Mrs. Darwin recently did an Immediate Book Meme, so I might as well do one here.
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There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme.
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Over the past couple years, I've been doing quite a few audiobooks as well as books, so for some questions I'll give two answers, the book answer and the audiobook answer.
1. What book are you reading now?
A. Books
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, which is the current fortnightly book
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness -- only just started this
Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A new translation with introduction and commentary
B. Audiobooks
Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun -- Enjoying this one more than I expected
Michael Flynn, Rogue Star
R. F. Kuang, Babel -- only just started this
C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
2. What book did you just finish?
A. Books
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which was the previous fortnightly book
Gillian Russell, Barriers to Entailment -- excellent, I'll certainly have something up about it at some point
B. Audiobooks
Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Agatha Christie, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Michael Flynn, Firestar
Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table -- of the Agatha Christies I hadn't read before, this has certainly been the best, although I think it would probably be a better read than a listen.
3. What do you plan to read next?
A. Books
By far, this is the hardest of these questions to answer. The obvious thing is the next fortnightly book, but I haven't decided yet what that will be. At some point over Lent, which starts in about two weeks, I expect to do Sigrid Undset's Saga of the Saints.
After a short pause, I will probably re-read Gillian Russell's Barriers to Entailment.
Last week, I picked up a few books at Half Price Books, some of which I intend to get through at some point in the near future:
Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings
Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse -- I think I read this one in high school, but can't recall much about it.
Agatha Christie, Towards Zero -- I don't think I've read this one at all.
B. Audiobooks
The following are currently checked out on my Libby Shelf and just need to be started.
Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death -- I've read this multiple times, but really want to see how it works in audiobook
Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty's Dead -- I don't know if I've read this one at all, although I think not
The following are currently on hold with Libby, waiting for available copies.
Agatha Christie, Sad Cypress
Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders
Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?
St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery, The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church -- but this is a bit-at-a-time book, anyway
The other two I started before Christmas vacation and just haven't gotten back to them yet:
Albert the Great, On the Body of the Lord
Henri Poincare, The Value of Science
5. What book do you keep meaning to start?
John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods, 2nd edition.
Mortimer Adler, Philosopher at Large
6. What is your current reading trend?
In books I don't have a reading trend, but as should be obvious, I have (since November) been going through Agatha Christie on audiobook. I did the Marples in November last year and have been doing the Poirots since then. (As a sidenote, from what I've listened to so far, Miss Marple does consistently better in audiobook than Poirot, who is much more uneven; and of the Poirot works, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the middling works that usually seem to work best -- Murder in Mesopotamia, Dumb Witness, and the like. The better books often trade on subtleties that are just easily missed in audiobook, and the worst Poirots tend to be overly complicated, so the books that work best as audiobooks are those that trade on neither subtlety nor detail, or at least very little, and thus are primarily carried by what might be called 'psychological' features of the story and the general sense of each character.) I am also currently going (much more slowly) through Michael Flynn's Firestar series on audiobook.
