What are you reading for January 2024?

[Anonymous]

What is everyone reading this month?
What is the book about?
What do you think about it?

[Anonymous]

Currently reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a murdered Sri Lankan photographer navigating the afterlife. Just started, but so far it's good. Mixes the politics and violence with themes of memory, vengeance, and justice, and what it means to speak or choose to forget.

[Anonymous]

Finished Yellowface technically on 12/31. I thought it was okay, but not great enough to be best fiction book of 2023 (per Goodreads). I rated it 3.5 stars.

Today I fished Hello Beautiful. I loved this story, but I generally enjoy stories about families and their complications. 5 stars

Now I'm off to finish The Other Black Girl (half way finished), then Britney Spear's memoir.

[Anonymous]

Trying to get through as much of How To Survjve a Plague (AIDS mémoire/nonfiction) before the library yoinks it back. Really good but wasn’t exactly Christmas fair.

[Anonymous]

I'm reading The Seventh Cross by German author, Anna Seghers. She wrote this book after fleeing from Germany in the 1930s after Hitler took over. She was living in Mexico when it was published in 1942. The book is about 7 men who escape from a German concentration camp in the 1930s and is credited with bringing awareness to how Hitler gained power and his use of concentration camps. It reads like a literary thriller and I'm really enjoying it.

[Anonymous]

Just finished The Exceptions. I really enjoyed it, but it gave me a lot to think about. I started my STEM career in 1999, right when the book ends, as a naive 18yo who didn't think there would be any barriers to women succeeding in a STEM career. I ended up leaving science after a PhD in a prestigious lab and a million little slights. I've now moved to another STEM-adjacent field with few women and am again feeling like this is harder than it should be, though the slights are subtle and sometimes feel like they're all in my head, though I don't think they are. So much to think about. I feel like Nancy Hopkins in 1992-94 and just need to find a tape measure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just finished The Exceptions. I really enjoyed it, but it gave me a lot to think about. I started my STEM career in 1999, right when the book ends, as a naive 18yo who didn't think there would be any barriers to women succeeding in a STEM career. I ended up leaving science after a PhD in a prestigious lab and a million little slights. I've now moved to another STEM-adjacent field with few women and am again feeling like this is harder than it should be, though the slights are subtle and sometimes feel like they're all in my head, though I don't think they are. So much to think about. I feel like Nancy Hopkins in 1992-94 and just need to find a tape measure.

The book is the backstory to this news article covering MIT's admission in 1999 of pervasive discrimination against women professors in science: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/23/us/mit-admits-discrimination-against-female-professors.html

The book tells the story at MIT, but it was really the same across academia.

[Anonymous]

I’m midway through the Fraud by Zadie Smith. I was really excited to get this for Christmas but am having a really hard time getting into it.

[Anonymous]

I'm now on the second in the Slow Horses series. I LOVE the tv show and when we finished season 3 I wasn't ready to leave that world yet.

It took me a bit to get into the first book - but then I did get into it. Have been busy and havent gotten to read much of the second yet, but hopefully soon!

[Anonymous]

Working my way through all Ann Patchett books. Just read the Magician's Assistant (loved it!) in the first three days of 2024 after reading Tom Lake and Commonwealth in Dec. 2023 (and others earlier in 2023).

[Anonymous]

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Also I've been making my way through a bunch of Sherlock stories as something shorter to read between other things. It's impressive how much of it still holds up very well compared to contemporary fiction in the genre.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m midway through the Fraud by Zadie Smith. I was really excited to get this for Christmas but am having a really hard time getting into it.

I feel that way about pretty much all of her novels but usually come around on them. Though I haven't read one in a while because I am less patient with fiction than I was pre-Covid (so many partially read novels since 2020, which is not something I ever used to do, I was a lifelong completionist).

[Anonymous]

The covenant of water.

[Anonymous]

Trust...just got it from the library.

[Anonymous]

Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue - about the Spanish flu epidemic in Ireland from the perspective of a midwife

The Appeal by Janice Hallett - epistolary whodunit