which is superb. Click on the cover to go to the Amazon site:

There’s a Wikipedia article about this 1999 novel here, but don’t read it if you don’t want to see the whole plot. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s about a Japanese-Korean man, Franklin Hata, who has moved to a small suburban town in New York, running a pharmacy-supplies store. He’s done well and has, in fact, become his town’s model citizen, eventually giving up his store and living a happy and prosperous retirement, having adopted, as a single man, a Korean girl named Sunny.

The one unhappy aspect of his life is that he can’t seem to form stable love relationships, not with Sunny nor with any of the several women he fancies. The reason involves a series of flashbacks to when Hata was serving in the Japanese Army in World War II (there are flashbacks involving nearly every relationship in the book), and a relationship he developed at that time, which haunts his whole existence. I will say no more, except that the prose is beautiful (a sine qua non for novels I like). HIGHLY recommended, and it should have won more awards than it did. I don’t think it was made into a movie, but it really should have been.

Here’s the book I just finished (click to go to Amazon site):

That one, from 2005, also has a Wikipedia page. Nathan Glass, stricken with cancer, moves to Brooklyn to live out his days in a pleasant urban environment (he’s the opposite of Franklin Hata, who hated cities). He meets his nephew, and then ensues series of random and unpredictable episodes involving an antique bookstore, long-lost relatives, and fractious relationships with other people.  It’s a good read, and a short one, so it’s a good book to take along on a trip or the beach (if you happen to live in a warm place). I would recommend it, but not nearly as highly as I would A Gesture Life.

I’m not going to read the other three essays in the Ta-Nehisi Coates book The Message, for his Israel-essay debacle put me off him for a while. Instead, I have two books in line. I started the first one, below, last night. It’s from 2001 and I have found but not read its Wikipedia page. (Click to go to the Amazon site.)

After that one, I’ll attack this monster, which I’ve requested on interlibrary loan (I have no more room to put any books I buy, so I get them all from the University Library). Click to go to the Amazon page. At 864 pages, this one is a monster, but, unlike the kids, I like long books. It was published in 2004, is highly regarded, and has its own Wikipedia page that I refuse to read.

It seems that I’m on a fiction kick lately, which isn’t usual for me, but the books that my literary advisor recommends, which have all been good, are guaranteed not to contain a clunker. As for nonfiction, I’m still waiting for Robert Caro to produce his fifth volume of the LBJ biography that I love so much (I think it’s the best biography ever written, at least that I’ve read), but Caro is now 89 and it’s a race against time.  The previous bio that I thought was the best, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, was abruptly truncated after volume 1 because Manchester died. I’d still recommend reading the first volume, even though it ends right as Winnie becomes Prime Minister and things would be getting even more interesting.

Your turn. Which books have you read lately, and which do you recommend (or not recommend)?

68 thoughts on “Books I read and am reading”

  1. Given that you like biographies, I strongly recommend Ron Powers’ “Mark Twain: A Life” (2005). A great biography of an amazing person. But I just found out that there’s a new biography of Twain coming out in 2025 by Ron Chernow, whose books on Washington, Hamilton, and J.D. Rockefeller were all astounding.

    1. Two recently read biographies: Life by Keith Richards, and Happy Odyssey by Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. You all know the author of the first, but the second is a remarkable military memoir (you can judge the calibre of it when you see that Winston Churchill wrote the foreword!)
      And now I’m back into ploughing through all of Dickens, currently enjoying Barnaby Rudge.

      1. De Wiart was a remarkable man. His Wikipedia entry mentions that “he was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own severely injured fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them.” His memoir is well worth reading!

        Glad you’re enjoying re-reading Dickens. The older I get, the more I turn to the classics.

      2. The di Wiart sounds interesting – in a similar vein, I recently read “Eastern Approaches” by Fitzroy Maclean.

    2. I don’t read many biographies, but I did very recently read The Catcher Was a Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff. It’s about Moe Berg, baseball player in the 1920s and 30s, extremely smart and highly educated, who was picked up by the US government for intelligence work during WWII.

      A good read, but though Berg comes off as quite sympathetic during his baseball and intelligence careers, he is considerably less so during the long period between the end of the war and his death in 1972.

    3. Well there’s one that I’ve read and I enjoyed it very much. Of course I’m a bit biased (so to speak) because Samuel Langhorne Clemens and I were born on the same day (November 30), just 114 years apart (1835 and 1949).

  2. Right now, I am reading So This is Florida (1938), in an attempt to learn something about my adopted State. It’s very informative.

    I recently read David Donald’s Lincoln (1996). It particularly good on Lincoln before the 1850s. I consider it a very good biography of Lincoln. Another good one that I read earlier this year is William Freehling’s Becoming Lincoln (2018). It includes many of the themes of his two volume Road to Disunion, which is, frankly, heavier going, in part due to his early writing style.

    Of more esoteric interest, perhaps, is Professor Dave Wondrich’s book Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail.

  4. I’m about a quarter the way through “A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds”. It is astounding how much we still don’t know about birds, and their migratory feats especially. The Bar-tailed Godwit for example migrates from northern Alaska in a nine day, non-stop flight to New Zealand each year, and then back via the Yellow Sea. Nine days non-stop is mind-boggling enough, but how do they do it without sleep? A fascinating read so far.

    2. Although I have not read the book you mention, I did read his older book, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds. It was excellent, and in fact was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction.

  5. I enjoyed Strange & Norrell very much. It’s a quick read for a long book. It does concern Magick…at one point I was so engrossed that I said out loud “things are about to get real in Faerie”.

    I just finished Long Island Compromise, about a seriously dysfunctional rich family. Lots of fun and jewishness; the writing is a little bit cute at times but not over the top.

    Next: Cronies, an embellished memoir by Ken Kesey’s buddy Ken Babbs.

    1. Strange and Norrell is one of my favorite fantasy novels, even though the author dedicated it to people who banned me from their blog 20 something years ago.

      1. While I’m not sure whether or not our esteemed host will like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I don’t think anyone could reasonably deny it the classic epithet “tour de force.” I read it out loud to my wife; we both loved it.

  6. Currently reading The Insect Epiphany by Barrett Klein (Timber Press, 2024), an entertaining and beautifully illustrated history of insect/human interaction.

  7. I’m into evolutionary psychology right now, and these are two of the most thought provoking books I’ve ever read:

    “The Most Dangerous Animal – Human Nature and the Origins of War” by David Livingstone Smith

    and

    “Minds Make Societies – How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create” by Pascal Boyer

  8. A few from the top of the pile :

    1.
    The Wheel, The Horse, and Language — How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
    David W. Anthony
    Princeton U. Press
    2007

    Traces origins of language : example:
    Cent, Cant, Sto, Hund all lead to “hundred”.

    2.
    (Copy/paste from Wpedia):

    Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957)—originally published in 1952 as In the Name of Science: An Entertaining Survey of the High Priests and Cultists of Science, Past and Present
    Martin Gardner

    Amazingly nuts popular scientific cult movement stuff, and even has some about “eccentric sexual theories” that are IMHO directly relevant today! Literally!

    3.
    Some books on the insane occult / race origins of Nazism, e.g. Himmler’s Crusade, or The Occult Roots of Nazism. Supernaturally nuts!

    1. Hear hear for Martin Gardner, my favourite writer from the days when SciAm was worth reading. I have pretty well all the anthologies of his Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions column, going back into the 1960s, and they are still a rewarding read.

  9. I’m looking forward to Stephen Kotkin’s THIRD edition of his Stalin biography. Soon-ish.
    Last December I read his book Magnetic Mountain how the Soviets built a steel town in Siberia.
    No fiction for me but I do read Lionel Shriver’s novels.

    D.A.
    NYC

  10. The book that immediately came to mind is one I read this year: The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919). It was written by English naturalist Bruce Frederick Cummings and published under the pseudonym of W.N.P. Barbellion. This is more or less the story of Cummings’ life, in the form of journal entries beginning when he was 13 years old and ending when he was only 28 and too sick from multiple sclerosis to continue writing (he died at age 30). He writes so beautifully and has such a passion for life and nature that I can’t count the number of passages I underlined while reading it.

    1. Three more I want to add. The first is a fabulous book about the early days of Greenland exploration: Into the Great Emptiness: Peril and Survival on the Greenland Ice by David Roberts (2022). Come to think of it, this book also involves a fascinating young man tragically dying far too young. I guess there’s a theme there.

