2026: What Are You Reading?

Happy New Year everyone! May your coming days be low in stress, high in satisfaction and full of nourishment for the body and soul. If you'd like to share any kind of thoughts or information about what you're reading, this is the place.

I've been marking time until New Year's Day is over to start my next book. At the moment, I'm strongly drawn to re-reading Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. As a general goal, I'd like to increase my percentage of re-reads this year.

This time around, because the 'What Are You Reading?' threads tend to be the de facto catch-all thread for I Love Books, and because most of us employ Site New Answers as our primary entry point for ILX, I thought a dull, but straightforward thread title would make it easiest to identify in the crowd.

Here's a link to the 225 thread: 2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

So, happy reading, y'all! Let the gabfest commence!

after very long Trollope in December i went completely the other direction with a Neuromancer reread

I found a neat book called The Names of Comedy, by Anne Barton, about the art of naming characters in comic drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Jonson). I'm going to try to read it over the remainder of break. I love topics like this which blend philosophy of language and literary studies.

"They confronted a fundamental choice: whether to give 'speaking' names, as Adam did in the garden, expressing the nature of the characters, or 'accidental' names which allow for greater independence and for change. These different attitudes towards naming are bound up with the larger debate about the truthful or arbitrary nature of language itself; the debate was formalized in Plato's Cratylus and continues today."

Brought Michael Amherst’s ‘The Boyhood of Cain’ with me on a short jaunt to NYC, where I’ll be reading in the annual Poetry Project marathon if anyone is attending

I've almost finished Francis King's recently back in print The Domestic Animal.

mentioned on the what did you read thread, but i am working my way thru october, china mieville's narrative history of the russian revolution. it's somewhat of a historical blind spot for me, so i'm enjoying it so far. mieville does a great job of sketching out the key figures and capturing the history-shifting drama of the moment

and also succinctly explaining the ideological differences between the various revolutionary factions

So funny, I found ‘October’ to be so dry as to make me utterly somnolent every time I opened it. It is currently on my “to sell/give away” pile, could hardly break 25 pages.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

Vijay Prashad The Darker Nations
A history of the Third World from a series edited by Howard Zinn

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie. A fictionalised account of the lives of two 14th/15th century female christian mystics. Very interesting really, I might take a look at one of the primary texts, The Book of Margery Kempe, considered to be the first autobiography written in English.

Heading into that Lockwood everyone hated. So far surprised by the conventional, third person style that it is written in. She felt she needed to switch it up I guess.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

I know the general outline— I took a few Russian history and art/culture courses in college— but I think that generally speaking, most history books aren’t for me, so it is probably a me problem.

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

I have, as indicated above, begun to re-read Varieties of Religious Experience. Because it was written and delivered as a series of lectures it was originally meant to be heard, not read, which makes for a somewhat more conversational authorial voice. I find it reads easily and reveals Wm James's character through the way he addresses his audience and makes his points. I find real pleasure in that aspect of the book, above and beyond which he was a very acute and congenial (to me) thinker on this subject.

"down there on a visit", christopher isherwood

also about ¾ way thru "the book of eve" by carmen boullosa which i was enjoying at 1st but have kind of bogged down in now

Currently giving Nixonland a go. I’ve decided this is the year to read all the fat books on my shelf that I’ve been avoiding. Also America seems to be more and more perplexing so I might as well learn something about y’all.

loved nixonland

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

Oh yeah, definitely. Tbh, this is a book that's been sitting on my shelf since forever. I bought it a long time ago, read a few chapters, and then set it aside. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time. But I was reminded of it when I read Tomkins's piece about being 99 years old in the NYer this past year and picked it up again. I'm glad I did, because for whatever reason I'm enjoying it now. It's very light on any kind of art criticism or any thoughts about the deeper meaning or theory of art. Duchamp was an unusual person who lived during interesting times and had a lot of interesting friends, and the book mainly focuses on that aspect. Tomkins has a worldly, understated style which suits the material. Duchamp claimed to have retired from producing art when he was fairly young, and insisted that everything he made after that was not art, and Tomkins respects that intention, leaving it up to the reader to ascribe whatever significance to the little artifacts he crafted and sold or gave to collector friends or the odd poems/puns he had published under his nom de plume, Rrose Selavy.

Tomkins on Duchamp is just the break I need from the hagiographic Andrew Jackson bio (by Robert Remini) I'm about to finish. Thanks.

