What Fiction are you reading this week, March 29, 2020?

[hermetic]

I’m just finishing Moore’s Sacre Bleu and Cold Vengeance by Preston & Child. I haven’t yet decided what I will read next but thanks to planning ahead, I have a huge pile to choose from.

How are you all doing out there? I’m glad I have several cats to keep me entertained but I am really growing weary of all the idiocy and heinous fuckery going on all around us.

Stay well.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. I just finished

Trapped in the R.A.W. (A Journal of My Experiences during the Great Invasion) by Kate Boyes. I think I first saw it mentioned here on D.U.

It's absolutely amazing, and everyone should read it.

[hermetic]

3. Okay

Will look for it. "..an ode to libraries. Human, humane, and often darkly humorous. A young woman working alone in a small special collections library is trapped in the building when invaders overrun her town."

I was just thinking, this morning, about that Twilight Zone episode where the guy ends up in the library after everything else is gone, and breaks his glasses. That really got to my teen-aged self back then.

[The King of Prussia]

2. I'm comfort reading

Just about to finish "Black Dog" by Stephen Booth - the first in the Fry & Cooper series set in England's Peak District. Subject to the ending not being preposterous, it's very good indeed. Earlier I read "Cadaver Game" - #16 in Kate Ellis's Wesley Peterson series of mysteries. I recommend the whole series.
Next up - not sure - probably another murder mystery set on a scenic part of England.

Keeping myself busy with a website called "Librarything" which my wife found. Cataloguing the vast number of books that we have.

Also been doing a bit of writing, started a blog and opened with a bit of relevant family history.

Things aren't great here, but not as bad as there I think. All of you try to keep yourselves safe x

[hermetic]

5. Well that sounds cool

https://www.librarything.com Will have to explore that.

I'd also like to read your blog. We may have relatives in common. If you don't want to put it here, do send it to my mailbox.

Things are getting worse here every day. Hey, at least you now know Boris is human because he got the virus. tRump, on the other hand, didn't get it which just is just further proof for me that he is is not human. Likely some reptilian or robot kind of thing....

[MuseRider]

4. Someone recommended

Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet. I started it a day ago and have not gotten far but I am wondering what in the heck it is talking about. Maybe I should go back and listen again. It is about some people but I have yet to figure out why. LOL It seems well written, I am listening and not being bored I just do not know what is going on! Once in a great while I run into this, I think if that happens you just need to sit down and read rather than listen.

I just finished listening to the books that together made The Dragonriders of Pern in honor of my deceased best friend. She has my book tucked safely in her casket as I promised so I just listened this time.

[hermetic]

6. That heppens to me sometimes, too

When listening to a book. I just went and read about this book, though, and it even sounds confusing in summary. But it may be worth it in the end. "..a novel of unnerving power -- darkly compelling, compulsively addictive, and shockingly honest."
https://www.fictiondb.com/author/kelly-braffet~save-yourself~562617~b.htm

You are a good friend.

[gladium et scutum]

7. Foundation and Empire, by Asimov n/t

[cyclonefence]

8. Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

I'm working through classics never assigned to me in high school or college. This is the first George Eliot I've ever read. I remember kids in another English class in high school having to read Silas Marner and groaning their way through it (don't know how my class avoided it) but that's next on my list.

I stole several sets of classics from my husband's eating club in college because it was closing, and I didn't know what would become of the library there. The set of Dickens I stole (it's been 50 years, so I think I'm safe confessing this) had never been read--I had to cut pages. I read through the Dickens 40 years ago; just now getting to the Eliot. I've read most of the Conrad but any I missed will come after the Eliot.

And I'm not sorry I stole those books, either.

[hermetic]

9. Sounds more like

you rescued them.

[japple]

10. I finished reading Lissa Evans' book,Their Finest and started looking for more

books about WWII. I found a bargain download at amazon, and though it is non-fiction, it reads like a novel. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell.

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her."

The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and--despite her prosthetic leg--helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.

Virginia established vast spy networks throughout France, called weapons and explosives down from the skies, and became a linchpin for the Resistance. Even as her face covered wanted posters and a bounty was placed on her head, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped through a death-defying hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown. But she plunged back in, adamant that she had more lives to save, and led a victorious guerilla campaign, liberating swathes of France from the Nazis after D-Day.

Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall--an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war.

[hermetic]

11. Fascinating!

What an amazing woman. Good find.

[getting old in mke]

12. An old (well, 1983) Tim Powers book

The Anubis Gates, a time-travel fantasy. Guy is part of a group that goes back to see Coleridge lecture, gets stuck in 1810 London. That much is pretty predictable. All the surround, why, and whither is not. Having fun with it.

Interesting bit of trivia: Powers and a college friend made up a poet William Ashbless during their college years and submitted more or less nonsense free verse to what they felt were less-than-picky outlets.

In this book, written some fifteen years later, Powers brings Ashbless in as a minor Romantic Poet. AND his friend, unknowing also published a novel in 1983 using William Ashbless.

I read Power's Dinner at the Deviant's Palace many years ago and enjoyed it. I got that book when I did a friend a fair sized favor and he said "What can I do for you?"

I said "Just find me some really odd books." And he did. This was one. Another was one of M. John Harrison's Viriconium novels. The third was a fantasy from the 70s placed in Ancient Crete, but I can't for the life of me remember the name. He did well on his end of the bargain

[hermetic]

14. Good deal!

[Tracer]

13. I'm not reading ANYTHING!!

Beacause I don't have anything to read!

I don't buy books (can't afford to), but go to my library every week to get my book fix.

But my library is closed due to Coronavirus and I'm out of luck.

There are a few books around the house, all of which I have read.

Can you recommend a good internet site where there are free books to read?

[hermetic]

15. Hopefully

Free Books - Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/texts

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account. Borrow a Book Books on Internet Archive are offered in many formats.

https://librivox.org offers audio books.

Your library probably has ebooks, too. Just open an online account, if you haven't already, and start digging around to see what they have to offer.

I wish you the best of luck.