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.

My comments are not meant to be recaps of the story lines as I include a link to Goodreads for their synopsis of the book. I am merely stating how I felt about the book without giving any spoilers.

My 2013 reading list can be found here.

We've had friends to visit us this week in Las Vegas so I didn't get much reading done.

FINISHED THIS WEEK:



Dark Places

I developed a real crush on Gillian Flynn when I read Gone Girl, the first time I read her. She fell out of favour with Sharp Objects and is somewhat redeemed with Dark Places.


Two hundred years after the Salem witch trials, in the summer of 1892, a grisly new witch hunt is beginning....
When newly appointed Deputy Marshal Archie Lean is called in to investigate a prostitute's murder in Portland, Maine, he's surprised to find the body laid out like a pentagram and pinned to the earth with a pitchfork.  He's even more surprised to learn that this death by "sticking" is a traditional method of killing a witch. 
     Baffled by the ritualized murder scene, Lean secretly enlists the help of historian Helen Prescott and brilliant criminalist Perceval Grey.  Distrusted by officials because of his mixed Abenaki Indian ancestry, Grey is even more notorious for combining modern investigative techniques with an almost eerie perceptiveness.  Although skeptical of each other's methods, together the detectives pursue the killer's trail through postmortems and opium dens, into the spiritualist societies and lunatic asylums of gothic New England.
     Before the killer closes in on his final victim, Lean and Grey must decipher the secret pattern to these murders--a pattern hidden within the dark history of the Salem witch trials.

The plot is intricate, and the author (his first book)  keeps all the pieces under control, but sometimes there's a sense that you don't really need all his research on the Salem witch trials to keep the story moving. But slow-moving and occasionally confusing.
Not my cup of tea.




Selected as the 2012 Title for One Book Toronto

A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls, always prompted, they say, by some unidentifiable odour.

Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of every nook and cranny of the city. Alex is a diabetic, now facing the very real possibility of losing his sight, and he’s determined to create a permanent vision of his city through his camera lens. As he rushes to take advantage of his dying sight, he encounters an old girlfriend,  the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is fighting her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother has been missing for months, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.

It was fun to read about Toronto, my home. I could see and feel every place that she describes in the book. However, she does feel compelled to identify every single location where the characters were. Fun for me but likely tedious to a non-torontonian.
This novel is structured around an event which affects a large number of people, all of whom are connected to each other, sometimes without realizing it. There is also a love story that is hard to get involved with as Alex is a very reserved individual and Susie, well she is hard to like. It is a scarred love story impacted by the thirteen years and three thousand miles that have separated them 

There is a grimy underbelly of Toronto reflected in the images of the homeless living under the Don Bridge and the mental illness that affects many of these poor souls.

This is a disturbing reality of a read that is grim and somehow fails to come together at the end.

STARTED THIS WEEK:


Freak weather and flash floods all over southern England. Half of Lafferton is afloat. A landslip on the Moor has closed the bypass and, as the rain slowly drains away, a shallow grave - and a skeleton - are exposed. The remains are identified as those of missing teenager, Harriet Lowther, last seen 16 years ago.