What are you reading this week of December 3, 2017?

[hermetic]

I am halfway through Michael Connelly's The Concrete Blond, a nice combination of courtroom drama and serial killer mystery. I have to return it Wednesday, AND THEN....

My library got Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God! Granted, it's on CD but I don't care. I was so delighted and excited to see them get this so quickly, I immediately put it on reserve. It won't be ready for checking out until Wed. but then I will be the very first to get my paws on it.

Hope everyone else has found something they are excited about reading these days.

Don't forget to check out the super moon tonight, if you can. Sure, it's really only a matter of perspective, but it might be really pretty wherever you are.

[bearsfootball516]

1. Im starting All the Presidents Men

Never read it before. Seems like a good time to start.

[hermetic]

2. There's a good story

Enjoy.

[PennyK]

3. Murder is the Word by Anthony Horowitz

I lurve this guy! Again, he was the writer for Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War (and some of the Poirots), and this is a crazy engrossing tale in which he places himself, partnering with a mysterious detective. It's told in the first person and blends fact and fiction to make a super-fun read.
I plan do do some mooning tonight!

[hermetic]

4. I really must get with Horowitz

My reading schedule is so full right now, but library has 2 DVDs: Foyle's War and Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker. I guess I will start with those for now. Thanks for all your tips.

[Ohiya]

5. A horse walks into a bar by David Grossman

I started this yesterday and am about halfway through. It won the Man Booker International prize. It takes place in Israel and is basically a stand up comic's one night show with a lot of digressions.

I'm excited, I just read a Jo Nesbo book, Nemesis and before that The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankel, they were both page turners and pretty good, but I think this David Grossman book is on a different level!

[hermetic]

6. Man Booker Prize this year!

One critic says, A broken man walks on stage and makes jokes for 194 pages. In this magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance, Jewish humor is celebrated, and is, these days, more necessary than ever.

Looks like one can get it online in PDF. Will have to try that.

[Number9Dream]

11. I had a friend in high school named David Grossman... different guy though.

[ClarendonDem]

7. House of Spies

By Daniel Silva and Inferno by Max Hastings.

[hermetic]

8. House of Spies

sounds like a really exciting read. And Hastings has written a great many best-selling war stories, but his biography, Editor: A Memoir, sounds fascinating. "His is an enormously illustrious career which started in 1985, when he was offered the Editorship of the Daily Telegraph, in a surprise move by its owners. This candid memoir tells the story of what happened to him, and to a great newspaper, over the next decade.It is all here: the rows with prime ministers, the coverage of great events, the daily routine. Max Hastings describes his complex relationship with his proprietor, Conrad Black. He offers an extraordinary perspective on the decline of John Major, the troubles of the Royal Family, the difficulties of dealing with lawyers and celebrities, statesmen and stars. It is above all the story of the excitement and exhilaration of almost 10 years at the helm of one of the greatest newspapers in the world."

Thanks for sharing.

[ClarendonDem]

9. I find Daniel Silva to be pretty consistently good for such a prolific author

And House of Spies has been solid so far. It is an interesting read since it is semi-founded on the "real" world, so Trump (without being mentioned by name) is the president, and since a spy novel Trump's appointees are running the CIA.

[getting old in mke]

17. I like Silva, too.

I'm not sure he's that prolific: most successful thriller authors are on a book a year basis.

I'd love more, but I understand.

Have you read Alex Berenson's John Wells books?

[ClarendonDem]

18. I have not read Berenson

Pretty good?

And yeah, you are correct about the book-a-year. I find him prolific in the sense that he's written a lot of books over the years. The opposite of prolific is George RR Martin, whose writing pace is infuriating. As an aside, I also really enjoy John Connolly's books.

[getting old in mke]

20. Connolly is funny as hell in person, too.

He was the Toastmaster for Bouchercon one year, in Cleveland, maybe. I think he may inhabit a slightly parallel magical reality like Charlie Parker (though hopefully not as dangerous a one).

I like Berenson a lot. His main character, John Wells, is a lot like other thriller protagonists, but with the addition of having converted to Islam during a decade embedded with the Taliban. The Muslim world is not cookie cutter in the series.

[Number9Dream]

10. Just finished "The Pharaoh's Secret" by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown

Thanks for the thread, Hermetic.

Another good action, page turner by Mr. Cussler & Mr. Brown.

Just started "H.M.S. Surprise" by Patrick O'Brian.

[hermetic]

13. Oh my

That sounds like an exciting story...

A weapon at his disposal may threaten the entire world: a plant extract known as the black mist, discovered in the City of the Dead and rumored to have the power to take life from the living and restore it to the dead.

With the balance of power in Africa and Europe on the verge of tipping, the NUMA team will have to fight to discover the truth behind the legends -- but to do that, they have to confront in person the greatest legend of them all: Osiris, the ruler of the Egyptian underworld.

One does not just walk into the Egyptian underworld, after all.

I will want to read that one some day.

[japple]

12. Thank you, hermetic, for the weekly reader's round up. I'm still in the

mud of a climatically-challenged Vermont winter in Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance by Bill McKibben. I am enjoying every bit of this story. If you want relief from the daily grind, read this book. It will help.

Couple of things I have put on my list or downloaded this week based on review that I've heard on the radio or read.

Hans Falada, Every Man Dies Alone Based on a true story, this never-before-translated masterpiece was overlooked for years after its author—a bestselling writer before World War II who found himself in a Nazi insane asylum at war’s end—died just before it was published.

In a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis, it tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Third Reich, Otto and Anna Quangel launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, Every Man Dies Alone is more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right, and for each other.

This edition includes an afterword detailing the gripping history of the book and its author, including excerpts from the Gestapo file on the real-life couple that inspired it.

Green Earth (Science in the Capital Trilogy), Kim Stanley Robinson
The landmark trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of climate change—updated and abridged into a single novel.

More than a decade ago, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson began a groundbreaking series of near-future eco-thrillers—Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting—that grew increasingly urgent and vital as global warming continued unchecked. Now, condensed into one volume and updated with the latest research, this sweeping trilogy gains new life as Green Earth, a chillingly realistic novel that plunges readers into great floods, a modern Ice Age, and the political fight for all our lives.

The Arctic ice pack averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter when it was first measured in the 1950s. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. One August the ice broke. The next year the breakup started in July. The third year it began in May. That was last year.

It’s a muggy summer in Washington, D.C., as Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler and his scientist wife, Anna, work to call attention to the growing crisis of global warming. But as they fight to align the extraordinary march of modern technology with the awesome forces of nature, fate puts an unusual twist on their efforts—one that will pit science against politics in the heart of the coming storm.

Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/11/02/561577403/writing-on-the-terrifying-beauty-of-the-human-future

[hermetic]

14. Hey, you found some good ones

This Every Man Dies Alone sounds totally amazing and like something that should be going into high schools and colleges so young people can see how that works and what it means and maybe save this country from itself.

Green Earth, too, for obvious but different reasons.

We should talk these books up elsewhere. Make more people aware of them.

I will for sure read Radio Free Vermont sometime soon. Cause we still gotta have some fun, too. While we can.

Thanks, pal.

[shenmue]

15. 'The Plantagents,' Dan Jones. Nonfiction.

Great book about English history.

[PennyK]

16. Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King

Next one in her Sherlock and Mary series. I recovered from my headache enough to run down to the library today. I'm also getting a crazy book called Design for Dying, which involves a team in the 1930s in Hollywood, one of whom is famous designer Edith Head, solving a mystery. I love fashion and I've actually read books by Edith Head, so this ought to be a hoot.
Foyle's War should be great! I will go to it when we finish Midsomer.

[getting old in mke]

19. Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

Book three of the Stormlight Archives.

Listening to the Audible reading. Epic fantasy in an unusual world. As in all his Cosmere books, the magicky things have interesting bases.

