What are you currently reading?

[T. D.]

Russian spy ring at the heart of the British Establishment. A well-written, intelligent book. I will recommend it without reservation.

I just read the first 75 pp. free on Google Books, and am sufficiently impressed to order the book on Kindle so I can finish.
Excellent spy story, the only caveat is that Beaumont is by no means a prose stylist. The writing is not bad, but very much in a "just the facts, ma'am" style without elegant flourishes.

It's the first in a series: the second title A Spy at War was published a few weeks ago.

[AnotherSpin]

I just read the first 75 pp. free on Google Books, and am sufficiently impressed to order the book on Kindle so I can finish.
Excellent spy story, the only caveat is that Beaumont is by no means a prose stylist. The writing is not bad, but very much in a "just the facts, ma'am" style without elegant flourishes.

It's the first in a series: the second title A Spy at War was published a few weeks ago.

I came to Beaumont's book immediately after reading Patterson whom I also mentioned earlier in this thread, as well as a few other novels in the genre over the past few weeks. Beaumont's prose struck me as markedly more refined, and his characters far more believable, realistic, even, if one may expect that from a spy thriller. The Russians are portrayed with rare authenticity, which is certainly not always the case. And — without revealing too much — the story and its resolution are refreshingly unconventional, avoiding the tidy conclusions so typical of the genre.

I'm quite looking forward to the next instalment, which, by all indications, may be set partly in Ukraine. One hopes the author brings the same nuance and credibility to that setting.

My flat in Odesa is on the main street, and when I'm there, usually a couple of times a month, I often spot expats or English-speaking visitors at the cafés below, even during these past couple of wartime years. Many of them don't look like typical tourists. Now I find myself wondering whether I might have seen Beaumont among them by chance

[Mandryka]

I remember reading that and thinking the shield must be the size of a Diego Rivera mural.

And that if it could have that level of delicate intricate work you wouldn't want to have it all messed up with one days worth of sword strikes.

I argued that whatever it is, it couldn't be a true and literal description of a shield. So it's an interlude about the power of poetry to create illusion.

That didn't go down well - people said that it's just a magic shield.

[Number Six]

Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson

I was listening to a podcast last night, and this book's author was the guest. I don't know anything about him apart from his appearances in the musical 1776, and he's basically the villain of the piece. So I decided to give him a fair shot and picked this one up on kindle and audible. Don't know when I will get to it, to be honest. 

[ritter]

Skimming through Reynaldo Hahn's Diaries...



No mention whatsoever of Le Dieu bleu... 

[Crudblud]

Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River

[AnotherSpin]

"There, at the foot of the Third Tower, I understood everything. My restlessness—on the train, in the various hotels and inns, in the periods between excursions, indeed whenever during the entire journey I had been forced into contact with that collectivity of the lonely, the euphoric Italian collectivity. I shielded my solitariness from them, and from the European future that they represented for me. I felt my solitary happiness threatened by their happiness of the herd, because they were stronger than I was."

Taken from Antal Szerb's The Third Tower, a fine little diary of the author's journey in Italy.