It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished reading On Beauty, by Zadie Smith. What a great book to get completely lost in! I gave the book a rare five stars on GoodReads, and I'm looking forward to hearing Smith speak at this year's Festival of Faith and Writing. Here's some information about Smith and her writing. In this book, the highly intelligent college professors and students bumbling through life reminds me so much of Iris Murdoch novels. At some point perhaps I'll write something comparing the two. In the meantime, I will definitely read more by Smith.

This week I started reading a book about Metallica, by David Masciotra. The book focuses on Metallica's most critically acclaimed album, The Black Album. In the early 1990s I went through a (brief) heavy-metal phase, and this was my favorite album, so it's fun to revisit it through this book. I've also been re-listening to the album while I read (and thus introducing it to my kids). I also started reading The Readers of the Broken Wheel Recommend, by Swedish author Katarina Bivald. Though the literary quality is not as high as, say, Zadie Smith, I'm enjoying this book so much that I read 166 pages of it yesterday! It's an easy read, but decently written, and falls into one of my new favorite genres of fiction: fiction about books. In this one, a Swedish tourists visits a small town in Iowa and ends up opening a bookstore there. I can't wait to find time to read some more in this book today.

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