It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I finished a couple of books last week. A Spy Among Friends is going to be one of my favorites for the year, and then I read the very short but fascinating Widow Basquiat, a biography/memoir by Jennifer Clement of Suzanne Mallouk, a Canadian woman who became the muse and lover of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and remained his friend to the end of his life. The book is a great portrait of New York and the art scene in the 80s. Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Madonna and others make appearances too.

This week I'm very nearly done with Augustus, by John Williams, an epistolary novel about the Roman emperor who brought 200 years of peace to the empire. It's fascinating and wonderful.

I'm loving The Narrow Road to the Deep North, this year's Booker Prize winner by Richard Flanagan. It's a hard read- think Unbroken only fictional- but beautifully, almost impossibly beautifully, written. It even has a tragic love story at its core.

My friend gave me an ARC of Zac Bissonnette's new book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, a history of the ubiquitous plush that charts the rise and fall of the crazy craze of the late nineties when people flipped them for hundreds of dollars and lined up at Hallmark stores and ate Happy Meals till they puked to get the teenies. I never did any of that, but I did collect them and I'm finding the book to be fascinating and a really good time. It comes out in January.

What are you reading this week? I hope everyone who celebrates it has a very Happy Thanksgiving!