      And two classics that I reread this year, after a few decades, and adored all over again: Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset and Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

  11. I just finished a quick but great read. Lost on a Mountain in Maine. Incredible story about a 12 year old who got lost in the fog while hiking with family and friends.
    Maybe I heard about it from this website? Very quick but great read.
    I also loved Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. I like James Kirchick as a journalist.

    And my favorite book I just completed was Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson the paleontologist. That was riveting for me. After this book, I would love to go to Ethiopia to see the Lucy skeleton. What a thrilling story.

    2. I had read the Lucy book some years ago, and agree it is an amazing tale.
      You might like Darwin’s Dreampond, which is about the remarkable fishes in Lake Victoria. It is also about the naturalist who authored the book, and the Africans who depend on the lake through changing times.

  12. Due to influences from this site, I have both increased my reading frequency and quality of books.
    I still have a sci fi kick, tho, but I think of better quality. I am deep into the The Expanse book series. The streaming adaptation on Amazon Prime is … good … but it is a pale version of the original books.
    While awaiting my order of book 4, I am meanwhile reading another sci fi novel, Project Hail Mary, which was listed here inside a long list of recommended reads.

    I have also finished several non-sci fi books that were recommended here. The one I remember best is The Corrections, by Franzen.
    I have several others on my list to look into, including the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Wolf Hall, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and a bunch of others.

    1. I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended Project Hail Mary in these pages. If you like the book, you’ll be interested to know that there is a movie version that is supposed to come out in 2025.

      1. I am not surprised it is optioned to be a movie. It seems a story that would fit well in that environment.

    2. Hi Mark:

      We SF readers named Mark from Michigan have to stick together! In my not-so-humble opinion, The Expanse is the finest science fiction series ever. I see you’re reading the books; I only read the first one, then got into the audiobooks, and listened to the rest of the series. Jefferson Mays is a phenomenal narrator, and he gets the characters so perfectly that now I can no more imagine The Expanse without his voice than I can imagine Alice in Wonderland without Tenniel’s illustrations!

  13. I just finished Nexus by Yuval Noah Harrari. A lot of people really don’t like him, but I thought the book was great. I think Nexus is his best book. I’m reading James by Percival Everett and am enjoying it quite a bit. Started Isaacson’s biography on Elon. It’s really interesting and it’s kind of impossible not to find Musk impressive. That said, I really don’t trust the guy.

  14. Two books that I would recommend are both by Amor Towles: “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway”

    The book I am reading right now is “Hang the Moon” by Jeanette Walls. I am enjoying it but am not quite ready to recommend it.

  15. I’m reading lots of classics (The Iliad, The Magic Mountain, and stuff like that). But one book I quite liked was Kara Swisher’s “Burn book”. She’s a reporter who has known all the greats — or at least importants — of the tech industry, Jobs, Bezos, Musk and many more. Gives you some fascinating look at these guys, many of whom were not yet adult enough to know what they wrought. She started out liking Musk, but that changed. A fascinating read.

    1. How was The Magic Mountain? I’ve been reading “A Death in Venice and other stories.” I’ve read 4 of the 8 short (not really short!) stories so far. His writing is fantastic, but very dense and psychological and I wondered if a long novel like MM would overwhelm me.

      1. My recollection of The Magic Mountain (which is on my re-read list) is that it is indeed dense and convoluted, but worth persevering with. His earlier novel Buddenbrooks, an unflinching portrait of a bourgeois 19th century family, is worth a shot as well.

        1. Actually, I decided on a whim to re-read The Magic Mountain, which I first read many years ago. (A double coincidence, since I just discovered the novel was published in 1924, 100 years ago, and the hero’s room in the sanatorium is 34, my house number.)

          I read 150 pages or so and then discovered it all sounded the same to me. So I got the Audible audio book and listened to the same 150 pages. That gave a me a new way of hearing and understanding it. Now I’ve dropped the audio book and am going on with my own reading, but as if I am reading it aloud to myself, and I am loving it. It is dense and long — and great! Yes, Buddenbrooks is excellent — and long — too. I didn’t much like Death in Venice the first time, again many years ago, but intend to try it again.

          1. Thanks for both your reviews. I have the novel, so I think I’ll give it a go.

            I really enjoyed Death in Venice, the descriptive writing and human insights were riveting though I was ambivalent about Aschenbach’s character and obsession. I’m sure that was intentional. But I liked a couple of the other stories better. My favorite so far is Mario and the Magician.

