Just catching up on the thread!
Yes @Sadik the more I think about the Butler book, the more underwhelmed I feel. It seemed a bit unpolished/written in haste. Hearing them speak about the book was more memorable than the experience of reading the book itself, which is a shame!
@inaptonym thanks so much for the lightning tour of Han Kang's works. She is definitely on my TBR list now.
@Owlbookend I'm in awe of wild swimmers; they are so intrepid! A few members of my book group go wild swimming regularly, year round. (Madness.) My waterfall plunge was actually more of a very quick dip than a swim, ha. But it felt great to be part of a group of middle-aged women with middle-aged bodies, all of them so confident in their own skin. I hope you are able to get back to your wild swimming soon!
@Stowickthevast thank you for reminding me of Desperate Characters. I read it when Jonathan Franzen first brought Paula Fox back into the limelight again, and loved it. I'm due a reread. I have reservations about Franzen, but he did a good thing there.
@FuzzyCaoraDhubh interesting review of Held. I wasn't going to read it, but I've changed my mind.
@bibliomania now I'm even more keen to read My Good Bright Wolf!
@Terpsichore on the basis of your review, I'll be giving the Claire Lombardo a miss!
I usually have three or four books on the go; more than that and I start to feel overwhelmed. One fiction, one nonfiction (the nonfiction ones usually take me longer to get through), one MN read-along (though I've been woefully bad at keeping up with read-alongs lately), and one Worthy Book (usually nonfiction, sometimes academic) which generally starts out as a normal read but is then relegated to the slow reading pile because it's not enough of a page-turner and it feels a bit more like work than pleasure (!). I try to alternate between reading one library book and one book I already own, but in practice the library pile usually goes down faster.