I wasn't sure I wanted to reread Station Eleven (even for Book Club), but once I got back into it, it really was quite an engaging read. I'm sure it helped that I had a lot of time to focus on it in (out to Stratford and back) unlike most of my reading time, which is very broken up. This may well rank as the best book I reread in 2026, but Under the Net may also put in a strong claim if I actually manage to reread it this year.
I enjoyed Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala more than I expected. It's a bit of a hard book to spoil. Taking it's lead from Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the reader finds out immediately that the narrator (a Cuban boy named Raul) is also the reincarnation of the Greek priestess Cassandra, so can foresee everything (including his own death in Angola) and yet will never be believed. It tied together well with my recent foray into Greek literature, but it is much more closely bound up with The Iliad, as well as Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Euripides's The Trojan Women. It did feel a bit longer than it had to be, but overall it was an engaging and fairly quick read.
I thought I would give up on Montimore's Ooona Out of Order right away, but it's just compelling enough that I plan on finishing it after all. It clearly is inspired by Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, but comes up with a scheme where our time traveler leaps into a different part of her life every New Year's Eve (which just happens to also be her birthday) and stays there for the entire year, which allows her much more time to be deliberate and learn which stocks to pick and sports teams to bet on, and so becomes incredibly wealthy (and yet very lonely as her relationships don't survive the toll that her leaps through time impose on them).
Tomorrow I should make a lot of progress in The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, hopefully finishing it up. I was panicking slightly when I couldn't renew it, but fortunately the person with a hold on the book got a different copy, and I was able to renew my loan, though this will be the last time. It turns out this is part of a trilogy (slightly undercutting the tension when we know Amina will inevitably triumph, but that isn't exactly a state secret for this type of book). It looks like the 2nd one just came out, though I will push that off a bit, maybe waiting for the third to be published and read them back to back.
I'm struggling a bit with All That Monk Business, but now that I am through The Odyssey, Station Eleven and The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (soon), I can probably just press on and get it crossed off.
This is what I said I was reading next, and this is certainly a good (if overly ambitious) plan: McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Amis's The Information, Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody. However, losing some books (my own and my son's) has caused me to reconsider a few things. I had to replace my son's copy of Baldwin's Another Country (tracking down a cheap paperback at BMV*), and I'd kind of like to read that before he comes home to reclaim it, but I would prefer to read it in order, which means reading Giovanni's Room first (which would have the added benefit of allowing me to listen in to the Secret Life of Books podcast episode on this novel). Oddly, there is quite a wait list at the library for Giovanni's Room, so I'll see when it turns up. I do have it in the LOA edition of Baldwin's Early Novels and Stories, but I just find reading on the train so much easier with a stand-alone paperback. So this may be a limited detour into Baldwin (and I really ought to read some of his essays as well, but that is probably biting off a bit much even for me).
I'm also a lot more interested in looking into Herodotus and Thucydides than I was before. I did rescue the Landmark editions of both (and hope I don't regret that), but these aren't the best actual translations, according to many. I think the Oxford Herodotus is the way to go and will be reordering that soon. I was leaning towards the Oxford Thucydides as well, but so many reviewers are pointing to a much newer Cambridge edition translated by Jeremy Mynott, that I might go in that direction (though I have put a hold on the Oxford edition just to copy the notes out). Neither TPL or (more surprisingly) Robarts have this in stock, so if I want to read it, I would need to order it. I'm on the fence over a copy I found from a Boston book seller. Given how large and heavy the book is, I think I would have to eat the shipping fees, rather than have my wife bring it back from Chicago. On the other hand, I am just not that likely to actually read it this year or next, so maybe I should just hold off. (I would say I am marginally more likely to actually read Herodotus's Histories.
* I also had PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep replaced, but it was sent to Chicago. I'm actually a bit glad it was sent there rather than to Toronto, as I thought I had just misplaced it here in the house...
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