About 1/3 of the way through Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. Feels bit like Elfriede Jelinek + Thomas Bernhard on either steroids or hallucinogens or both. Pretty great but I have to take in small doses at a time.

Just finished reading Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, which I thought was dreadful, but it has at least the virtue of being an interesting failure. Typed out a longer reflection but ultimately it's not worth it. Felt like he really fumbled the ghost story and was never able to successfully incorporate the other part of the story (hypochondriac womanizing alcoholic inn owner has a depressing life experience), so that both felt kind of flat and incongruous. I would explain why I feel this way, but that would require me to open the book again, which I don't want to do

Ah, see, that's one of the few Amis novels I like (the others: Lucky Jim, Girl 20, Ending Up, The Old Devils).

(I also read it in musty library hardcover form in 2007 before NYRB's handsome reissues a few years ago, so).

I like three of the four you listed (haven't read Girl, 20), so this was the first time an Amis novel left me cold

Will probably finished the Lin book today, am also reading Michael Amherst's 'The Boyhood of Cain' before bed. After a bit of a slow start, things are starting to pick up about 40 pages in— our protagonist's personality is coming more into view, and the tensions of the book are making themselves more apparent. probably the first time a book has been described to me as a "slow burn" and actually been that!

I just finished Gerald Murnane's Inland. Kind of amazing, couldn't stop reading it. I'll have to read more of his work now. A great example of how brilliant abstract writing with some depth can be, even when what's beneath is intangible. I note Claire Louise-Bennett is one of the hype quotes on the back of my edition and that makes sense as I now realise her work is like Gerald Murnane if the first-person narrator was Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.

I've resumed The Hemlock Cup, a biography of Socrates by Bethany Hughes after abandoning it last year. Really enjoying it, it's sort of a history of the time as well as his life, just sort of interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict and she has a knack for story.

Love Murnane, still think it's criminal that he hasn't won the Nobel

I love some of the digressions that become sort of meta-observations of the writing process, there are some in which the exact technique he's describing is embodied in the form he uses to describe it but he's still writing lyrically and freely as he does so, and not explaining or outlining. Virtuoso stuff.

interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict

Socrates lived in an exceedingly interesting time and place, spanning the Periclean rise of Athens to an imperial power, its collapse during the Peloponnesian War, and the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants. Also the cultural and intellectual ferment that accompanied all these events. An unusually well-documented, incredibly concentrated, and very archetypal historical period.

This is what I'm learning - the war and political conflict are incredibly interesting and obviously prescient, at any time I guess but also now.

I know a bit about Roman history as did Latin in school but don't really know Greek and this has a great narrative flair to it. Obviously a very different subject but it was recommended to me when seeking another history book as enjoyable as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Already there's so much I didn't know, Socrates hated the written word!

Socrates also had his failsons.

Started end of '26 as I ended, with a bunch of yoga books

Elisabeth Kadetsky - First There is a Mountain. A book where a Californian journo goes to yoga intensives in India given by yoga master BKS Iyengar (whose teachings I know well as I have been practicing his form of Hatha Yoga for ten years, and teacher training rigorously in it for the last three years). Its also about India, anorexia, processing family trauma while looking and being fascinated by a flawed man who had a tough upbringing in utter poverty in post-colonial India and went on to popularise Yoga in the West (while being overlooked at home). Its a properly written (very New Yorker style) book (she ran several interviews with him for it), and it gets uncomfortable as some of the people around his studio (potentially including Iyengar's son) are clearly highly sympathetic to the Indian far-right, and there's plenty on the feedback and tensions between East and West and the underlying post-colonial order. I think its pretty readable to a non-yoga student though you may want to look up some of the poses and bits of background on yoga philosophy to get more of a grasp.

Also finished:
Svātmārāma - Hatha Yoga Pradipika (notes by Krishnamacharya, tr. Mohan) - the 'best known' medieval Hatha Yoga book, with commentary by BKS Iyengar's Teacher
The Gheranda Samhita (tr. Mallinson) - another Medieval Hatha Yoga manual
Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga - Shandor Remete (former student of BKS Iyengar who went onto develop his own school of Hatha Yoga, to the extent I have started practicing some of it

At various stages:
BKS Iyengar - Astadala Yoga Mala (vol. 1, of 8) - collected interviews/writings
Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)
Swara Yoga Treatise - this is a sort of Tantra Yoga manual, can't make much of it, a lot of Vedic astrology and morals

you're mainlining the inner peace

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

Abel Ferrara’s autobio - A breezy, entertaining read. Messy, wild, full of great anecdotes.

