What Fiction are you reading this week, May 13, 2018?
Happy Mothers' Day! Wouldn't this be nice gift for Mom? Why yes, yes it would. 
I've almost finished Julie Smith's The Axeman's Jazz and it's got me wondering. There are some really messed-up people in this book who spend a lot of time attending 12-step groups. I have personally never attended any but it's always been my understanding that they discourage people getting involved with other group members. Not these guys. Total opposite. So, is that passe thinking?
Whatever, I'm next going to read Smith's House of Blues. I had found both of these books at a thrift store. Evidently my library board doesn't deem Ms. Smith a writer worth investing in. 
What writers are you investing in this week?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I love church mysteries. Been a while since I read one. 
Olivia Matthews is the cozy mystery pseudonym of award-winning author Patricia Sargeant.
Suspense Magazine says, "..readers of this first-in-the-new-series will soon find out Mayhem & Mass is a promising addition to the cozy mystery genre, and its protagonist is delightful!” Nice
I've always enjoyed mysteries about art. This comes up listed under Contemporary Romance but sure sounds more like a mystery to me. "one woman’s journey to discovering the truth behind an abandoned apartment and a family whose mysteries may be better left undiscovered." 
I will have to look for her books. Thanks.
But, as one review said, "Larson has a knack for writing history as riveting as almost any novel, and this is an example of him at his best."
It seems like an important book to read, showing how people have a tendency to believe what they want to believe, never mind evidence to the contrary. The German people wanted to believe in their country's greatness and that Nazi excesses against political opponents, Jews and others were just temporary or weren’t nearly as bad as some were reporting. Now, here we are, in that same boat. 
Congrats to you. I am a 30-year survivor. You will be one, too. 
Thanks! 
The Cabinet ... is high on my list. Wildly popular.
This was a First Novel Nominee for the 2016 Anthony Award and the 2017 Edgar Allan Poe Award.
highly recommend it for those who like offbeat, original stories. The ending was a bit of a surprise, but I loved it.
I can't remember if someone here recommended this book, but I wanted a change of literary scenery, and since I loved The Man Who Fell to Earth (both the book and the film), am now reading Mockingbird by Walter Tevis.
An elegiac dystopia of mankind coming to terms with its own imminent extinction, Mockingbird was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel.
The author's life history is nearly as interesting as his fictional work. (copied from amazon.com)
Walter Tevis was born in San Francisco in 1928 and lived in the Sunset District, close to Golden Gate Park and the sea, for the first ten years of his life. At the age of ten his parents placed him in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Home for a year, during which time they returned to Kentucky, where the Tevis family had been given an early grant of land in Madison County. Walter traveled across country alone by train at the age of eleven to rejoin his family and felt the shock of entering Appalachian culture when he enrolled in the local school. He made friends with Toby Kavanaugh, a fellow student at the Lexington high school, and learned to shoot pool on the table of the recreation room in the Kavanaugh mansion, and to read science fiction books for the first time in Toby’s small library. They remained lifelong friends, and Toby grew up to become the owner of a pool room in Lexington.
At the age of seventeen, Walter became a carpenter’s mate in the Navy, serving on board the USS Hamil in Okinawa. After his discharge, he studied at the University of Kentucky where he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English Literature and studied with Abe Guthrie, author of The Big Sky. Upon graduation he taught everything from the sciences and English to physical education in small-town Kentucky high schools. At that time he began writing short stories, which were published in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy. He wrote his first novel, The Hustler, which was published in 1959, and followed that with The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was published in 1963. He taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for fourteen years, where he was a distinguished professor, and left that post in 1978 to come to New York and resume writing. He wrote four more novels—Mockingbird, The Steps of the Sun, The Queen’s Gambit and The Color of Money—and a collection of short stories, Far From Home. He died of lung cancer in 1984. His books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greek, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Israeli, Turkish, Japanese, and Thai.
Thanks for the weekly thread, hermetic. A belated happy Mother's Day to all the mothers, cat mothers, dog mothers, and nurturers of all creatures.
We haven't done one of these in a long while. 
I like it. But my, they are just babies! Kurt Vile. 
