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.


2012 Recap and 2013 Recap




I read a couple of paperbacks I picked up at the condo but they obviously didn't make any impression since I can't even remember them!!
Then my e-reader decided to unload my library application so I had to reload it.

FINISHED THIS WEEK:

A serial killer is picking off members of the England cricket team, and in the dark and violent world of Brixton a vigilante group is hanging dope dealers from lamp-posts. Both Roberts and Brant are in hot water with their chief and they need something big to get them out of it. They desperately need a "white arrest, " a major catch to whitewash all their past sins and deliver them, if not to paradise, at least to a better beat. Paced with black humor and a soundtrack of violence and intolerance, A White Arrest is a police procedural unlike any other.

I normally love Ken Bruen books, but I didn't love this one. I know that the both Roberts and Brant are supposed to be obnoxious but they just irritated me to no end. 

STARTED THIS WEEK;

It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner and college Darwinist - suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus - who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they have learned. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.