I second Onward’s recommendation of Before We Were Yours. I’m not a very fast reader, but I’ve zipped through this book.
Just finished “The Bright Hour” (Nina Riggs.) It’s her memoir of living with metastatic breast cancer - so you can guess how it ends. The language is gorgeous, poetic, and very moving. I don’t read this kind of book very often but I’m glad I did, even though I feel a little haunted by it this morning.
I just finished “Middlemarch” by George Elliot. Well worth the time. Now I’m afraid every other English novel will be a disappointment.
Middlemarch has been my favorite novel of all time.
I loved, loved, loved Middlemarch which I read when I was about 21 and alone in Europe doing research for my senior thesis. I tried it rereading it in my 30s when I had a houseful of babies and I just couldn’t get into it. I’ve often thought I should give it another go.
Okay, @intparent - I picked up “Good Morning, Midnight” from the library on your recommendation!
@mathmom, I read Middlemarch in college and it was just one more novel to rush through and write a bad paper on. I didn’t do it justice and have been wanting to re-read it for decades. Maybe it’s something we should consider next time we choose a classic for Book Club.
Middlemarch is hands down my favorite novel.
@Mary13, I’d be game.
Middlemarch is a masterpiece.
A friend and I went to a book signing with Lisa Wingate, who wrote Before We Were Yours. I also recommend this book.
Just finished Martin Amis’s “The Moronic Inferno,” which is an early series of essays/interviews on America/ns, who are dead now: Hugh Hefner, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, etc. Love how Amis lets folks hang themselves on their own petards–not because it’s mean, but because blindspots are so very revealing. (Yes, and sometimes mean too.)
“Gotham,” the first doorstop-sized volume on NYC history, so that I can read the second volume that just came out to rave review in NYRB. Comprehensive and detailed picture so far of Native American, Dutch, and English colonial experiences. Fabulous detail based on what must have been backbreaking research.
Also the brief but beautiful “The Burial at Thebes” (translated by Seamus Heaney, one of my favorite poets.)
“Visiting Mrs. Nabokov” written by Martin Amis.
“A Monk Swimming” by Malachy McCourt, who is wonderfully vulgar and accurate in his old Irish/New York immigrant story that involves unloading boats at the dock, drinking, and drinking companions. NY has changed so much that I really only remember it when jostled through historic first person accounts like his.
“Mushrooms of the Northeast” because accuracy is very important sometimes! Very well organized, with clear, helpful pictures. It’s more pertinent, though less scholarly perhaps, than the “Audubon Guide to North American Mushrooms.” Plus small enough to take with you in the field.
“Etquette Guide to Japan” as a way to further understand one of my favorite places on earth. I review my collections of ukiyo-e illustrated books with regular and fierce enjoyment.
I just reread “My Journey to Llasa,” which I read every couple of years. It inspires me to think beyond all kinds of boundaries, and reminds me that limits are largely broken in one’s imagination first and foremost. Then it’s time to take to the road, with all its hardship and spiritual awakening.
Always been a promiscuous reader, with tastings concurrent here and there, working through different books in different rooms of the house. Helpfully, my local library also has an excellent reading room, with a stack of recent NYRBs.
the brief but beautiful “The Burial at Thebes” (translated by Seamus Heaney, one of my favorite poets.)
The Irish Rep (NYC) did this translation a couple of years ago. The script was the best part of the play!
Does anyone have any recommendations for a mystery/thriller that’s good? I’m between books and am stumped on what to read. It doesn’t need to be a literary masterpiece, I just want something engaging that I’m not going to want to throw across the room in frustration. 
Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr. Fantastic book.
"Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts’s gift for telling emotionally wrenching stories.
Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King’s final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled by yet another report of unarmed black men killed by police, hacks into his newspaper’s server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column’s publication.
While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaint—while simultaneously dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s activist—Toussaint is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Barack Obama’s planned rally in Chicago’s Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement."
@MSU88CHEng, I really loved Shadow Divers.
Mystery, thrills, WWII history, and true!!!
For a mystery/thriller I really liked all three books by Peter Swanson - I think that I liked The Kind Worth Killing best (the others are Her Every Fear and The Girl with a Clock for a Heart)
For a mystery-thriller, anything by Tana French.
Good standalone mystery is Laura Lippman’s Wilde Lake
I highly recommend “Magpie Murder”. Just finished it last night.