What are you reading this week of April 16, 2017?

[hermetic]

Happy Easter, fellow readers.

I got Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a graphic novel. This was highly recommended by Neil Gaiman which was good enough for me. The illustrations are luscious and the little stories eerie and a bit unnerving. I love it.

Getting close to the end of A Gentleman in Moscow. Such a delight to read and it's a good way to learn about Russian history, which I've always found rather tedious. But here is a fun story about some unusual characters in Moscow from the '20s to the '50s and history is happening all around them. I have learned a great deal. I never knew that over 7 million people died from a famine in 1932 and 1933 and it was forbidden for anyone to talk about it until the late 80s.

This coming week I plan to listen to Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston.

What books are in your basket this week?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Nearly done with Tana French's latest,

The Trespasser. It's the six in a series of novels about the Dublin Murder squad, and every one of them is quite good.

[hermetic]

3. Yeah

I read all those, too, and really enjoyed them.

[Ron Obvious]

5. Thanks for the reminder

I need to get that one.

I enjoy the series, but unfortunately forget about who everybody is and what their backstory is when a new one comes out.

[TexasProgresive]

2. Slow reading week for me

Not even half way through Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin. Been a busy week. You know a novel is complex when there's a 3 page list of characters at the front. I keep referring to it.

[hermetic]

4. Wow, 3 pages

of characters! Bet that one won't show up on an audio book.

[sagesnow]

7. Skull in the Ashes Peter Kaufman

Excuse me for putting a Non-fiction entry in this group, but I found this as entertaining as any Fiction spy thriller novel. A murder takes place in a General store in Iowa and then follows as authorities track the killer to the Alaska and Canadian gold fields. Insurance Companies hire iconic agents from newly formed detective agencies to track the killer to the Klondike during the gold rush days. This story is one of the cases that marks the origin of "Law and Order" detective fiction and the early days of employing forensic evidence to track down and prosecute the criminal.

“To sum up, Skull in the Ashes is a thrill ride for history buffs and fans of narrative nonfiction and an unexpected, and delightful, blend of pulp and scholarship.”—ensuingchapters.com

https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2013-fall/skull-ashes.htm

[TexasProgresive]

8. Speaking for myself- don't mind.

In fact when I get to it my friends in this group will know I will be reading The Lost City of the Money God: A True Story by Douglas Preston. Must be true it's got photos. I like this blurb:

If you're going to explore a lost city-in this case one that vultures, poisonous snakes, sand flies, and mudholes have protected for 500 years-you really only want to do it with douglas Preston, A tale of bravado, chicanery, and impossible dreams, arresting at every turn, no less so in its unexpected, pulse-racing coda.
Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Witches: Salem, 1692 and Cleopatra: A Life

If it lies up to Stacy's hype it will be as riveting as any novel.

[hermetic]

10. That sounds like a fun read

We occasionally sneak a non-fiction through here. You're good.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

6. Book four of the Expanse series, now a Scifi series.

Also as a reprieve from that plot, Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Then as my "office book" The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov, tend to read 2-4 books at the same time, different one in each room I relax in.

[TexasProgresive]

9. Does your "office" have a ceramic throne?

I use to read multiple books but tend to stay with one these days.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

16. No but I wish it did...

then I would "move" more.

Need to keep the brain active and learning after a couple strokes.

[TexasProgresive]

17. HO! HO!

That's worthy of a pinboy3niner award.

[hermetic]

12. You certainly are

a "serious reader." I often have difficulty when reading one book at night then listening to a different audio book during the day. Thanks for joining in.

[shenmue]

11. The Missing and the Dead, Stuart McBride

[hermetic]

14. Sounds like a winner

Evidently a lot going on in that book. I must look for it, especially because there is a cat named Cthulhu, which is a great name for a cat.

[shenmue]

15. Yes

[sagesnow]

13. Thanks for the suggestion

Will put "A Gentleman in Moscow" on my next to read list.

[hermetic]

20. My pleasure

Be sure to stop by and tell us how you like it.

[PoorMonger]

18. The Fireman - By Joe Hill

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.

The fireman is coming. Stay cool.

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.

Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

[hermetic]

19. Now THAT'S a description

Thanks for taking the time to do that. Sounds like a very intense tale.

[PoorMonger]

21. It's the inside flap.

So it's not really my doing. But Hill is one of my absolute favorites. He's actually Stephen King's son - but he writes with his middle name because he wanted to make it on his own.

'Horns' and 'NS4A2' are his best so far in my opinion but everything I would highly recommend.

[PoorMonger]

28. Musical Suggestion - "Incinerate"

Going back in with musical extras where I have em! I like to give it some thought so I may be bringing several of these threads back from the dead

https://m.

[japple]

22. Happy Easter everyone. Thanks for the thread, hermetic. Still reading Sebastian Barry's book

Days Without End. Our brave Irish boys (now men) have just been released from the Confederate prison at Andersonville in a prisoner exchange and are going home. The writing is like a dream.

[northoftheborder]

23. "Belgravia", "News of the World", "Stormy Weather"

Belgravia, by Julian Fellowes, is about an earlier period of English social life, the 1800's. Loved it, complicated story, but satisfying ending.

News of the World, by Paulette Jiles takes place in Texas, right after the Civil War. It is still a wild place, little law, no roads, native Americans a danger to the scattered settlements. It is the story of a young girl who is kidnapped by the Comanches at age 6, and 4 years later is rescued to be returned to her family. The elderly man, Captain, escorts her from north Texas to her home west of San Antonio, and that is the story: she did not want to be rescued, remembers none of her language or customs, but she and Captain form a bond which saves them both in the end. A wonderful story with a happy ending. RECOMMEND

Another by Jiles is Stormy Weather, also about Texas during the early oil discovery era and the great drought and depression. Good story, but not as good as the above. Experiences told of a family of that era in that place, desperately poor, but shoulder through, and achieve success.

[japple]

24. I'm a huge fan of Paulette Jiles and loved News of the World, but I also

liked all of her other books as well, esp. Lighthouse Island and The Color of Lightning.

[northoftheborder]

25. Thanks for review, I'll consider those too....

There are TOO many good books out there for a lifetime!!! Listening on Audible really speeds things up for me, because I can listen while doing routine boring chores. My night-time reading puts me to sleep, so read on I-Pad. Slower going!

[northoftheborder]

27. My night-time reading:

I have three books going: reading alternatively according to what kind of day I've had: Jacqueline Winspear's series about a British woman private investigator, Maisie Dobbs, goes through era between two world wars, and now beginning of WW2 In This Grave Hour. Light but interesting period to me.

An Improbable Friendship The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raywanda Tawil, by Anthony David. True story - have learned a lot about the period of founding of Israel after WW3, the exile of the Arabs. Very interesting to me.

Free to be Me biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Amazingly brilliant woman. Hope she lives many more years.

[Binkie The Clown]

26. Song of Ice and Fire. Book I. n/t