Welcome to our first “What Are You Reading?” of 2024! If you haven’t been here before, it’s a safe place to talk about whatever book you’re reading, or what you’ve read int he last week. Feel free to join the conversation, and I’ll do better this year (promise!) as to approving comments for those who get notes saying they need to be approved.

If you haven’t been here before, on Thursdays we tend to talk about books, but also weather wherever we are, trips, music, plays, shows, things we’ve been doing in the last week. Read a few comments to see if you’re comfortable joining the conversation. I know a lot of people just lurk, and that’s fine. Welcome!

This week, I’ve been reading nonfiction. I finished a book called Why We Read by Shannon Reed. It comes out in February, so my review will appear then. A friend gave me a copy of the 2021 book, Musicals: The Definitive Illustrated Story, published by DK. I’m excited about that.

I’ve only read a couple chapters of Gregg Olsen’s true crime book, The Amish Wife: Unraveling the Lies, Secrets, and Conspiracy That Let a Killer Go Free. In 1977, in an Ohio Amish community, pregnant wife and mother Ida Stutzman perished during a barn fire. The coroner’s report: natural causes. Ida’s husband, Eli, was never considered a suspect. But when he eventually rejected the faith and took his son, Danny, with him, murder followed.What really happened to Ida? The dubious circumstances of the tragic blaze were willfully ignored and Eli’s shifting narratives disregarded. Could Eli’s subsequent cross-country journey of death—including that of his own son—have been prevented if just one person came forward with what they knew about the real Eli Stutzman? The questions haunted Gregg Olsen and Ida’s brother Daniel Gingerich for decades. At Daniel’s urging, Olsen now returns to Amish Country and to Eli’s crimes first exposed in Olsen’s Abandoned Prayers, one of which has remained a mystery until now. With the help of aging witnesses and shocking long-buried letters, Olsen finally uncovers the disturbing truth—about Ida’s murder and the conspiracy of silence and secrets that kept it hidden for forty-five years.

And, of course, I’m reading mysteries for review for Library Journal.

What about you? What have you been doing in the past week? Anything special for New Year’s? I don’t like to be out on the roads that evening, so I binge-watched the first season of “Good Omens”. I really should read the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. What are you reading this week?