Gone Girl on the Train

 My current stack of books in active reading include the following:

1. Vanity Fair, Thackeray

2. Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

3. Selected Writings, Samuel Johnson

4. Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe, Michael S. Neiberg

Books in my active reading as August 10, 2025

The one I am apt to finish next is Brooks. Johnson will take a while, but it is an anthology, and I don't want to rush the works of the great man. Like Vanity Fair is not something one rams through. It should be savored like a banquet until the moment that one is too eager to learn what happens next, and one's reading begins to accelerate to the climax. 

The Neiberg book is one I checked out from the Phoenix public library. The time period of history, the transition from war to peace in 1945 and the years after, is one that I am particularly fascinated with. 

Also there was actually a fifth book until last night, when I finished it. Last week I withdrew a copy of Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins from the little free library in the park. Last March in a similar fashion I had borrowed, read and returned Gone Girl, a book I thoroughly enjoyed on multiple levels. But I had thought Gone Girl was supposed to be about a girl on a train, so I got confused when there was no train. Girl on the Train is the same genre of the "disappeared girl" stories, which seems to be arguably the most impactful genre of contemporary fiction. I read it in less than a week, which is very fast for me.

Now I have read both. Gone Girl is by far the more sophisticated story, with a complicated villain, who fate leaves one in an ambiguous state. Girl on the Train borrows the technique of having multiple first person narrators, with chapters indicated by dates. Girl on the Train is a more conventional story but still works. Villain is a husband who cheats, and cheats on the person he cheated with, and batters his wives and mistresses, and lies all around. Easy to root against him when you find out who he is.  

I noticed a third book in this genre, set in Dublin, out at the little free library last spring, but it's no longer there, and I can't recall the title.