Teoría del color ( J. Pawlik)

Started the first of Darwyn Cook’s “Parker” adaptations

you're mainlining the inner peace

― LocalGarda, Monday, 5 January 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Namaste

Most of my reading is through audiobooks. I recently very-much enjoyed David Szalay's Booker Prize-winning 'Flesh'.
So I was surprised to see a lot of people online didn't like it, including one or two people on ILX. Maybe it's because the narrator was extremely compelling, but frankly I thought it was fantastic.

Szalay employs a deliberately stark writing style to mirror the lead's taciturn character, it's an exploration of masculinity, sex, trauma, class and outsiderness. I saw a few people expressing frustration that the writer denies the reader any insight into the main character's inner life. I'd say this is what makes the book special. There is a world of meaning expressed in small-talk exchanges like: "How are you?" / "I'm okay." / "What do you mean 'Okay'?" / "I don't know...".

So yeah, bare on description, bare on emotional exposition, but somehow I could imagine every character and location extremely vividly. And despite nothing in the book having ever actually happened to me, every scenario and conversation felt relatable. Do readers really need their characters to be gregariously pouring their hearts out on every page? For me this was an enjoyable (if bleak) and quick read.

My first book this year was a novella: The Alienist by Machado de Assis. Not essential, not at all unpleasant either. The satire takes up the whole space and we are left with stock characters, some witticism, and a light atmosphere, when it seems like he could have fleshed it out and touched a bit more on the philosophical aspects of madness.

And now I'm in the first pages of Of Human Bondage, which is my first by Somerset Maugham. The length looks daunting, but it's the start of the year, so Godspeed.

I have also picked up Thus spoke Zarathustra at my parents for a first look in over 20Y. I thought I would just skim through, but I may end up rereading. At age 17 I was looking for deep truths, now I am curious to what extent this was a personal, therapeutic, self-psychanalysis book for Nietzsche, fed by bitterness or regret. Not that I would reduce it to this lens, but taking advantage that it's an open book lending itself to different interpretations.

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table)

Gay Bar impressed me in 2022.

going to grab a copy of that one

reading new paltz, new paltz, first novel by erstwhile(?) ilxor(???) mike powell (if none of that turns out to be true, he's a colleague whose work i've admired for a decade-plus). it is totally fucking excellent

Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)

i checked this out based on the title and your description and i may have to get a copy. good first page!

i used to go to yoga classes billed as "iyengar" style in d.c. the woman who taught them would scream at students and wasn't shy about let's say emphatically making adjustments by hand. she was unhinged lol.

Schiffmann is really nice. There are a few meditations in there (he is v much into meditation as well as yoga), and he has an interesting technique he relates to from a Hatha Yoga teacher (Joel Kramer, who has articles you can find on his site and are v interesting if you practice) that is about finding energy lines, whereas Iyengar Yoga is about alignment in the pose and specific sequencing.

The teaching can be v strict. My teacher was taught by Geeta Iyengar (the daughter, who sounds worse, in the Kadetsky book she relates how she was reduced to tears by her) and she is v tough but its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down. But its done in a yoga context so people walk out, hate it etc. Its not for everyone and will probably die out. But I probably wouldn't want to teach if it was for my teacher. There's a lot of fluff in yoga, as she says.

The younger Iyengar crowd are a different generation, and they are much nicer.

its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down

yeah this was the vibe. my take is - martial arts intensity without the rush of combat? lol no thanks.

on the other hand the difficulty and pain of actually adjusting skeletal alignment sort of calls for that approach. and people who want to be pushed like that are definitely around.

i remember her asking students to make the skin on their legs move. lol wtf? not to get on too much of a tangent.

Headstand and shouldderstand for 10+ minutes with deep backbends/forward bends/twists will probably be the nearest I get to combat lol

Yeah stuff around skin is a more advanced instruction and shouldn't be given to any beginning students tbh. In general classes I am going to ask you to engage your thigh muscles and lift up the kneecaps and so on. Those kinds of instructions should suffice and work at a more "gross", rather than subtle, level.