        2. Your comment on Buddenbrooks is right on the money. I can’t speak to The Magic Mountain, as I never got around to reading it.

  17. Two great books by author James Rebanks: The Shepherd’s Life and Pastoral Song. He writes beautifully about his family’s legacy as herders and farmers in England’s Lake District. The first book is more personal and the second deals with the changes in philosophy and technology from his grandfather to father to him.

    Other recent reads were The Tiger by John Vaillant, a true story about a man-hunting Siberian tiger; The Cruelest Miles, about the dogs and drivers who delivered the diphtheria serum to Nome, and The Magnificent Ambersons, a novel about two families at the turn of the 20th century. It’s unsettling when you see aspects of yourself in an unsavory character.

    1. Thanks for the reminder. Just reserved Rebanks’ Pastoral Song at my library. Also trying to find his wife’s book, A Farmer’s Wife.

  18. After months, I finally received Catherine Nixey’s “Heretic, Jesus Christ and the other Sons of God.” A book highlighted on WEIT last Summer. The release date kept being pushed back for some reason. After I finish the Thomas Mann short stories I mentioned above, I’ll be reading this book…looking forward to it.

    Wondering if any readers have read Heretic yet.

    1. Not yet; but looking forward to it.

      Have you read her The Darkening Age? Early Christianity as it really was, not as the churches would have us believe.

      1. I didn’t even know about that one, but that looks good too. If I like Heretic, I’ll definitely pick up The Darkening Age. Thanks for the tip! That’s why I like these discussions.

  19. I recently read Caleb Carr’s book, “My Beloved Monster”, which was written shortly before Mr. Carr’s death earlier this year. The book explains in detail Mr. Carr’s loving relationship with his cat, Masha, for the seventeen years they lived together. It was a wonderful love story between man and animal. Reading the book led me to do research about Mr. Carr and his difficult childhood, the relationship with his cruel father and the many books he wrote. I am currently reading the “Alienist”, another of Mr. Carr’s books.

    1. Im not the kind of homo who cries homophobia at everything I dislike, but I found The Alienist to be rather homophobic. I always wondered if it had anything to do with Carr’s father having been tried for murdering his gay lover in the 1950s.

  20. For reasons that are too tedious to go into, I have completely gone off contemporary fiction. The fairly recent non-fiction books that I have most enjoyed are The Idea of the Brain, by Matthew Cobb, and Determined, by Robert Sapolsky, both recommended by our host; and Transformer, by Nick Lane, about the Krebs cycle and its role in life and death.

    I am currently re-reading Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag-Montefiore, and slowly ploughing my way through Zola’s 20 Rougon-Macquart novels. The novel I am currently looking forward to re-reading is Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, which I lent to my sister about 25 years ago and have only just got back. It is a unique imagination of a post-nuclear world set in eastern Kent, not far from where I live, and I remember being impressed with it when I first read it. Let’s see how it’s lasted.

  21. A few I’ve read this year (in one case, rereading).

    Robert Anderson – The Lighter Side of My Official Life. An interesting autobiography in which the author, amongst many other things, briefly discusses his involvement in the Jack the Ripper case, and makes a startling claim about the identity of the killer.

    Charles Dickens – David Copperfield.

    Theodore Dreiser – The Financier and The Titan. Two of a three part series based on the life of Charles Yerkes, business magnate and philanderer.

    Eric Hoffer – The True Believer. Discusses the motivating factors of those involved in mass movements, regardless of type. I’ve read it several times and am always amazed by the insights of the author.

    Jocelin of Brakeland – The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakeland. A primary source document written by a monk living in an English monastery in the 12th and 13th centuries.

    1. Eric Hoffer – The True Believer

      Yes yes yes yes yes!! I was absolutely blown away by the book, which immediately landed at #2 on my list of all-time favorite non-fiction books (since you asked, #1 is Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).

      You said it better than I could: always amazed by the insights of the author. It’s fun to compare his insights on mass movements to the recent phenomenon of a certain orange-haired soon-to-again-be president.

      Also, I recently loaned my copy to a friend. After he read it, we talked about it, and both agreed that the way he stated things made us realize (repeatedly) “that’s it; this, that, and the other thing join together to make this or that idea or event so clear.”

      Or, as Huxley said about himself after reading Darwin’s Origin, “How incredibly stupid not to have thought of that already.”

