Category Archives: 2026

My reading slowed dramatically this week. Part of it is that I was babysitting my 16 month old grandbaby over the weekend. I’m not going to count the approximately 138 board books that we read together in this post, but suffice it to say, this baby LOVES his books. This is not at all a surprise because both grammy and mommy are big readers.

Pro tip for people who have babies in their lives: the Hazy Dell series of flapbooks, including Bigfoot Baby, are a favorite. There are several different versions, all involving “monsters,” including Bigfoot, Nessie, vampires and Yetis (see, e.g. Bigfoot Baby).

Anyway, even once I got home from babysitting, I still didn’t get much reading finished. I’m currently reading two enormous books: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (731 pages; I’m on page 150) and The Power Broker by Robert Caro (1298 pages; I’m on page 180). But even with that, I didn’t read very much.

A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor: This is the second book in the Chronicles of St. Mary’s series, which now has 14 full length novels and many additional novellas that fit into the cracks between. It’s fairly similar to Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series, but with a lighter feel to it, like if Connie Willis & Jasper Fforde collaborated.

I bought my first kindle in February 2009. It was one of the weird shaped Gen 1 versions and I bought it off of a guy on Craigslist as a birthday present to myself. I really wanted one, but I wasn’t going to spend $399, which I think was the initial price point of the kindle. I still spent about $200 bucks on the used one.

I bring that up only because I first became familiar with the Chronicles of St. Mary’s on the Amazon forums, when they were self-published for the kindle, before the forums disappeared. I ultimately bought the first two books in 2013. At some point a publisher picked them up and the rest is, I guess, history.

Anyway, I like these books, but I don’t love them. So far. However, the prices for the kindle books have dropped to what I consider a reasonable $5.99 a book, and my library has them. So I may continue reading the series.

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells. This is it – the only other book I read in a week, and it’s a reread.

I love the entire Murderbot universe. I love Mensah, ART, Ratthi, the Preservation Alliance, Kevin R. Free, whom I don’t know but love just because he is the voice of Murderbot, and Pin Lee. I hate the Corporation Rim.

I have reread/relistened to these books as much as I have reread/relistened to any other books in my life. I recommend them to everyone who asks me for a book recommendation, which is a lot of people because I am mainly known for reading a vaguely incomprehensible number of books among my friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

Murderbot is great genre fiction, but it is also a philosophical meditation on what it means to be a person. Sometimes genre can do the big questions obliquely better than the books that are approaching them head on. This is one of those occasions.

Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff. On second thought, I managed to blow through one more book yesterday. Valor’s Choice is the first book in Tanya Huff’s Confederation of Valor. It’s military sci fi/space opera featuring Staff Seargent Torin Kerr.

According to the Afterword, it was loosely based on the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, in which 150 British soldiers famously defeated 4,000 Zulus. They obviously had superior weaponry, but nonetheless, that’s quite a victory.

I’d never read anything by Tanya Huff, and I really liked it. It took me a bit to figure out all of the characters, and the various alien species (in addition to human) that made up the universe, but once I did, I really got into it. Torin Kerr is a great character, and I look forward to seeing more of her in future installments this summer.

Anyway, that was my week in reading.

Currently reading:

• The Power Broker by Robert Caro;
• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann;
• All Clear by Connie Willis (I am on the struggle bus on this one; I can’t get into it);

Buckle up, because this is going to be a long one. I left town last Thursday, so I didn’t include Thursday or Friday in last week’s post, plus I was on airplanes and in hotels, so it was a lot of “airplane fiction” reading, which I blow through at the speed of a plane travelling at 3,000 miles an hour. Or however fast a plane travels.

First up, we have the Bosch fest. When I get bored with reading, I have a tendency to return to old comforts and for some reason, Harry Bosch and the HBU are one of those comforts for me. I especially like the newest cycle of books, post-retirement from LAPD, where he partners with Renee Ballard.

So, after reading Ironwood, which was Connelly’s newest release, which crossed over with Ballard (and a tiny cameo of Bosch), I decided that I would go back to The Wrong Side of Goodbye and reread/relisten. These are great travel books, because I have them all on kindle and on audio. I can read or listen, depending on what works best for my situation.

