What are you reading these days?

I am finally going for gold and aiming to finish The Doctors Blackwell which focuses on two sisters who became some of the first female physicians in the 1850s/1860s. I think it's very compelling because the eldest sister (I can never keep them straight, they both had E names) didn't get into being a doctor because she was primarily interested in helping people. She was interested in the academic pleasure of it and was actually quite squeamish.

I had started this book a couple of years ago and rented it digitally from my library. I didn't get through the whole thing because I had a hard time reading it that way. I nabbed the paperback of it earlier this year and find myself focusing on it much better.

I accidentally sped through 5 books from the Green Rider series by Kristen Britain in about a week and a half. I'd read the first one many years ago as a kid during a trip to the Smokey Mountains, which is rather fitting based on the feel of the books. It is a lot darker than I remembered, especially later books. I'm enjoying them, though.

I've had to block my reading app for the moment so I can recover from my lack of restraint, but hopefully I'll be able to finish 6 and 7 sometime, just broken up into pieces more...

I just finished Easy Riders, Raging Bulls today and... its an interesting book, but the tone was a little too gossipy instead of inside baseballs, if that makes sense.

I don't think the book needed to be as long as it is, either. Now, all this being said, it's still worth the read, even with the bullshit above. I think its one of the standards for people who are into film.

I'm now reading Chuck Hogan's Prince of Thieves, which is what The Town was based on. Seems good so far -- nothing fancy.

Last night I started (and finished, it's pretty short) All Systems Red, the first book of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I'm a sucker for first-person stories with flawed, snarky protagonists (and bonus points if they're not exactly human) so it was quite up my alley. Great pacing and character development for such a short read. This was for a book club at work, but I'll likely continue with the series on my own.

In tandem with that I've been slowly working my way through the Grand Central Arena series by Ryk E. Spoor. I'm currently on Spheres of Influence (book 2), but this one isn't quite connecting with me as strongly as I wanted. I liked the first book mostly for the interesting premise, but now that the novelty of that has worn off a bit I'm finding that the characters are written a little too perfectly--the protagonists always make the best choices and implement them near perfectly. It's really good at building up excitement and then delivering payoffs over and over again, but for me it's missing any real sense of stakes. I'll probably keep going though because the next book in the series (Challenges of the Deeps) has an interesting premise again, and I have grown to like all of the characters.

Same Kind of Different As Me. Saw the movie, got the book. A black man was basically a slave in the United States until 1970 or so. The amazing thing is in high school one of my teachers once told me about a man he knew who owned a slave. How does that happen? Read the book.

I'm listening til Esther Perel's "The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity" and I can't recommend this book enough. Particular of course if your affected by the subject but also if you're curious about how important communication in relationships is especially surrounding very touchy subjects and how we frame conversations. I feel like it's one of those book everybody should read just to broaden your perspective. She writes beautifully and encapsulates so many nuances of rarely talked about issues from all sides. Blunt, empathetic and realistically.

I’m on book two of the three body problem trilogy, called “the dark forest.” Darn good.