Currently reading: “Transatlantic” by Colum McCann

Howdy, friends.

Here’s what I’m reading now:

Here is the author’s web site.

And a review from the New York Times.

And here is a review of one of his other books, “Let the Great World Spin,” that is one of the best I’ve ever read.

And here is what Booklist had to say:

In 1919, British aviators Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Ireland. McCann, in his first novel since the National Book Award–winning Let the Great World Spin (2009), imagines a letter handed to Brown by a young photographer, written by her mother, Emily, a local reporter covering the flight, to be delivered upon their landing to a family in Cork. Years earlier, while on a speaking tour in Ireland with the mission to raise money for the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass forms a bond with young Isabel, the daughter of his host family in Cork. Lily, a young servant, emboldened by Douglass’ visit, sets out for America, in the hope of a better life. About a century and a half later, former Senate majority leader George Mitchell is coaxed out of retirement to broker talks between the various factions, with the intention of getting a peace agreement by Good Friday. At the tennis club, he meets a woman in her nineties who, years earlier, had lost her grandson to the Troubles. It is Lily and her offspring’s stories—set across different times and in many different places—that ultimately tie everything together, as McCann creates complex, vivid characters (historical and otherwise) while expertly mixing fact and fancy to create this emotionally involving and eminently memorable novel.  –Ben Segedin

Before this, I mowed through “The Orphan Train” for book club this week. It was a good, fast read. Fast enough I finished it in two days (partly because I woke up to snow on Monday and couldn’t face it — so I enjoyed two hours of reading on my couch with the cup of coffee before the sun came up).

It’s been a good winter of reading for me.

What are you reading?