So, I’ve read/listened to:

• The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Bosch);
• Two Kinds of Truth (Bosch);
• The Late Show (introduces Renee Ballard; I didn’t really like the narrator of this one, so although I think it’s a good entry, I would not recommend the audiobook);
• Dark Sacred Night (the first one with Ballard & Bosch);
• The Night Fire (Ballard & Bosch)

I am currently reading/listening to The Dark Hours. Yes, I know that this is insane, but I have read these books so many times that I get through them really fast. When I travel, I sleep very poorly, so I end up listening to audiobooks every night, often for many hours.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans was my real life book club book for the month of June. Going in, I knew that it was an epistolary novel, which is not my favorite format – I tend to be very picky about the ones that I have liked. They usually don’t work for me. I also have a tendency to be contrary about novels that had a lot of hype and hoopla, which this one definitely did.

So, I was a little bit surprised that this one worked as well for me as it did. I read it in one sitting of about two hours, and found it very well done. The letters to and from authors (living and dead) were a bit cringe, but also kind of a delight. The titular correspondent, Sybil Van Antwerp, was an interesting character. She was often off-putting because her thoughts are mediated through letters and she can come off as distant, cold and even entitled. But, looking a little deeper, she also had a gift for kindness and friendship. Her relationship with a troubled young man was lovely, and her, eventual, friendship (after butting heads for several years) with the young female dean of the English program at her local college was very funny. Sybil is a big reader, so it was fun that the author added the ongoing book conversation between her and her best friends over the years.

The ending of the book is exceptionally good even if it’s also somewhat predictable. I still liked it.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Speaking of ongoing book conversation, my daughter (just turned 30) and I have a two-person “book club” where she catches up on classics that she has never read, and I read them with her. Usually they are rereads, although not always. These are completely unstructured because she is a mom to a very active 16 month old and doesn’t have the large blocks of time that I, in my retirement, have. She picks, I come along for the ride, and we read at whatever pace she can manage.

Edith Wharton is one of my personal canon authors. I’ve read The Age of Innocence many times over the years, and I get something new from it every time. It’s one of those books that feels different when it’s read at different ages and stages. My respect for Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska and May Welland have grown over the years. When I was younger, I didn’t understand their sacrifices. Now that I am older, I not only understand their decisions better, I admire them all the more for having made them. But it is a book that will break your heart.

Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer. This was one of two of my summer themed books that I read this week. This one is the second book in the Finder series, featuring intergalactic repo man Fergus Ferguson. It takes up shortly after Finder, book one, leaves off.

Fergus returns to Earth to try to deal with some unfinished (for years and years) business, and promptly becomes embroiled in an art heist. He’s called back to his friends – shipbuilders on Pluto – when he receives information that there has been an attack. The rest of the book is spent solving that mystery, trying to figure out if his friends are all dead or if they can be rescued from a planet that is noteworthy for being primarily underwater, with a massive ice crust overhead. Hence the title – Fergus spends most of the book driving a submarine around in the absolutely claustrophobic depths.

No spoilers here, but it’s a lot of fun. Fergus is snarky, loyal and funny; his new (temporary?) sidekick is a former police detective who may or may not be trustworthy, and there is a cat named Mister Feefs. There are two more books in the series. I will be reading them.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. This has been on my TBR for a really long time – I used to follow Scalzi on the Bird app, back before it was bought by Elon Musk and turned into a cesspool of racism and misogyny. Scalzi was very funny and charming, and would tweet pictures of his daily burrito, which were typically disgusting and contained very random combinations of flavors and foodstuffs.

But, I digress. This was his first book and had a great concept – turn 75 on Earth, sign up for the Colonial Defense Force, get a new, young body and become a soldier. A second chance to live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse.

It’s a relatively short book, 318 pages, but is packed full of concepts and action. The next book in the series seems to have a different cast of characters. I’m curious to see where he takes his world.

Currently Reading/Next Up:

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. Hereinafter, I will just be calling this The Power Broker. I decided to sub this one in for The Proud Tower. I’ve been planning to read Caro’s LBJ series, but it’s not finished yet, so I’m waiting to see if he actually does finish it (before he dies. The man has been working on it for 50 years). In the meantime, a 1200 page biography of a guy I’ve never heard of that won a Pulitzer in 1974? Sure, why not . . .
• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann: is one doorstopper not enough? Nope. I’m reading this with a couple of readerly friends on GR.
• All Clear by Connie Willis. Still.

