Reading Update

Book #78 of the year was Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. This is a completely absorbing story, told in the format of an oral history. It's the story of an album, and how creativity works, and the mess that substance abuse makes of lives. It's the story of many people behaving badly, and of music being made anyway. I could hardly put it down.

Book #79 was a reread, Inspired, by Rachel Held Evans. I read this when it first came out, and wrote this very unexcited review. I liked it much better this time around. Just as Searching for Sunday was a love letter to the church, this one is a love letter to scripture, and her experience with it. Rachel Held Evans was someone who wasn't afraid to ask questions. I really wish she were still around.

Book #80 was something I read with my book club, The Watchmaker's Daughter: The True Story of World War II Heroine Corrie Ten Boom, by Larry Loftis. Although I already knew many of the details of this story, it was definitely worth reading and discussing.

Book #81 was Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane. I've been reading this book for more than a year. It's not a quick read, and it's not an uplifting one, but it's completely fascinating. A taste: "Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain." 

Book #82 was The High Flyer, by Susan Howatch. I read this trilogy (this is the second one) a long time ago. Frankly it's not her best stuff, and it's not nearly as good as the Starbridge series, but it has its flashes of Howatch. I wish she'd written more books - I've read all of hers. I found this one in a second-hand bookstore recently and decided to reread it.

Book #83 was Robert Galbraith's latest installment of the Cormoran Strike series, The Running Grave. This is a book about a cult. It's really hard reading in places, because it's almost unbearably painful and suspenseful. Not really my kind of book, but I couldn't stop reading it.