What BOOK are you reading right now?

Past the half way point in the rereading of Ready Player One by Ernst Cline.

Since finishing the above mentioned reread, I reread The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a mystery by Alan Bradley. Yesterday, I started China Mieville's Railsea.

https://www.facebook.com/AwkwardYeti/photos/a.323340867741595.74511.127722993970051/823466871062323/?type=1&theater

The latest Bernie Gunther.

Balkans in wartime?
Nasty Gestapo characters?
How'd you like it?

I've only just started it, but I love all the other Bernie Gunther books. Some are set in the Weimar Republic, some in Nazi Germany before and during the war. The latest he's appeared is in Cuba just before the revolution. He's a very good character, a decent man who's too good at his job to be fired by the Nazis.

Berlin Noir is a good place to start, those are the first three novels in one collection.

Thanks

Thanks from here too.

I talked myself down from book buying - have some good ones I should finish and then give away.

Did find $.01 used paperback though in the Bernie Gunther series, now on wish list.

I ran across a Joseph Kanon book set in Berlin, one of his I haven't read. Good writer in my view.

I'm always ready for Ken Follett. Not much of a body count, but thoughtful enough that I've ever finished one in a day or two.

The first Bernie Gunther book I read was The One From The Other, which was given away free with Waterstones' magazine, which in itself was free to Watersones card members.

To be honest I didn't take to it straight away, but once I was about a quarter of the way through I got hooked. The first 3 collected in Berlin Noir were all he intended to do, and he has written lots of other books including a series of kid's books about a genie. Bernie wouldn't go away though he had a huge fan base. The first five are sequential starting with the first days of the Nazis in power and then ending in Buenos Aires under the Perons.

However by then he's getting a bit long in the tooth, and having mapped out Bernie's life Kerr was in a quandary, and had to find the gaps in the other books and fill in the missing pieces. Some of his books have two separate time streams, If The Dead Rise Not, his sixth book is typical. The first half is set in Berlin in 1934 after Bernie has left the police and is working as the house detective at the Adlon hotel. The second half is set in Havana in 1954.

Finished What If?. It was a hoot.

Re-reading A Dance with Dragons in bits and pieces as the HBO
Game of Thrones series progresses.

Still reading both Women of Will and Braiding Sweetgrass but will next read Far From the Madding Crowd because I enjoyed the latest film of the novel.

Went away last weekend for a writers' retreat and came away with new ideas for my play so will reread some of Shakespeare's plays as well as criticism.

I had a dental appointment in Boston and left my book in the car. Travelling all that distance, of course, meant arriving early because of using the subway, etc. I needed something to read but was not worried because Tufts Dental School is a few blocks from the Brattle Book Store, a famous used book store. I looked around quickly and chose a collection of Chekhov short stories in part because short stories are good to read when the time to read may be chopped up into small pieces and because a dear, departed friend used to urge me to read his stories. Glad I did.

Mohamed Choukri - La Pain Nu (For Bread Alone)

Naked biography of a street kid in 1950's Morocco. Not for the faint-hearted.

"Children, when they die, become angels. When they live, they become devils."

Finished John Scalzi's breezy unorthodox murder mystery, Lock In.

I am currently reading Lincoln Child's The Forgotten Room. By page 70, I've about decided his sole purpose in writing is to show off his really, totally, totally awesome vocabulary. Too late for the library, so I will probably continue.

A Kiss from Maddelena, which I bought and stopped reading years ago, oh yawn.
This time I liked it, and liked it more the more I read. Molto interesssante, all the way to the end.

I'm reading Poor People by Dostoevsky. Actually I think I'm rereading it. I'm now inclined to reread some of his other works. I remember him as being better than Poor People would suggest.