A short addendum to the last post to say that, in the last few days, I read James McBride’s “Deacon King Kong”, which is on all of the best of the year lists. It was slow going at first, and I didn’t think I would finish it, but it got better and better and ended up being a five-star book, one of the best of the year. It’s a strange mix of race relations in 1960s New York, magical realism, farce, and something of a Quentin Tarantino plot. Unique in both concept and in style, this will probably be the last book I read this year — the 44th — and finishes my literary 2020 with a bang!

November and December were very productive for me in terms of reading — eight books, most of them very good, and I hope to finish another one or two by the year’s end. The best nonfiction book I read was “Radical Candor”, by Kim Malone Scott, who has worked at…

Four very different books this month. “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”, by the surgeon Atul Gawande, is about how checklists can be key to improving outcomes in extremely complex activities like surgery, flying airplanes and building skyscraper. I had read excerpts of this in the New Yorker…

My “reading” highlights this month were three audiobooks by Alan Bennett. All three are wonderful and gain a lot from being read by Bennett himself, in his distinctive voice. Smut is actually a set of two novellas about sex: “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson” and “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes”…

This month, my personal circumstances so arranged themselves that I managed to read six books, the number that I read in May, June, and July combined! H is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald, is hard to describe. I began it somewhat reluctantly, thinking that I would not enjoy it, but…

These were not productive months for reading. I read and enjoyed the fifth Jackson Brodie novel, Big Sky — the scenes descibring a human trafficking ring and its workings were particularly impactful. I also started — but did not finish — a number of others, including “Diários da Presidência, Vol…

This month, I exclusively read Kate Akinkson’s Jackson Brodie detective novels — the first fout, at least — I’m still working on “Big Sky”. I read Case Histories, One Good Turn,When Will There Be Good News?, and Started Early, Took My Dog. I liked them all very much — they…

Continuing from the first half of the month… I reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet, part of Madeleine L’Engle’s “Time Quartet”, which I first read as a child. …

I’ve been having more time to read (no prizes for guessing why) so decided to already post the books I’ve read so far this month. The highlight was definitely The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel. The first book of hers that I’d read was “Station Eleven”, an incredible…