Love by Roddy Doyle

 

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Going to keep trying, but find first 100 pages of this boring, like an exquisitely composed speech you slowly realize you've heard before. Even revelations and self-discoveries are posited in rounded prose, without a rise in narrator voice or tone. Don't think I'll learn much from reading it.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

 

Really enjoyed this, if a little subdued and poetical-sounding. Reminded me of Anthony Burgess' NOTHING LIKE THE SUN. The story of Shakespeare's wife and dead son, without almost no input from Shakespeare himself, who's never even named in the book.

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

 

Reading as a companion to the new RED COMET biography. Sort of strikes me as a darker, female CATCHER IN THE RYE this time around. And most of it is straight out of Plath's real life.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich