Recent reads: October 2025

Bel Canto

A well known soprano is singing at a dinner for an executive of a Japanese company in a Central or South American country. After the show is over a group of rebels invade in an attempt to assasinate the president. The problem is the president of the country isn’t there and then the rebels are left trying to figure out what to do. They take hostages and the story proceeds from there. This isn’t an easy story, but the writing is beautiful and there are moments of connection between the hostages and the rebels that were absolutely worth the read, even though I read with an impending sense of doom.

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic

I wanted to know more about the founding of the United States, so I decided to read some books we had on the shelf that G read when studying American History. I’ve read on other book by Ellis and really enjoy his style, so I picked up American Creation and enjoyed the read. Ellis talks about the gradual pace of the creation of the country, it wasn’t a fast process at all, and he also speaks to the things the men doing the work got wrong. I particularly appreciated the way in which Ellis wrote about Native Americans and the way in which they were treated so horribly, one of two major mistakes Ellis sees in the beginning of this country. I’m not done reading yet, but this was a good overview for a start.

Book of Alchemy

I touched a bit on this book when I wrote about my experience journaling every day, but I hadn’t quite finished it when I wrote that piece and now I have. The best parts of this book, by far, are the ones written by Jaouad herself. Her introductions to chapters are great and I loved reading them. What I’ve learned is that writing prompts aren’t really my thing. While some of them were good and I’ve used them repeatedly in my journal, that was less than a handful, the rest didn’t strike me, but that will be different for everyone and if they’re your thing, you’ll love having this collection.

Great Big Beautiful Life

I haven’t read all of Emily Henry’s books, but quite a few of them and this is my favorite of what I’ve read. Alice and Hayden are summoned to write the biography of a woman who was famous but disappeared from public life years ago. The two of them turn out to be competing for the job over the course of a month, but it’s the story within the story, that of the old woman, that I thought brought so much to this book. Highly recommend this one if you like Henry’s work or romance in general.

American Sphinx

The second book I read as I continue to read more about America’s beginnings and this one is a biography of Thomas Jefferson, again written by Joseph Ellis and one that we own. Jefferson is a complicated person, as are most of the folks that were involved in the founding of the US because they’re people and can’t really ever be all the things we think, especially given way in which they’ve been romaticized or remembered for only certain things. I learned a lot reading this and it’s by no means comprehensive, Ellis chose certain periods of Jefferson’s life to highlight who he was. But it was the epilogue where Ellis brought together some threads that really stuck with me and the below quote has had me thinking for quite some time about why the US is the way it is. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately in general, particularly after a friend from Canada asked me about things in our ongoing email exchanges. This quite sums it up for me pretty well.

Both Adams and Madison and, to an even greater extent, Hamilton, began with the assumption of a society as a collective unit, which was embodied in the government, which itself should be designed to maximize individual freedom within the larger context of public order. Jefferson did not worry about public order, believing as he did that individuals liberated from the last remnants of feudal oppression would interact freely to create a natural harmony of interests that was guided, like Adam Smith’s marketplace, by invisible or veiled forms of discipline. This belief, as Adams tried to tell him in the correspondence of their twilight years, was always an illusion, but it was an extraordinarily attractive illusion that proved extremely efficacious during the rowdy “takoff” years of the American economy in the nineteenth century, when geographic and econonomic growth generated its own topsy-turvy version of dynamic order. Not until the late nineteenth century, with the end of the frontier and the emergence of the massive economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, was it fully exposed as an illusion. (p 300)

The Unreal and the Real

I started reading this book of short stories by Ursula Le Guin several years ago and it’s taken me that long to get through it. I love Le Guin’s writing but the second half stories spoke to me so much more than the first part. It feels like she’s working through so many different themes that are expanded in her novels, but also trying out ideas that never made it to her novels. The world building is incredible and I know I’ll be coming back to these and rereading some of them many more times. Le Guin’s understanding of people and relationships is profound.

London Rules

The next book in the Slough House series (and it’s the one the the new season of Slow Horses is based on) was a welcome TV read for me after reading about the founding of the United States. The story focuses on Roddy, one of the long time Slow Horses and how he gets used in order for a plot to be carried out in England. It’s a really clever plot so I don’t want to say much more, but as usual, once I got into it I had a hard time putting it down.

Table for Two

I’m a huge fan of Amor Towles books and I finally got my hands on his latest which is short stories and a novella. I loved it. The Line, The Bootlegger, and The DiDomenico Fragment were some of the best short stories I’ve read in a long time. I also loved the novella and catching up with Eve after Rules of Civility and reading more of her story. If you like Towles, you’ll love this one.