This book has been calling out to me from the high-end paperback tables for a while. And I'm so glad I finally read it. It blends a wonderful woman in mid-life crisis tale with a harrowing story of World War II. And best of all, most of it takes place in Paris and its environs, a city I love to read about. I've already recommend it and will continue to recommend Sarah's Key.
Advertised as a novel of manners, this book reminded me of Richard Ford's trilogy about Frank Bascombe and the trials he encounters as his life changes due to a change in marital circumstances. Unfortunately, Dahlie's "hero," Arthur Camden is very hard to root for. All his misfortune seems to be a complete consequence of his doofus-ness. While the world of very rich New Yorkers is often fun to read about, this novel of manners mostly left me wishing I was reading Edith Wharton or re-reading Richard Ford rather than entering the world of Arthur Camden.
I feel like I ought to go back and re-read this book given the ending, but then again, given that this is fiction, would I really learn the "truth?" A novel of a place and a family, Human Croquet plays with the idea of time and how we interact with it. But more importantly it deals with how we, as humans, young humans in particular, take the facts that surround us and create our story from them. Whether the story of any member of the Fairfax family is accurate is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Part 2 of the Maureen O'Donnell trilogy. This time Maureen, her brother Liam and her friend Leslie find them tangled in a story that not only involves their native Glasgow, but travels to the Brixton section of London. Maureen is a most unlikely detective, not to mention unpaid. But her shrewdness and resourcefulness make her very sympathetic, not to mention her own underlying personal issues. I look forward to finding out how Maureen resolves those issues as her story winds up in the next book.
My son asked me to read this book once he finished it. It's an interesting tale of four "orphans" working together to uncover a devious plot. It's nice to read books where there are puzzles that not only the characters, but you as the reader can solve. While I can't say I'm dying to read the next two installments, I'm glad my son is interested in reading them. It was an entertaining example of children's fiction.
I went from noir to noir and at least this noir was set in an actual noir period and place, Hollywood right after World War II complete with returning GIs, German emigrés, and Red Menace hunters. Kanon painted a vivid picture of studio system Hollywood, but unfortunately the novel, at times, read more like a screenplay than a novel (though heaven help us if someone attempts to convert the 500 pages). Overall, I enjoyed it and found it an amusing quick read.
An excellent novel of the Cold War Soviet Union. Not a spy novel, rather a crime novel, Smith does a fantastic job of conveying the emotions, motivations and actions of members of Soviet society in the days of Stalin and beyond.
I did not like this book. It's a shortish book, but it was not a fast read. The story is told from shifting points of view over a few days both in 1950 and 1959. Basically it's a character study, and that's my main beef with it. I just did not like, identify with or enjoy these characters. The action was all remembered by the characters, and there just wasn't enough of it for my taste. Some might describe this as lyrical or poetic, but I describe it as dull.
I read this to see if I thought if was appropriate for my 10-year-old and if I thought he would like it. He's just finishing the Percy Jackson, Greek mythology series, and we needed a new series to get to. I think this will suit him just fine. The main character, and the namesake of the book, is a bit of a shady 12-year-old, and thankfully, my son figured that out to. He realized that just because you're the main character, it doesn't make you "good" or "right." But the main part of the book, and the part my son will most enjoy, is Artermis' foes. They are elves and pixies and trolls and centaurs, a whole world of what we'd view as folklore creatures. My son loves fantasy, so this is right up his alley. I think the Artemis Fowl series is the next in our list.
This is the novel I'll be recommending to anyone who asks me and probably to those who don't. Piazza tells the story of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina through some of the most real characters I've ever encountered in fiction. The descriptions of the storm itself and aftermath of the levee breaks are visceral, but it's the characters who really drive this story. I love the city of New Orleans and have been back several times since Katrina. This story cements my love for the city and my hopes that the government will do whatever it takes to do things right in the future so that Katrina never happens again.
A novel of crime set in Glasgow Scotland, a city I've never read about, Denise Mina paints a vivid set of characters and places as they ostensibly look to solve the crime that occurs in chapter 2. While the crime itself was gory, I'm glad that the novel didn't focus on that. Mina plays with a potentially unreliable narrator in a way that makes you question, yet hope, that our heroine, Maureen O'Donnell is in fact more together than you fear she is. I look forward to reading more of Mina's work.
I was so excited to find the latest Sophie Kinsella book available at my library just as I was leaving for the beach. I love Kinsella's heroines. They are always so adorable, and the latest heroines are no exception. As usual it's a quick read that leads to laughing out loud. While not as guffaw inducing as Can You Keep a Secret? and not as series inspiring as the Shopaholic, Twenties Girl is definitely worth taking a day to immerse yourself into and allow yourself the joy of this lighthearted story.
This is my first Salman Rushdie novel. And I liked it. It's essentially a fairy tale right out of 1001 Arabian Nights. Set in the Middle Ages, this tale spans from India to the city state of Medici-run Florence and back again (and back again and again). Rushdie plays with the power of story-telling both to ourselves and to audiences. It's easy to be enchanted by this tale.
This has been on my want to read list for about a year, and I'm glad I could finally track it down at the library. The novel, set in Sweden, starts slow. It took me some time to get used to the Swedish names, especially the place names given that I have zero knowledge of Swedish geography. But once the story begins to shift from financial reporting and background checks to that of a disappearing heiress things really pick up and it's hard to put the book down. I won't give any of the plot points away, but I really like how complex this story is, both in terms of the number of elements and people in play to what they've all been hiding. I can't wait to get a hold of the sequel.
A delightful debut mystery in the vein of a Miss Marple, well if Miss Marple were only eleven years old. Set in the 1950s Sweetness has all the hallmarks of a good suspense story complete with unexplained deaths, but with none of the grit that infests most modern mysteries. Nancy Pearl put it perfectly, " it's gore-free, very funny in places, nicely written, not too sweet (despite the title) and narrated by a real charmer."
Whew! What an epic. I started this book in late May or so, then put it down in late June and then started back up with it after getting home from the beach. It was 947 pages crammed full of true writing. I'm glad I picked it back up.
Now with a title like this your imagination can go to all sorts of places. But essentially this is the story of a family and a boy/man and his two families, the one in which he is the son and the other in which he is the husband and secondarily the father. 
Okay, it's time to go home (or the book store) because I've scraped the bottom of the condo barrel. This is the kind of "women's book" I hate, namely a women's book that tries to be more in this case by making the love interest gay and by doing something to the mom that was so obvious it was painful. Okay, maybe back when it came out it was more meaningful or something. On the plus side it was less than 250 pages. I won't be seeking out any more of Ms. Berg's apparently plentiful work.
More chick lit from the condo. I read one Jane Green book ages ago, but didn't like her as much as I like Sophie Kinsella, so I had not read any more. And while I liked this one more than I remember liking the other, there were things about this book -- namely the charcterizations rather than characters -- that annoyed me. None of the characters were particularly relatible or worthy of our sympathy. I know she was going for ambiguity, but it failed to pull it off in a more than skin deep level. Still, I might look for Swapping Lives at the library. Sounds intersting in that whole Trading Places sort of way.
A fleshing out of the parable of The Prodigal Son, Keller's book is especially aimed at the Elder brother's in our society, something I'm definitely guilty of being. Keller reminds us that it's not only going into the far country that separates us from our grace-filled God, but that self righteousness can be an even more insidious way to keep ourselves from the life God longs to give us. Something I need to remind myself of every single day.
The 4th Tess Monaghan moves from Baltimore to central Texas, and Lippman does a great job inhabiting a new city. I love how poor Tess regularly bemoans her inability to instantly navigate new streets of in distinct contrast to her innate knowledge of her beloved hometown. But best of all, best, best of all, is that Crow is back. That's all I'll say because he's at the heart of the novel, but Crow is back. Yeah! I can't wait to see what happens to Tess next.
I had never read this novel despite growing up in Alabama. And after reading it with it's sensibilities mired somewhere between the 1930s and 1960 I can see why school didn't have us read it in the still not quite settled early 1980s. But boy am I glad I finally got around to it.
Oh Spellmans, you make me so happy. The 3rd book in the series is every bit as funny and engaging as the earlier editions. Everyone is acting as odd and suspicious (both acting like they're guilty and suspecting everyone else of guilt) as ever, and the trouble they get themselves into and out of is a fast-paced romp that will have you turning pages rapidly and wishing there was a fourth, fifth and sixth Spellman book already available.
An earlier collection of stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, earlier than Unaccustomed Earth that is. These are more "Indian" stories than those of Unaccustomed Earth. And while they were pleasant, these stories were a little too short and a little too foreign to be relatable. Nevertheless Lahiri is an excellent painter of small stories of small people, people we are or know. I look forward to more of her work.
A blending of Catch-22 with The Wolves of Calla, The Gone-Away World started fast, drug a bit in the middle, but once the twist was revealed (granted 400 pages in), I couldn't read fast enough. Harkaway combines humor with the very real feeling possibility of what we might be doing with our world. While a fantasy, this gone-away world could and might easily exist. 
The second Cliff Janeway novel. Cliff ranges beyond Denver and doesn't suffer for it. An intriguing lesson on printing books, how it's done, who does it, who collects it. Again a good detective novel with the interesting, at least to me, hook of the book business. Maybe a little long, but that's okay.
Ah Meg Cabot I can always count on you. Another adorable laugh out loud tale of a girl in the big city. It's funny how quickly the idea of email has progressed from something new to something we can't be separated from. Told entirely in emails this story of a 20-something finding love in NYC is not ground breaking, but it is entirely entertaining. Just what I needed for a holiday weekend.
This book was just like the TV show 24 for me. It started out fast with an interesting premise and by the end I wasn't interested in finishing it and didn't care if every single person in the book died. If you like interesting sympathetic characters this is not the book for you. If you like plausible plots this is not the book for you. If you like things to make sense this is not the book for you. If however you like fast-paced, short chapters, boring action movie hero and villain types and don't mind things being utterly implausible then this is the book for you. Enjoy, but I did not.
I was supposed to be reading this really long critically acclaimed deep dense novel, and I have gotten 300 pages into the 90o+, but I was on vacation and I was tired of reading for 3 hours and only covering 50 pages, so I switched to Booked to Die, a mystery involving a cop turned book dealer. And boy was I better for it.
I am so over time travel. After 17 episodes of Season 5 of LOST, Star Trek and this book, that's it. I'm done with time travel of any sort for months if not years.
This is an unusual book for me. It's what I'd call a woman's book, but it's not chick lit and it's not romance. Still I can't imagine a man really enjoying it. The book is set in Salem, Massachusetts. I visited Salem about this time last year, and I like reading books set in places I've been, so it definitely satisfied on that level.
A novel of WWII featuring plucky residents of Leningrad and the surrounding areas and their encounters with the evil Germans. The writing was good; the story was taut, but I guess this just isn't my kind of subject matter. It's a small tale of two young men in their personal war with the Germans and their own countrymen. And as neither a male, nor Russian, nor Jewish it just didn't have much for me to identify with. It was okay. It wasn't a bad thing to read, but it wasn't a favorite and didn't have me staying up late turning the pages.
I was so tempted to put this book down unfinished. It started strong, but in the middle it got meandering and confusing. I was never quite sure what was happening or what the characters intended to happen next, but boy was I glad I stuck with it. The last 30 or so pages packed quite the emotional wallop, and I was very glad about how things turned out. And the middle made more sense once I got to the end. What we know and don't know but guess about others -- acquaintances, those we're intimate with and even ourselves is at the heart of this novel. 
Charm City is the second Tess Monaghan novel, and much like many second episodes of television shows, I liked it even better than the "pilot." Of course, being able to skip over the character set-ups and get down to action is the key to that. Which is not to say Lippman skimps on her characters. Instead we're able to focus on key details that make our recurring characters what they are, at least as relates to their strengths and weaknesses that come to play in the grander scheme of the mystery.
On the recommendation of Mo Ryan I decided to check out Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan novels. I'm not a big mystery reader, but this was a good one and I plan to read more of the series. Set in Baltimore which is on my radar thanks to The Wire and Ace of Cakes it's your basic murder mystery in which our fearless heroine tries to help out a buddy. But the writing is good, the twists are good, the characters are good, and so the book was good. Good job Ms. Lippman.
So taking my own advice from the previous post, I went from that horrible book to Meg Cabot. I was hoping that Heather Wells was going to be the antidote to whatever the name of the heroine was in The Manny. And while Heather was definitely an improvement, she was no Queen of Babble or better a Shopaholic.
I don't know where I first heard of this book or why I thought I wanted to read it. I think I must have thought given the title and the cover that this would be fun, harmless Chick Lit. Entertaining, amusing, another Nanny Diaries type book. But boy was I wrong.
Read this author! One of my favorite books I've read in a while. I was enjoying it so much I didn't want to keep reading because then it would be over. This is the 3rd novel by Atkinson that features Jackson Brodie. Case Histories comes first, then One Good Turn. Atkinson is a master of writing intertwining narratives about characters you really care about. Ostensibly crime fiction, but the crimes serve merely to get the actors in motion. Full of twists and turns, I envy everyone who is reading this book for the first time. I can't wait until Ms. Atkinson's next offering.
Wow what a series! I watched most of it on DVD, but managed to catch up in time to watch the last 10 episodes as they aired. This is a fantastic character driven story full of themes ripped from the headlines of our early 21st century world--themes like racism, multi-culturalism, terrorism, torture. This was a show that could really make you think, but instead of being merely high-minded and preachy, it got down and dirty by driving the story with characters you loved, characters you hated and characters that made you love then hate them then love them again (or vice versa). 
Yep, another Island book. And boy am I glad this isn't one that's had too much influence on LOST. I much preferred this to the other Wells book I read recently, The Time Machine. Wells writing style in the 8 years between the two greatly improved in terms of readability. Essentially a shipwreck story, the Island is a place for science to be pushed to its limit and those things which define humanity itself challenged in more ways than one.
This book has been on my To Read List for a couple of years now. And now I wish I'd read it earlier. This is one of my favorite type of novels. It's the story of two lives, essentially from birth to death, and how they came to overlap. And what's more, it's based on real people. Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, or infamy he might say. And George, well he's also real, but I'll let you discover his story for yourself. To tell you much would give his part away. Much of the story is based on fact including actual transcripts of various proceedings and correspondence. The setting is pre and post turn of the 20th century England. The pacing is a little slow in the beginning, but then it is wonderfully quick paced. The author does a great job of making you feel for the characters, but all the while making you wonder if there's something you don't know yet that will turn everything on its head. While not at its heart a mystery, the way those elements blend into this story of lives, famous and mundane, add to the enjoyment of reading Arthur & George.
Thousands of pages and I and Roland have finally arrived only to find --- no, I'm not telling. I've actually added up the pages from the 7 books I read. It's 4656. Wow! And worth it. I've enjoyed this journey I've taken with Roland and his ka-tet. I started reading the books because of LOST, of course, and there certainly have been numerous themes that overlap between the two endeavors.
Only one more Beaudelaire book to go! The Penultimate Peril reunites the Beaudelaire orphans with many volunteers and villains from their past. In fact this is getting more and more like LOST and its myriad crosses. And as the question of justice arises, our "heroes" can't plead innocent, but only comparatively innocent which makes me wonder if Ben or Widmore should make that plea. The question of whether it is okay to do bad things for good reasons is at the forefront of this tale. And as is the case with life I suppose, non of us are completely innocent, not even children orphaned and placed repeatedly in peril through no fault of their own.
Posts
All Comments