I’ll be heading to a wedding in Colorado towards the end of the week, so this won’t be a full accounting of my reading for the week. I suspect that I will have at least one, maybe two, books to add on to next week’s post.

Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery: I barely squeaked this one into May, but I did finish it and caught up on my LMM Big Read schedule. I’ll be reading Anne of Ingleside in June.

Anne and Gilbert’s wedding at Green Gables takes place at the beginning of the book, and then they are off to their first home 60 miles away, in Four Winds, where Gilbert is going to go into medical practice with his uncle.

I really enjoyed Anne’s House of Dreams. Montgomery is at her best when she is writing about the beauty of the natural world, and she describes Four Winds Harbor beautifully. There are new people to meet as well – Captain Jim and his bestie, a ginger cat named First Mate (or Matey), are particular favorites. Anne is noticeably older and more mature now, her highs aren’t quite so high and her lows aren’t quite so low (even though she experiences true sorrow in this book), but she is still recognizably Anne of Green Gables.

At the end of the book, they are leaving their first home to take up residence in one of the stately manors in town, the two have become three and they are all thriving.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

This was a long haul for me, taking nearly a month to read (I started on 5/8 and finished on 5/30) and weighing in at 721 pages, I think it can fairly be called a “tome.” I am also not sad that this is the last time I will have to type the entire title.

I’ve decided that I want to keep a non-fiction as one of my current reads, with the intention of just reading a few chapters a day. How do you eat a 721 page biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer? One page at a time . . .

I am not a natural NF reader, but I did end up really enjoying this one. Oppenheimer was a fascinating man and had many more layers than I would have anticipated. He was born into some privilege, and was deeply interested in both science and in the liberal arts. His intellectual curiosity was voracious and he was the sort of renaissance man that basically doesn’t exist among our current crop of tech bros, who seem to entirely lack interest in anything human (beyond themselves), including the humanities. (This may be an unfair stereotype, but they bring it on themselves by never shutting up about things they seem to know almost nothing about and showing up at Trump events looking like absolute caricatures of men in a midlife crisis. Yes, Elon, Jeff and Mark, I am indeed talking about you).

The end of the book, which delved into his experience having his security clearance stripped through a show trial and experiencing McCarthyism was riveting and was the high point of the book for me. It seemed alarming relevant to today.

Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon. This is the fifth, and final, book in Moon’s Vatta’s War series, published in 2008. It ends, satisfyingly, with victory for Ky Vatta and her group of privateers defending the galaxy from pirates. The book does a really nice job wrapping up all of the various plotlines belonging to Aunt Grace (who ended up a favorite character), Stella, Rafe and Toby.

The book ends at the point of success, with only the slightest intimations of what will come next for the intrepid Vattas and the systems that were impacted by the pirates. Apparently Moon was also intrigued with the idea of what happened after victory – enough so that in 2017, she returned to the Vattas and published a duology called Vatta’s Peace, starting with Cold Welcome.

I want to put a bit of distance between Vatta’s War and Vatta’s Peace, a few weeks at least, but I’ll be reading this duology sometime over the summer.

That’s probably all I’ll be able to draft this week, because I fly out on Thursday (which is tomorrow, as I type this) and I’m hoping to leave the laptop at home. I much prefer to go computer-less when I travel. My husband and I are going to Colorado for a wedding and some Rocky Mountain fun.

Currently reading:

• The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World 1890 to 1914 by Barbara Tuchman: this is my current NF. It’s slightly shorter than Oppenheimer, only 588 pages, but I’m going to be slow reading it over the next few weeks (month?). I’m also not typing out that title every time, so heretofore it will be referred to as The Proud Tower.
• Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer: the second book in the Finder series featuring galactic repo man Fergus Ferguson. My husband and and I listened to Finder on a road trip last year and we both really enjoyed it.
• All Clear by Connie Willis: the second half of her WWII time travel duology.

I decided to change the name of my weekly reading journal post. There’s a bit of nostalgia attached to the name. Way back when I was a elementary school student in the 1970’s, there was a publication called The Weekly Reader that was sort of a magazine for students covering current events. I loved reading it. I understand that it was discontinued in 2012, but I don’t remember either of my kids bringing it home. So, I’ve decided to adopt the name, even though my Weekly Reader will have very little to do with current events.

