What are you currently reading?

[red solo cup]

Age of Ambition. Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos. For all the changes in China, corruption is still the byword. It costs about a million yuan in bribes to become a general in the army. The expectation being to make 10 million in one's "career". Makes you wonder how well China would do in a war.

[Prayerful]

Crypts of London, Malcolm Johnson. This covers inhumation in the Anglican churches of London. It meant income for rectors, but after a time it often meant a bad smell and hygiene issues. It covers history but also focusses a lot on the practicalities. Most church burials were banned in the 1850s and usually after that remains both old and new were moved to common plots in suburban or urban cemeteries carefully design to avoid the old issues.

[Christina_S]

Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss. Also Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

[Hannelore]

Ben-Hur. So good.

[Tennessean]

I'm reading Suttree after finishing Blood Meridian.

[Hannelore]

The War That Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. It's a young adult historical novel. Pretty good.

[GMC]

Reasons to Believe by Abbot Yves Moureau.

[Hannelore]

In This Corner of the World . A manga about a young woman during WWII in Japan.

[Christina_S]

The Vaccine-Friendly Plan by Dr. Paul Thomas. Borrowed from a library, but it's so good I might end up buying a copy.

[Prayerful]

Burning the Big House[i/], Terence Dooley which covers the years preceding and those years of the early 1920s where many, many country houses were burnt. Sometimes it might relate to an aristocrat's forceful support then and before for the British connection, perhaps support for RIC auxiliaries (like the 'Black and Tans'), menaces to estate workers to enlist in WW1 or be dismissed, hostility from a mix of things like historic poor relations, including memories of the Famine, but also graziers or their sons who wanted the untenanted lands that former landlords let out for cattle grazing. Many were empty, but others had seen the death of sons in WW1 (thanks to the tactics which ensured officers perished in huge numbers), so younger landowner families without an adult male were vulnerable enough.

[red solo cup]

Landscape Turned Red. The Battle of Antietam by Steven W. Sears

[Hannelore]

1,001 Nights, the new translation by Malcolm C. Lyons.

[Mono no aware]

[GMC]

The whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation. I have read parts of the Bible, but never all of it.

[Hannelore]

Dragonfly in Amber, by Diana Gabaldon. It's not particularly good but I spent a credit on it so I feel like I should finish it.