What BOOK are you reading right now?

I'm six chapters into it and am fascinated.

It's a great book, George.

I like Pamuk - I admit I didn't finish his Istanbul, being waylaid as I was with police procedural thrillers - but he still interests me and I may finish it.

I've been reading a book, s t i l l, that is as I reported earlier greatly aggravating, that I keep going on because just as I am about to boot the thing, I get interested again.

Copying myself -
"And now to what I'm presently reading, Frances Mayes' A Year in the World, Journeys of a Passionate Traveller. She wrote Under the Tuscan Sun, which I remember liking for the food descriptions and recipes, not so much for the rest of it about fixing up a house there. I'm a little jaded about fixer upper books in that setting. Anyway, this book I'm reading now is an account of her and her husband's travels off and on over five years, the whole time spent then being approximately a year. It's replete with description, often rather poetic, so replete that I keep falling asleep. There are wave after wave after wave of descriptions. I'm even tired of the food descriptions, which is saying something. Once in a while I spark up, as in a few pages ago she gets into some designed gardens in the Cotswalds, but even those I'm just using as a reason to look up the one(s) I haven't heard of before online. Um, I also was interested in the medina of the Fez in Morocco. Well, this will all be over soon, only five more locals to explore."

I admit one of the reasons her writing aggravates me so much is that I can almost relate, or maybe I could if money were no object. Her ego as a writer and explorer fills all the pages, so the book is all about her, at the same time every x number of pages I learn something new.
Strange book I might be glad I read after my aggravation wanes.

I've got two more pages.

Considering that it more than 800 pages long and is set in 10 point type, it is more of an impression than anything else.

I think to remember that you have a fondness for Russian writers anyway, George, don't you?

I do indered ! I became fascinated as an adolescent with what then seemed incomprehensibly overwrought, strange, and yet penetrating as I read Crime and Punishment, a book taken from a dusty shelf in my Dad's study. Since then there are a few works I reread every ten years or so - Crime & Punishment; the section on Ivan & Alyosha from Brothers Karamazov; a play "A Month in the Country" and "A Sortsman's Sketches" by Ivan Turgenev; Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" and the Epilogue from War & Peace.

You might enjoy the Second Epilogue from Tolstoy's grerat work. In it he posits (remember this was 1848) that if one shows a Russian pesant a (then) modern steam engine and asks him what makes it move, the pesant will surely tell you 'There's a devil' in there who makes it go.' Tolstoy goes on to say that if you then patiently explain to the pesant that there is no devil in the machine and then again ask him to explaiun how it moves, he will answer;
"Then there's a German in there."

Isn't there always? It's an engine. It works. Duh!

Very funny.

I am re-reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles....haven't read any Hardy in yonks, though I love some of his novels. I was reading another book that mentions Tess a lot and was inspired.

About to read The Ancestor Game. Am reading a couple of workbooks also.

I have Pamuk's Snow, which I love.

I was reading Museum of Innocence when I was overseas, but got bored with it and left it in England. Very interesting author.

I know, it's tough being a German, but someone's got to do it!
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Well, a German friend transferred to my online library good 200 German books, and I've started reading one from John Le Carrè (David John Moore Cornwell) - he's supposed to be the greatest spy novelist of our time (The Spy who came in from the cold), so I am looking forward to reading "a murder of quality" ......The Master and Margarita has to wait!
"

Finished it.
Now on to Herodotus, Histories.

It's an old Penguin paperback, inscribed by someone in New York in 1963. Fragile, I need to tape it to keep it from flaking away.

mmm, I like Cornwell/Le Carre. I suppose he's not perfect but he usually pulls me in and in further, and I've always been glad I read whatever of his I'd just finished.

If I could do it over, I might read all of his books in sequence, but I've never been that orderly. Have missed some of them as it is.

I also like Le Carre. The bureaucracies he describes are so completely unorganized as to be quite believable.

I haven't read The Constant Gardener (or some name like that), which is many people's favorite.

I believe "A Murder of Quality" is the only Le Carre book that is not of the spy genre.
It's been a while since I read it.
He's probably my favorite author other than Lee Child...when it comes to a beach book.

But "Star Trek" has a Scottish engineer.

I'm re-reading "Supernature" by Lyall Watson.

Very interesting stuff, on the edge (in the 1970s) of science.

One of his early, small books, The Looking Glass War, is my favorite for precisely that reason.

Cara Black has a series of mysteries that take place in modern day Paris. I enjoy stories set in European cities. I am reading one of these books now. I think that there are about twelve in the series.

I've read a few of hers, liked them. The ones I read were put out by Soho Press.

This is the first time that I am reading her. I want to add that I also enjoyed the Moscow setting of Gorky Park, the Oxford setting of the Inspector Morse series, and the towns of Sweden in the Wallander series.