Also, after finishing The First Law trilogy, it's interesting to see another incarnation of the (almost) uncontrollable killer inside the flawed protagonist. Maybe be a thing in Fantasy these days?

[hermetic]

21. Cool

There's several Brandon Sanderson audibles at my library so that will provide me with much to listen to after my Erdritch story.

[PoorMonger]

22. Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Moving from revolutionary Zanzibar in the 1960s to restless London in the 1990s, Gravel Heart is a powerful story of exile, migration and betrayal, from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Paradise Salim has always believed that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island's white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict: longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into dishevelled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother explains neither this nor her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence. When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, Salim must face devastating truths about himself and those closest to him - and about love, sex and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound insight, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging and betrayal, and is Abulrazak Gurnah's most dazzling achievement.

[PennyK]

23. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I know I've already mentioned it, as my husband was reading it, but he finished and I grabbed it. Total funfest. A young guy, in a dystopian future, where everybody spends as much time as possible in the virtual-reality Oasis, tries to solve a computer-game that has layers upon layers (and it's all '80s trivia) to save the future of the Oasis (and incidentally gain a fortune). The movie comes out in March. Fun characters too.

I should also mention here that I actually met my husband in Second Life, a virtual reality. What a surprise when I found out he wasn't a raccoon wearing a velvet Elvis suit!

[hermetic]

24. Aww, sweet

I met my guy online, too. But our commonality was books. He was really into gaming when he was younger, though. Even belonged to a club. So I'm hoping he enjoys this book, which just arrived. It does look like a fun read. So glad you told us about it.

[PoorMonger]

25. Love it!

One of the best sci-fi books of the last decade - his follow up Armada was good too - like an updated Last Starfigter.

[PennyK]

26. Oh, you've read it?

Hubby wasn't sure; he saw some reviews that weren't great. The first chapter's at the end of the first book and I'm more than willing to give it a try. Thanks!

[PoorMonger]

28. Yeah its good!

I mean honestly Armada isn’t nearly as good as Ready Player One - but that’s not to say it isn’t still a lot of fun. Whereas RPO is for sure a love letter to the 80’s and has such a nostalgic feel, Armada is in some ways going to be more relatable to millineal gamers - as the game at the center of the plot is a very modern war game in the style of Battlefield. But if you like the first book I think it’s fair to assume you’ll have fun with Armada too.

[PoorMonger]

27. The Birdwatcher by William Shaw

Police Sergeant William South has a good reason to shy away from murder investigations: he is a murderer himself.

**Longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year

A methodical, diligent, and exceptionally bright detective, South is an avid birdwatcher and trusted figure in his small town on the rugged Kentish coast. He also lives with the deeply buried secret that, as a child in Northern Ireland, he may have killed a man. When a fellow birdwatcher is found murdered in his remote home, South's world flips.

The culprit seems to be a drifter from South's childhood; the victim was the only person connecting South to his early crime; and a troubled, vivacious new female sergeant has been relocated from London and assigned to work with South. As our hero investigates, he must work ever-harder to keep his own connections to the victim, and his past, a secret.

The Birdwatcher is British crime fiction at its finest; a stirring portrait of flawed, vulnerable investigators; a meticulously constructed mystery; and a primal story of fear, loyalty and vengeance.

I believe this could be the start of a second series by Shaw. His other one is a great cop series set in 60’s London (Breen & Tozer) I highly recommend that but pay attention if you look it up because for some odd reason of publishing / marketing the US titles are different from the UK originals

[peacebuzzard]

29. Ines of my Soul, (Allende)

A great escape with historical fiction helps calm my stress.
Isabel Allende is a superb and master storyteller. She concentrates on South American heritage in an interwoven mix of history, politics, culture and romance. The visuals she invokes fly right off the pages (I usually read hard copies of my recreational reading)

[shenmue]

30. The Echo Man by Richard Montanari

[hermetic]

31. Yummy!

A masterpiece of suspense that builds to a crescendo of terror and stunning surprise.