It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Is it still OK to say Happy New Year? Happy New Year! I finished 2018 strong and I'm on to a whole new slate of books. My first finish of 2018 was Ruby Namdar's The Ruined House, a very literary Israeli prize-winner about a middle-aged man's mid-life crisis, a kind of psychotic/religious mental breakdown that coincides with the attacks of 9/11/01 although the attacks are never explicitly mentioned. Anyway it is a beautifully written, haunting novel that I'm probably going to be mulling over for a while.

My carry-around read is Milkman, by Anna Burns, a somewhat stream-of-consciousness novel that just won the Booker Prize, coming from Irish writer Anna Burns, about the life of woman who can't quite live by the rules of her Northern Ireland sectarian community. It's a slow read but very compelling.

Bedside I'm reading Tommy Orange's it-book There There, about indigenous Americans in southern California. I just started it so I'll be able to tell you more soon.

I'm a few days away from finishing Abraham Verghese's luminous My Own Country, a memoir about his experiences treating patients with HIV/AIDS in rural Tennessee in the 1980s. His was one of the first medical memoirs to cover HIV/AIDS; he went on to write the wonderful novel Cutting for Stone years later.

In audioland I'm enjoying the heck out of French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers. This is about a fading socialite and her man-child son and what happens when their family fortune goes away.

What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments.