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.
I wish I had read the first book in the series The Priest as there are constant references back to it. Normally I don't mind if I read a series out of order, but it did make a difference in this case.
I knew many of the neighbourhoods he mentions in Dublin, so I liked knowing where he was talking about.
I liked the book until I got to the end then felt like it ended abruptly. it felt like it needed more substance to the story.

ALSO FINISHED THIS WEEK:

From the book jacket:
As if Joyce had sat down and written Sin City -- this is the cool, comic, violent and lyrical debut novel from Ireland's most talented new writer. 
Thirty or so years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the North Rises and the eerie bogs of the Big Nothin' that the city really lives. For years it has all been under the control of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But they say his old rival Gant Broderick is back; there is dissent within the Fancy ranks; there are problems with the missus... and then there's his mother. 
City of Bohane is a provincial noir of mesmerising imagination and vaulting linguistic invention. Cool and comic, violent and lyrical, it is a taste of the startlingly new.


This is certainly an imaginative  story that kept me engaged to find out what would happen next. 
I loved this book, the writing is so imaginative and descriptive. 
It's a cross between West Side Story and Mad Max set in Ireland in 2054!! 


All the characters are memorable and certainly well-dressed. I loved Kevin Barry's descriptions of their outfits.


One of the first sentences in the book totally captured my imagination:
"Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses” 
Yet another great description:
“The bed was an insomniac’s heroically rumpled nest”
I could go on and on with examples of his incredible prose but I won't.


STARTED THIS WEEK:

From the book jacket:

When the Bergamots move from a comfortable upstate college town to New York City, they’re not quite sure how they’ll adapt—or what to make of the strange new world of well-to-do Manhattan. Soon, though, Richard is consumed by his executive role at a large New York university, and Liz, who has traded in her academic career to oversee the lives of their children, is hectically ferrying young Coco around town.
Fifteen-year-old Jake is gratefully taken into the fold by a group of friends at Wildwood, an elite private school.
But the upper-class cocoon in which they have enveloped themselves is ripped apart when Jake wakes up one morning after an unchaperoned party and finds an email in his in-box from an eighth-grade admirer. Attached is a sexually explicit video she has made for him. Shocked, stunned, maybe a little proud, and scared—a jumble of adolescent emotion—he forwards the video to a friend, who then forwards it to a friend. Within hours, it’s gone viral, all over the school, the city, the world.
The ensuing scandal threatens to shatter the Bergamots’ sense of security and identity, and, ultimately, their happiness. They are a good family faced with bad choices, and how they choose to react, individually and at one another’s behest, places everything they hold dear in jeopardy.
This Beautiful Life is a devastating exploration of the blurring boundaries of privacy and the fragility of self, a clear-eyed portrait of modern life that will have readers debating their assumptions about family, morality, and the sacrifices and choices we make in the name of love.2012 books read (39 to date):
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
The Leopard - Jo Nesbo
The Stone Cutter - Camilla Lackberg
Miramar - Naguib Mahfouz
The Gallow's Bird - Camilla Lackberg
Nineteen Seventy- Seven - David Peace
Timeline - Michael Crichton
Millennium People - JG Ballard
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Birdman - Mo Hayder
Clara Callan - Richard B. Wright

The Paris Vendetta - Steve Berry
Little Girls Lost - Jack Kerley

The Reutrn of the Dancing Master - Henning Mankell

Nemesis - Jo Nesbo

Dublin Dead - Gerard O'Donovan

City of Bohane - Kevin Barry

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.  


Well, I somehow missing posting last week due to some family health issues and other stuff!


FINISHED:

Synopsis here.
WOW what a read especially as I have just returned from visiting countries that were devastated by the Nazis this was a very timely book.
This is an extremely violent book, but totally mesmerizing.
It is very hard to write about without giving the plot away. It is a great study of revenge.
I had heard about the return of a legal Nazi party in Hungary when I was there but had no idea how rampant it is in Sweden as well. Very scary!
Another good Mankell novel, the first of non-Wallendar ones I've read, but it also was very good. Good characters, tight plot, exotic setting.

From the book jacket;

Rainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn't get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case.
While Hole's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame decides to get in touch. Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hole to dinner, and he can't resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as Hole awakens with a thundering headache, a missing cell phone, and no memory of the past twelve hours. That same morning, Anna is found shot dead in her bed. Hole begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile, the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery.
As the death toll continues to mount, Hole becomes a prime suspect in a criminal investigation led by his longtime adversary Tom Waaler and Waaler's vigilante police force. Racing from the cool, autumnal streets of Oslo to the steaming villages of Brazil, Hole is determined to absolve himself of suspicion by uncovering all the information needed to crack both cases. But the ever-threatening Waaler is not finished with his old archenemy quite yet.

I had started this several times and for no real reason went onto other books.  This story involves gypsies (Romas) and until I visited Budapest last month and went to the Holocaust Museum I had no idea that Hitler was also determined to obliterate the gypsies as well. This book makes several references to Hitler and his hate of the gypsies.

Nesbo has an uncanny ability to lead you astray with one false lead after another before disclosing the most unexpected ending.

The book interweaves two independent investigations which prove to be interrelated.

Definitely another great read last week.

STARTED THIS WEEK:

From the book jacket:

Journalist Siobhan Fallon needs the help of DI Mike Mulcahy with a story she’s covering about the disappearance of a young woman from Cork. When he agrees, they find themselves dragged into the ruthless world of international drug smuggling - and finding a link between the murder of a retired drug dealer in Spain, the suicide of an estate agent in Bristol and a yacht abandoned off the south coast of Ireland.
Once again justice and journalism make awkward bedfellows as Mulcahy and Fallon run a desperate race against a remorseless enemy determined to silence the one person alive who knows the truth…

So far a very enjoyable read set in my birthplace.

Friday Finds - Books

I'm posting over here today at Should Be Reading.




These are some new books I bought this week for going on vacation.
A few of them I had mentioned in my post on the 2012 Pilgrimage Book challenge. The synopsis for each of these can also be found in that post.

This one is set in Copenhagen, our fist stop.

Don't be fooled by the title, it is entirely set in Budapest, our second stop.

Vienna, another stop.

I selected the other books I bought from my Goodreads TBR list.


I mentioned this in a post on the Costa Awards list.


I wrote about this book found on the Toronto Star's 2011 must read books.

The next two I found atthis new blog (to me) Crime Always Pays.