Really Reading Now, As Much as I Can

Yes, another long time away from this blog. But these days I need to read and share with others, like I need to breathe. 

I've been immersed in the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy's recently published The Wild, Dark Shore. Without knowing what I was doing, I chose it as an Audible book. If I knew then what I know now, I think I would have chosen to read it as a book rather than an audiobook. The writing is beautiful, and because I am not a stellar listener, I feel I'm missing some of its beauty. 

 

I'm still wrapped up in it, nevertheless, and am near the end now. Powerful writing! The novel is set on Shearwater Island in the Antarctic. A friend asked if it's set in the future, and I would say yes, a bit in the future. Shearwater Island is about to become uninhabitable because the ocean is overtaking it, yet one family remains there, though only for a matter of weeks, at which time they plan/hope to be picked up by a ship and taken back to Australia. Wonderful nature writing, yet this novel is a nail-biter as well, and yes, a harbinger of climate disaster. 

I'm only 10 pages from finishing Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, translated and first published in English in 2008. I just came off being tremendously moved by Schlink's most recent novel, The Granddaughter, and decided, as a project, I would read all of his novels (many of them for the second time). I did read Homecoming back around 2009-2010. But this second reading has been nothing like the first; it has been much, much more startling. 

I reached the ending, and I saw what was coming, though I swear I don't remember. But some part of me remembers, because for a long time, I could not finish the last 30 pages. I did read much of it today, but all of it is so prescient, so unbelievably, incredibly timely that it is horrifying to me. No, nobody dies. No extreme tragedy ensues. But this ending is about our current status--now. A charismatic professor, a person at the helm, leading his students into danger for his own theories and purposes. And in the ADIRONDACKS, no less!! I kid you not!

 So, to rest the mind (!), I'm also reading a Kate Morton novel, The Distant Hours. Have you read that one? It's a very long one, set in England, during WWII to decades later, moving back and forth in time.