The books I finished this week:

Reread. I initially read this shortly after it was published in 1998, although it was before I started using GR in 2013, so I can’t say what year it was. I bought it because my daughter was a big reader and really liked the Tamora Pierce Wild Magic books. I thought that this one might be a good bridge for her between YA and adult fantasy (it’s tagged YA in GR, but I dispute that it is really YA).

I’m not sure she ever read it, though. I read this one, and also the second one, Rider’s First Call, and I bought the third one, High King’s Tomb. I’m not sure what made me think of it, but when I checked, it’s up to 8 books. I decided that I would reread to see if I wanted to finish the series.

I’m still not 100% sure. This one is not especially well-written. It was Kristen Britain’s debut and, while it’s not a bad book, there was quite a bit of room for improvement. It bogged down a lot in the beginning, when the main character was on her travels trying to deliver the message. I got the feeling that the author, also, got bored with this part of the book because she used supernatural means to cut it short. It had some problems.

But, it’s also a debut, so I can forgive a lot. There are the seeds of a good story there, and there are a lot of things to like about it, including the main character. So, I’m going to reread the second one and then see how I feel.

Information Received by E.R. Punshon was published in 1933 and is the first in the looooong running Bobby Owens series, which, according to Goodreads, runs to 35 books. The final book, Six Were Present, was published in 1956.

Dean Street Press – possibly my favorite small press – has reissued the series in its entirety and they are cheap for kindle, between $.99 for the early books and $3.99 for the later ones. In addition, over the years, DSP has made many of them free for limited times and I’ve grabbed them when I can. I’ve only read a couple of them so far, but I’ve liked them.

Back at the beginning, Bobby Owens is a likeable constable who has been with the police force for three years after his graduation from Oxford with a “pass” degree. Throughout the series, I know that he gets married and at the end of this book, he is transferred to the CID.

In terms of the mystery, the solution is fairly obvious and I figured it out early on in the book. The actual motive remained a mystery that isn’t revealed until the very end. Punshon also uses a device that I really don’t like – the murderer leaves a letter behind that tells the whole story. I tend to think that this method of reveal is not very interesting and tends to drag the tempo to a halt (see, e.g., And Then There Were None). It’s true here, too. But, I enjoyed the book and have several of them, so I’ll pick them up when the urge hits me.

Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon is book 4 in her Vatta’s War series. There is only one book left, Victory Conditions, which I have already checked out of the library and will start once I finish Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout and get a bit more of the Oppenheimer biography under my belt.

In this installment, we have added to our cast of characters. Ky, Stella, Aunt Grace and Rafe are all on separate planets, trying to figure out how high the conspiracy goes. They are fighting back against the pirates that are trying to conquer planet systems, in all of the ways that they can. But, the pirates keep surprising them with their technology and their strength.

Ky’s leadership and tactical capacities have risen to the challenges so far, Stella is much cleverer than anyone gave her credit for, Rafe isn’t nearly the rogue that his family claimed he was, and Aunt Grace remains a pistol. I’m really excited to see how Moon delivers victory to our rag tag band of heroes.

It seems wild to me that I’ve never read anything by Elizabeth Strout, in spite of the fact that she’s been on my radar since the 1990’s. It’s just a testament to how little large press literary fiction I read these days. My reading is so concentrated on either genre or small press literary fiction (NYRB, in particular) or classics or backlist women’s fiction from the mid-twentieth century that I just never pick it up.

Having said that, I do like some literary fiction, especially written by American women; I put Elizabeth Strout here, as well writers like Anne Tyler, Anita Shreve, Jane Smiley and Elizabeth Berg, all of whom I’ve read in the past, but rarely read now.

Amy and Isabelle was Strout’s debut novel. It is beautifully written and characterized, and does not read like a debut, but rather like a book from an far more experienced and accomplished novelist. The second half is better than the first half, which, for me, dragged a bit. I will read more by Strout, possibly moving on to either her Olive Kitteridge books or her Lucy Barton books.

Currently Reading:

• American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird;
• Ironwood by Michael Connelly;
• Black Out by Connie Willis