Gave the Lockwood a break, not because it's bad - not far enough in to make that judgement call yet - but because it's on my nightstand as my before getting up book, and having had quite a difficult beginning to the year feverish evocations of the pandemic is definitely not what I want my day starting with at this moment. So instead I've picked up the Dictionary Of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, 1730-1980 by Mark Bryant and Simon Heneage. This was an impulse buy at the Cartoon Museum, seduced by both the book's format and the illustrations on the cover; only after purchasing did I think about how you don't read dictionaries and if I ever got into the position of looking up a British caricaturist surely I would now do so online. But hey, just because there's conventions doesn't mean you have to follow them and so I've started reading it the way one would do a novel. The entries are so short that I doubt any names will truly stick with me, but dry, mundane facts are a soothing start to my day - studied in Liverpool, served under regiment x in wwi/wwii (choose which one applies); lots of advertising work as well as contributions to The Tattler and a weekly strip in the Observer. That kind of thing. Perhaps if I finish it, even not retaining any names I'll have acquired a holistic knowledge of the field in these eras. Or perhaps I'll get bored with it in a couple of days and pick something else.

Interesting - do they limit themselves to newspaper editorial cartoonists like Cummings of the Express or Mac of the Mail, or are strip cartoonists and comic book artists included too? As far as I know there's still a gap in the market for a David Thomson-like Biographical Dictionary of British Cartoonists, where some sort of critical insight and a certain literary style would offer more than a Wiki entry.

A friend of mine wrote this extremely useful A-Z of British Newspaper Strips, complete with plenty of examples:

https://bookpalace.com/info_azbritnewsstrips

thanks, Alfred, for the encouragement

I finished Murnane's Inland, which was amazing, and Bethany Hughes The Hemlock Cup, also very good.

This week I read American Psycho, which I'd never read before. I guess I am trying to read satire for my own writing and I imagined, from the film, it would be a satire that had real density as regards time and place and behaviours. I wasn't wrong about that, lol. I guess to an extent it's a cliche to say of a satirical story "oh it's still so prescient", and maybe prescience over time is no less a quality indicator than something which was perfectly accurate about a time that has now passed and is harder to understand. Maybe it's even less a quality indicator. I don't know.

All of that said, it is weird, the repeated adulation of Trump, the very specific entitled misogyny which linguistically and aesthetically feels very Andrew Tate. The bodybuilding.

It was a little too long and sagged a bit as it went on but there just aren't many satirical novels that pack such a weight of well-observed, studied detail. Would be open to any recommendations here.

I am now reading A Day In Summer by JL Carr, which is a sort of darkly funny story about a man who visits a small English town intending to murder the person who ran over and killed his child. It moves very rapidly from person to person and I'm enjoying this, the sense of an entire town and its inhabitants depicted across one day. He has a really nice sense of England even if it's an older, faintly archetypal version.

Sorry it's Bettany Hughes*

Im reading James Ellroy's "The Cold Six Thousand" at the moment. So unrepentantly sleazy, I think Im going to need a long hot bath once I finish it

xpost

Thanks dow, the Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein - mentioned in that reddit thread - 'is based on the 1918 first edition text, published in three volumes', and includes supplementary material on the textual variations (which as I'm reading for pleasure rather than study, am not going to get too bogged down in, but useful to have to hand).

XPs to LG

The Trump thing is a prime example of a contemporary reference that makes total sense cos Trump was despised at the time by NY’s upper crust iirc? Spy Magazine repeatedly went for him, there’s this infamous Vanity Fair profile of the time as well:

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1990/9/after-the-gold-rush

It’s quite difficult to make the case now that AP isn’t deeply misogynistic as Ellis has become a total right wing piece of shit apart from whatever deniability he had at the time, but I’ve always said depiction isn’t endorsement and that the casualness of the misogyny in this work is part of the character’s worldview. Women are disposable, just like casual acquaintances, restaurants that aren’t hot anymore and $10,000 shoes that are from last season.

Nevertheless it is a part of what makes this such a deeply uneasy work and fascinating as time passes to look at its reflections in the world we now live in. It’s one of those works where the people being satirised really do not get, or care to, the bit, and that’s tainted it by association but it’s still a great book. Just not an easy read imo. I haven’t read it in years cos I really need to be in the right mood for it.