  22. I have come across two new (to me) writers this year, both of whom I am really enjoying: Haruki Murakami and Iris Murdoch. There’s is nothing quite like really enjoying a novel and then discovering that there are many more to read by the same author; that said, the second Iris Murdoch novel I read was very much the same formula as the first. Maybe all her novels are similar.

    Furthermore, Murdoch is next to Murakami on the bookshelf so I don’t even have to walk that far around the library!

    1. Which Murakami book(s)? I adored 1Q84, but realize that not it will not be everyone’s cup of tea; I’m looking forward to Kafka on the Shore, but just haven’t gotten to it yet.

  23. Am reading SPQR, a superb history of Rome, by Mary Beard. After that, I’ll reread Suetonius on the lives of the Caesars. Just started Nicholas Nickleby, which I read at c.
    19. And, as I do every year at this time, I’ll read all or most of Joyce’s Dubliners, and always The Dead. I’ve done so for at least 25 years, and always find something fresh and remarkable. The book I am giving as a gift is the late, great Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? In short, we are not, but to read this is to learn something new and astonishing on almost every page.

    1. I have a Caesar quote (below) on a picture of the famous Caesar statue and “SPQR” is engraved in my mind from it.

      Ut est rerum omnium magister usus

  24. Given that I often get book suggestions off of these posts, I feel I ought to contribute to one. So here are some of the books I have enjoyed over the past year:

    Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown – An in-depth and moving account of the service of Japanese American soldiers in the US military many of whom had family held in internment camps

    On a sea of glass by Tad Fitch, J. Kent Layton, and Bill Wormstedt – An extremely detailed book I’d recommend to anyone who wants to know every knowable detail about the Titanic and her sinking.

    Killing a King by Dan Ephron – A book about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the deep political tensions within Israel

    Lioness by Francine Klagsburn – An in depth biography of Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel. I didn’t realize how deeply she was involved in founding the state of Israel, and I learned a lot about Israel’s history from this book.

    The Hero of Two Worlds – A biography of the Marquis de Lafayette by Mike Duncan, a podcaster known for his entertaining Revolutions podcast.

    The Nazi Titanic by Robert P Watson – About the Cap Arcona, a German ship that stood in for Titanic in the Nazi’s 1943 propoganda film Titanic, but that became part of a far worse disaster.

    The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson – I have not finished it yet, but it is a fascinating book about the 1893 World’s fair in Chicago.

  25. Recommended:
    “Times Echo-The Second World War, the Holocaust and the Music of Remembrance” by Jeremy Eichler
    A history of musicians and composers (many Jewish) in the Third Reich and afterwards.

    1. I loved that book. Extraordinarily moving and taught me some new music, particularly Schoenberg’s “Survivor from Warsau” (with his own words in English and German). Listen to that and prepare to weep. Beside the Schoenberg, he discusses works by Britten, Shostakovich and Richard Strauss. Fascinating and a must for lovers of classical music and history.

  27. Three books people have given me since October: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Vanishing Treasures: a Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, and Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. All are books about animal life and death. But I can’t yet report on them, except that I find very striking the focus of the snail book on a single animal, a single snail, and on how much we can learn to see and appreciate by that narrow focus. The narrow focus was not chosen: the author was bedridden.

  28. I love, love, love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell! I suppose it helps to be an anglophile and a history buff. But for me, it’s like eating raw cookie dough.

  29. I’ve just finished the Wolf Hall trilogy. I’ve read one a year since 2022. Incredible. Historical fiction is not usually my thing, but my word the prose! It’s the most beautiful I’ve ever read. I wouldn’t actually care what Mantel was writing about if she wrote like this always. Each sentence is a work of art.

    The background story is also compelling, I’ll add, and even if you know how it’ll al end when it comes it still hits like a blow to the stomach.

    It’s long though! The whole trilogy is longer than Lord of the Rings (by 40%) and the final book, The Mirror and the Light, is 875 pages.

    The first two both won the Booker and I think the last is the best. Possibly the fact it’d be the first trilogy to all win a prize/first author to win three worked against it, but then that year’s winner was also a compelling read (Shuggie Bain).

  30. Norman Maclean A Life of Letters and Rivers by

    Rebecca McCarthy
    2024

    A beautifully written biography of one of our greatest writers, who taught at the University of Chicago, grew up in Montana

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