It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What are you reading? is hosted by Sheila at  Book Journey. For this meme, bloggers post what they finished last week, what they're currently reading, and what they plan to start this week. 

FINISHED THIS WEEK:

Synopsis here.

Blah, did not enjoy this book at all, I skimmed through it so I could finish it. There wasn't a single character that I liked. Other than the twelve year old Ellen and the office manager Meera no one else had any common sense. They were all a bunch of whiny grownups expecting life to be a bed of roses. Just too much like a soap opera to me, an American one at that!


Not a good week so far, I abandoned the next book on page 121.

I tried, I really did to like this book. I enjoyed the trips back and forth between the generations but the main characters were the most insipid women that I had to give up. I seriously couldn't have cared less what the mystery was surrounding family.

She finds out on her 21st birthday (her father felt he had to tell her, why??) that her loving, adoring family is not her biological family. Her father had found her as a very small child and raised her in a wonderful home with great parents and adoring little sisters.
So she breaks up with her perfect fiancee who also adores her, settles for an idiot of a husband, has a  daughter, who turns into a horrible mother who in turn raises another dysfuntional child and so on.

Synopsis here.

I didn't love this book, it was ok (a really bad reading week for me). The title doesn't really reflect the story as it is more about family relationships than about learning to "fit in" in England in the 1970s. 

It is written from a small girl's view so things are explained from her point of view in very simple language. I did love all the food references. 

I also enjoyed learning more about life in Iran under the Shah and then what happened when the extremists took over. 

From the book jacket:

The night the first snow falls, a young boy wakes to find his mother gone. He walks through the silent house, but finds only wet footprints on the stairs. In the garden looms a solitary figure: a snowman bathed in cold moonlight, its black eyes glaring up at the bedroom windows. Round its neck is his mother's pink scarf.

Inspector Harry Hole is convinced there is a link between the disappearance and a menacing letter he received some months earlier. As Harry and his team delve into unsolved case files, they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears, Harry's suspicions are confirmed: he is a pawn in a deadly game.

For the first time in his career Harry finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his turf, a killer who will drive him to the brink of insanity.

I have started this book several times and gotten sidetracked. As a result of my dismal attempts to read something good this week I decided to finish this. I want to reduce the number of hard books in the house as we both use e-readers for a lot of our reading especially when we travel.

So I finished it, liked it but wasn't blown away by the author being touted as "the next Stieg Larsson". 

It was hard going at the beginning and Harry reminded me of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender and the murder mystery plot was fairly typical of the genre. However I did get quite involved and didn't want to put it down until I knew the outcome. There are quite a few twists and turns to the plot which keep you interested.  I  do think it was too long and there are some pretty obvious false turns that were not necessary.

STARTED THIS WEEK:

As I mentioned above I am working my way through the books in the house in hard copy.

From the book jacket:

In the depths of winter, a killer stalks the city streets. His victims are two young women, both found with twenty-four inexplicable puncture wounds, both drowned in their own blood. The crime scenes offer no clues, the media is reaching fever pitch, and the police are running out of options. There is only one man who can help them, and he doesn't want to be found. 
Deeply traumatised by The Snowman investigation, which threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong's opium dens. But with his father seriously ill in hospital, Harry reluctantly agrees to return to Oslo. He has no intention of working on the case, but his instinct takes over when a third victim is found brutally murdered in a city park. 

2012 books read:
The Coast Road - John Brady
Still Midnight - Denise Mina
The Bulgari Connection - Fay Weldon
Good Bait - John Harvey
The Heretic's Treasure - Scott Mariani 
Dead I Well May Be - Adrian McKinty
The Devil's Elixir - Raymond Khoury 
A Darker Domain - Val McDermid
The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin 
GB84 - David Peace 
The Emperor's Tomb - Steve Berry
Stonehenge Legacy - Sam Christer
Inquisition - Alfredo Colitto ABANDONED!

The Troubled Man - Henning Mankell

Nineteen Seventy-Four - David Peace

Faithful Place - Tana French

Dead Like You - Peter James

Brother and Sister - Joanna Trollope

The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton ABANDONED

A Beginner's Guide to Acting English -Shappi Khorsandi

The Snowman - Jo Nesbo