My Reading List



20 Mar 2023 (Last Modified 31 Jan 2025)


My Reading List

My list of books I’ve read, with marginalia.

2025 I started noting books that I started and didn’t finish.

Books That I Remember When I Read Them

Notes: This book was a rambling memoir. Not a good discussion of the books or juxtaposition of their themes with modern life.

  • Andromeda by Ivan Yefremov (Finished 21 January 2025)

Notes: This was a fantastic book.

Notes: This book was so poorly written that I could not finish it. Just not my style. It underscored Ben McEvoy’s admonition to avoid the literary equivalent of junk food. Other writers have done better with this material.

Notes: This book, for me, lacked substance. It explored superficially the very interesting topics of the relationships between Achilles and Oenone and Priam and Hecuba. All the males were portrayed as one-dimensional as the women in the Iliad.

Notes: I found the book too slow and the characters not engaging. Her writing is lyrical but, to me, it felt like it was trying too hard to be poetic.

Notes: The narrative was uneven and Mr. Egan’s use of jargon obscures his point. He explores the important idea of what it means to be human if you become a disembodied mind, and then even move to another dimension, but the exposition was much poorer than, say, Klara and the Sun.

Notes: I very much liked the portrayal of Klara, as intellectualy simplistic yet trenchant and authentic. Mr. Ishiguro nicely dissociates emotional intelligence from declarative knowledge while showing that a machine could be more human in either than a human.

Notes: I buy French books from French Books Online, not Amazon.

Books That I Don’t Remember When I Read Them

-The Least of us by Sam Quinones

-In the Shadow of Humanity by N. John Williams

-Heaven by Hieko Kawakami

-Babel by R.F. Kuang

-Victory City by Salman Rushdie

-Le Consentement by Vanessa Spingora