It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I finished The Day Will Pass Away, which was depressing, and read Eventide, by Therese Bohman, a very good Swedish writer whose books I always enjoy. This one was about a middle aged art professor who is teetering on a professional windfall. It is not a high-intensity page-turner by any stretch but an intensely character-driven study of midlife. Bohman gets women profoundly and her books are always arch and perceptive commentaries on the stages of a woman's life.

I wanted to start the Patrick Melrose series by Edward St. Aubyn but I misplaced my omnibus edition, so instead I picked Out, by Natsuo Kirino, a grisly Japanese crime novel I bought in Seattle a couple of years ago at the now-sadly-closed Seattle Mystery Bookshop. It's good.  On the long side, but the pages turn and the tension hasn't cracked yet. It's about a woman who murders her husband and the group of friends who cover it up. It was made into a really poorly-reviewed movie in 2002. I think maybe it needs a reboot. I could see HBO do a really good job making a limited series.


On the bedside table is still A.S. Byatt's A Whistling Woman. I'm finishing up David Sedaris's latest, Calypso, on audio. My nonfiction read right now is Madeleine Albright's Prague Winter, her memoir of World War 2 Czechoslovakia. I'm enjoying it but I'd bet I'd like it even more on audio than print, especially if she reads it. But the print is great.

What are you reading?