Finished the Chiwetel Ejiofor-narrated audiobook of
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and it turns out I had remembered way less of this book than I'd thought?? The parts that had stuck with me were the descriptions of the labyrinthine House and the world within, as the narrator understood it, and more or less the mystery of
( spoilers ahoy. ) Makes a very good audiobook!
Read
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a 1962 novella following the titular Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner, through one day of life in a Stalin-era gulag. (Solzhenitsyn himself was a prisoner from 1945 to 1953.) A short but slow read, dense with small, compelling details.
Currently reading
The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton, a 1925 novel about the return of a prodigal mother to New York and her now-adult daughter after pulling a reverse Ellen Olenska (leaving her husband and moving to Europe) almost two decades earlier. It's interesting how much WWI looms over this book, so far, especially because I associate Wharton so much more with the Gilded Age than the 1920s, which is when most of her novels were actually published.
Have just started
Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream, a memoir about joining a strict Carmelite order of contemplative (read: silent) nuns in the north of England as a recently bereaved twenty-something in 1989 and - per the opening scene - literally fleeing into the night to escape it twelve years later.