Still, it’s got some great and funny moments. I love when his internal monologue when the detective is at his office is escalating into hysteria and he drops this gem:

“That I'm heir to the unfortunate information that his penis had a name and that name was Michael?”

You can feel whatever remained of his soul shattering. Why do I know this, why has my mind retained this, why is it that name?

Having watched the (not very good) Del Toro Frankenstein I finally picked up the novel. I had it in mind that it was a bit of a slog, compared to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula, but I'm enjoying it so far

I sadly did find it a bit of a slog - kept myself entertained by imagining the ultra-verbose monster as the one from the Universal movies, his long monologues existing only in his brain as everyone else hears groaning - but I should give it a second try.

I'd suggest trying The Last Man, which I read in college and shows another facet of Shelley's talent.

Frankenstein is incredible, the scenes where the doctor is chasing the monster through the Arctic are all time

My go-to answer whenever I'm asked to name the greatest novel ever written. Sometimes it's even my favourite as well.

Frankenstein 1818 > Frankenstein 1831

Currently reading "Christendom" by Peter Heather. Approachable, opinionated history in a non-technical style. The author's judgments seem broadly right, or at least reasonable, to me so far.

i'm re-reading Brothers Karamazov for the first time since my early 20s and having that classic feeling of getting entirely different things out of it this time. it's a funny mishmash of knockabout domestic drama, humanist religious inquiry and kind of proto-psychological description - people are always doing things in this book that they can't explain, that make no sense to them, emotions getting the better of them

I Think if you can get through Dracula you'll have no trouble with Frankenstein

. it's a funny mishmash of knockabout domestic drama, humanist religious inquiry and kind of proto-psychological description - people are always doing things in this book that they can't explain, that make no sense to them, emotions getting the better of them

That's the glory of Dostoyevsky -- and why Nabokov detested him (he was weird).

That's true of Karamazov for sure, but I found it immensely readable. I read the first 100 pages of Demons and it feels like more of a slog (set it aside a few months ago)...almost entirely gossipy domestic drama so far, and it also feels like prologue to a story that hasn't started yet.

Even taking into account that you didn't really have to worry about losing the reader's attention when there was little else competing for their attention, Brothers K always had something engaging in the different bits.

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo

going full tankie in 2026 and loving it

Oh, if it's not clear, Nabokov was full of shit.

He was definitely a patrician snob.

xxp yes mate!

the key to enjoying Dostoevsky imo is to avoid the dreadful Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. Magarshark or Garnett is what you want

interesting!

mine is by david macduff and it’s terrific. my only quibble is with the word “voluptuaries” which was idk probably a defensible choice when he wrote the translation but reads very strangely now. would have been better as “sensualists” or similar

or “decadents”

I read the Garnett Brothers K, and my 'Demons' is also Garnett. :/

Brothers Karamazov has been stuck in my Top Picks Kindle Deals list for over a year now. Which is odd because i bought my copy from kobo website. it is unread. any year now...

"Voluptuaries" is a fun word, and we still know what it means! Have only read xpost Magarshark Dustys and enjoyed those. Totally second Alfred's tip on The Last Man, which I was thinking about this morning. It's tight enough that even basic description can be spoilery, but look up what Joanie Loves Chachi and I were saying about it on a previous WAYR? if curious. Not a Frankenstein rehash, but as much of a trip with layered subtext in its own way.
Description of American Psycho reminds me of what I said on another thread about re-reading Tender Is The Might, w Dr. Scott as pathologist of privileged White American male, with bits of himself under the scope pretty often.

I got this collection of Agatha Christie books for a few bucks on Kindle and I'm pretty addicted to them

she is snooty about the working class though lol

Frankenstein was the one book that I connected with back when I was the worst English major ever

Which Christies do you like? I'm reading my first one currently (Roger Ackroyd).

I got this collection of Agatha Christie books for a few bucks on Kindle and I'm pretty addicted to them

she is snooty about the working class though lol

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, January 23, 2026 9:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

When I was an easily scared kid of 10-12, I was addicted to the Agatha Christie books our library had. I must have read nearly 20 of them with lurid covers like this:

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9639bb_9b61d81c64e64cf3af7b4c01557ae9b0~mv2.jpg

or these:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/QpoAAeSwdstpLY~v/s-l1600.jpg

That Postern of Fate cover scared me so much. Wtf is up with that horse?

