tagged by @starlingkick and @marroniere a while back!
The last book I read: Night Shadows by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, Icelandic murder mystery. I liked it okay although I thought it started better than it began. I’m trying to read more books in translation this year and Icelandic detective fiction is an old friend.
A book I’d recommend: A short story collection by Julia Armfield called Salt Slow (there’s a great review of it here). I read her novel Our Wives Under the Sea first, which I would also really recommend if you’re into horror books about grief or if the idea of that intrigues you, but I think more people have heard of that one so I’d recommend Salt Slow as nobody else I know has read it.
A book I couldn’t put down: Justin Myers’ The Glorious Dead. This one’s also about grief (something of a theme in my reading this year…) and about messy relationships and unreliable narrators and deceit and love. Adored it.
A book I’ve read twice or more: Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, which I’ve re-read every five years or so since I was a student and has felt like a wholly different book every time I come to it with five more years of life experience.
A book on my TBR: Leo Marks’s Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code-Maker’s War 1941-1945, about his experiences working in SOE.
A book I’ve put down: I can’t remember now who wrote it but it was called either The People Next Door or The Couple Next Door and it was some kind of psychological horror thing I picked up in an airport coming back from a work trip, and by the end of the flight I’d just got annoyed with it and gave up.
A book on my wish list: All the John le Carré ones I haven’t read
A favourite book from childhood: Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth
A book I’d give to a friend: for fiction, Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch; for non-fiction, Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (@stitchingatthecircuitboard this is the one I was recommending recently!)
A book of poetry or lyrics that I own: Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal; one long poem in multiple parts, written in 1938 about the buildup to the war.
A non-fiction book that I own: After the Ice: A Global Human History by Stephen Mithen. I am so fascinated by archaeological history.
What I’m currently reading: I am always reading too many books at once (my resolution the past couple of years has been to have an upper limit of 10 on current reads), so at the moment this includes Middlemarch, a collection of Lorrie Moore’s essays and reviews called See What Can Be Done, and a book called Proto by Laura Spinney about… linguistic history I guess? The origins of proto-Indo-European. I'm fascinated by history told through language and I'm really enjoying this so far.
What I’m planning on reading next: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead
Tagging: @nightingalesighs @stitchingatthecircuitboard @balrogballs @nocaptainonthisship @branmer @mcpayne and anyone else who'd like to take part!