The covers had lots of skulls, syringes, and dripping daggers. The titles seemed definitive: Evil Under the Sun and Death Comes as the End. I would look at the covers over and over again deciding which to read, which might be too much. I was a weird kid.

Finished Spender’s ‘The Temple,’ which was fascinating— the specter of the Nazi party’s rise as the protagonist engages with the young, gay life of Weimar Germany is quite something.

I started W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film and am plowing through it. Excellently reported.

I started W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film and am plowing through it. Excellently reported.

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 25 January 2026 17:28 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it replete with tales of carousing, hellraising booze-soaked escapades?

i am currently reading “red star over china” by edgar snow. writing is gripping, almost a piece of adventurous travel writing as much of political history, and full of colourful characters. at times the documentary becomes quite sense but it’s ok

It is, but less than I dreaded. It treats Peckinpah as a serious artist; I'd no idea how well-respected his scriptwriting skills were, for ex.

Feel like later on he sort of ended up more like the caricature of himself, but for The Wild Bunch he is still at the height of his powers.

well-respected his scriptwriting skills were,

Started in on Matthew Stadler’s ‘The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee.’ Very strange first 100 pages

The latest anthology of short stories by Julia Jacques. A lot of pretty explicit s&m in this, thoughts and prayers to those reading over my shoulder on public transport.

Words Are My Matter by Ursula Le Guin. Essays, book introductions and reviews. Some of the essays are a little out of time, but the intros and reviews have given me plenty to add to my to-read list. Having all these pieces in one place makes it seem like she had an idée fixe about genre pigeonholing and the lack of respect for SF. Not that she was wrong, but I think things have finally improved on that front.

When I was an easily scared kid of 10-12, I was addicted to the Agatha Christie books our library had. I must have read nearly 20 of them with lurid covers

There's a great paperback art book devoted to the lurid covers of an artist called Tom Adams:

https://letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2022-11-13/agatha-christie-cover

I'm about 3/4 through The Lost City of Z, David Grann. The story at its base is plenty fascinating. There's the eccentric, but indomitable explorer of the Amazon, his revival of the search for El Dorado, his nascent anthropological research, his race with a rival, and his eventual mysterious disappearance into the jungle without a trace. Everything you need for a ripping yarn. I now await the culmination, where the author also enters the Amazonian jungle in search of traces of his protagonist and for the Lost City he was so certain would be found there.

If the book has one weakness it is one shared with a great many of the non-fiction narratives I read. The author spent a ton of time and energy researching the story, traveling the globe, interviewing members of his family, amassing notes by the bushel basket. After going to so much trouble to acquire all that biographical and familial material, he feels bound to make use of it. For me, there's much more of it than is required to tell the main story, so the pace of the telling slows while the author pursues side tracks allowing the tale to meander before he resumes the central story.

James Gray's film version of The Lost City of Z is wonderful, still my favorite film of 2017.

I finished the Z book. The ending was most satisfactory, even if it could be anticipated by those who have read 1491 by Charles Mann. Now I've started to read Greenmantle, by John Buchan, which is both a novel of espionage and intrigue, and an artifact of the British colonial period, right at the moment when it had driven straight over a precipice, but retained the habit of thinking of itself as the most robust empire in world history. iow, circa 1916.

I started Scott Eyman's Joan Crawford bio and Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, only my third Fyodor.

I bought this bundle of all the Agatha Christie Miss Marple books and it's been a fun escape, on my fourth so far this year

Speaking of those xpost lurid Christie covers, last night I re-read Orwell's review of No Orchids For Miss Blandish, and OMG no cover could have come close to this tale, as retold by O---any of yall read it??? Review is in Collected Essays. Had somehow forgotten just how freewheeling-on-a-mission these could be, like ilx megaposts on caffeine blast---but this 'un is pretty tight; all he has to do is describe the thing.

Have any of you read the book itself, I mean: No Orchids For Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase--published in 1939, filmed in 1948...

Finished Pasolini’s ‘Boys Alive,’ translated by Tim Parks. Incredible book— glimpses into a ragtag crew of poor Roman hoodrats in the years following WW2, the writing and the characters have an incredible energy and propulsion to them, even when they’re not doing much of anything. Pasolini makes the idle of a day bathing along a filthy river into something of a wondrous adventure. That there are also incisive moments where the reader is made to understand the sheer poverty and destruction that so many were living in during the post-war period is also a testament to his powers as a writer. Highly recommended.