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:

You can read the recap over here.
So... finished. Not a character in it that I could like, people with so much money that 400,000 billion pounds means nothing. Old money, old powerful, supercilious men, old secretary/companion still in lobe with old boss. 
I did really like Melissa, a reporter who cracks the story to the newspapers, after losing her job and starting a scintillating blog.


But it is a gripping tale of the current economy when an old private English bank that gets caught up in the hedge funds scandals and has to use family money to prop up the bank's balance sheet so they can sell it to an American bank and walk away with gobs of money never worrying about who gets hurt in the meantime, the ordinary, other people. As long as they can come out with their lifestyles, it's all that matters.

This is a new author, to me, but I will be looking at his other books.

Also finished this week:

This was a very quick read of a modern day tawdry affair in post Celtic Tiger times in Dublin. I had not read this author either before but will also be looking for more of her books.
The narrator is Gina, who leaves her husband for an older married with child man. Sean is dashing but cold. I could never see what she saw in him. I understand the kisses and mad passion in the hallways of hotels but more than that with him? No.
Gina is a nasty piece of work. Her humour crackles with desperation, however, I did  share her impatience with her overprotective sister (whose children have never seen a cigarette) we want to distance ourselves from whatever she is thinking (even though you might be thinking the same thing). 
Gina’s is lazy in her recounting of the affairs: how, why and when the critical events in her story take place. (“I can’t be too bothered here, with chronology.”) And she’s hazy on details, preferring the fuzzy and general summary to the sharp and particular representation. Her job involves translation, but not from “the romance languages, unfortunately, I do the beer countries, not the wine.”
Her mother is dying, but she hides her head in the sand until it's too late and then gets all morose.
One of my favourite sentences that I bookmarked to repeat here was:
"Delighted that the end of her marriage to the hapless Conor has rescued her from having to visit his boring family, she crows: “I just can’t believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It’s the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.”
Much as Other People's Money above is about greed and money this also touches on these topics. 
I did enjoy the voyeurism into the seedier side of their adultery.
All in all a good read.

Plan to start:

From the book jacket:

One freezing winter morning a dead body is found in the backyard of the Dharma family's house. It's the body of their tenant, Anu Krishnan. Why had she, a stranger to the mountains, been foolish enough to go out into the blizzard? From this gripping opening, Anita Rau Badami threads together a story of love and need, and of chilling secrets never told aloud.

For Anu, seeking a secluded retreat from the city, the Dharmas--the authoritarian Vikram, his aged mother, gentle Suman whom he has brought from the bustling warmth of India in a swiftly arranged marriage, their young daughter, Varsha, and her little brother--are a tightly knit family with values to uphold. The joy of Suman's good Indian cooking, the tales told by old Akka, the beauty of the place, delight her; but she soon realizes that the Dharma family holds unexpected secrets--Suman is a trapped, silent and fearful woman--and the memory of Vikram's first wife who died in an accident casts a long shadow over the household. Anu's arrival will change the balance of the Dharma household, and when the secrets start to spill out, something terrible is bound to happen...

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of  Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Include the link to your Teaser in the comments.

 I'm currently reading and completely enjoying it!

Here's my teaser:

"He hates charity dinners, with all that bonhomie and the childish showoff auctions and those terrible jokey speeches. Dickens described financiers of his time at a charity dinner: sleek, slobbery, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle."

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:

Took me longer than I planned to finish this as "stuff' got in the way. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Just a great read with lots of history mixed in. Any time a book covers off the secrets of the Vatican I am fascinated.The story flips back and forth between a Templar knight's adventures protecting and hiding ancient Christian religious texts and the modern search for the same texts by a terrorist who wants to destroy the texts to undermine the Christian religious beliefs that the Vatican would want all to believe.

We start off in the Vatican and then travel around Turkey in search of the texts.

There's plenty of action, some a little unbelievable, but makes for a lot of fun reading. 

It's one of those books that you'd like to see made into a movie (although of course the book would be better) just so you could see some of the stunts.

Started this week:

AArecap of the story line ca be found in this post. It is moving along quickly and other than a slow start it has picked up. 

Plan to start this week:

From the book jacket:

The Forgotten Waltz is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing, that reads with breathtaking immediacy. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. A woman recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life." As the city outside comes to a halt, she remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, she awaits the arrival on her doorstep of his fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie. InThe Forgotten Waltz, Enright is at the height of her powers. This is Anne Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion, and real distinction.

Book Beginnings

How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you're reading. Then, if you would like, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday and will be open for the entire week.


I just started 


"At this time of year, Antibes is at its best. The almond blossom is out, the sea loses its darkness, the cold rains have mostly been swept mysteriously away, the mistral has cleared has cleared the skies and the geraniums are being planted out."


Seems like a nice, tranquil start to a book about money. It makes me wish it was springtime here. I am only a few chapters into the book and it is anything but tranquil at this point.

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:


Nothing, nada, ziltch, rien, niets. Been busy with life!!


Started last week and slowly getting through it, I am enjoying it but just haven't had the time to finish it.

From the book jacket;
With its iconic title and unmistakable cover, Raymond Khoury's million-copy- selling The Last Templar remains one of the most memorable thriller publications of the last decade. Finally, after four long years, Khoury returns to the world of the Templars with The Templar Salvation, a sequel that's every bit as eye-popping and as gripping as its predecessor. Constantinople, 1203: As the rapacious armies of the Fourth Crusade lay siege to the city, a secretive band of Templars infiltrate the imperial library. Their target: a cache of documents that must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Doge of Venice. They escape with three heavy chests, filled with explosive secrets that these men will not live long enough to learn. Vatican City, present day: FBI agent Sean Reilly infiltrates the Pope's massive Vatican Secret Archives of the Inquisition. No one but the Pope's trusted secondi get in-but Reilly has earned the Vatican's trust, a trust he has no choice but to violate. His love, Tess Chaykin, has been kidnapped; the key to her freedom lays in this underground tomb, in the form of a document known as the Fondo Templari, a secret history of the infamous Templars... With his trademark blend of incendiary history and edge-of-your-seat suspense, Raymond Khoury's The Templar Salvation marks a triumphant return to the rich territory that launched his bestselling career.


Plan to start this week:
I posted this in last week's Friday Finds.  and then bought it for my e-reader.

From the book jacket:

In a world still uneasy after the financial turmoil of 2008, Justin Cartwright puts a human face on the dishonesties and misdeeds of the bankers who imperiled us. Tubal and Co. is a small, privately owned bank in England. As the company's longtime leader, Sir Harry Tubal, slips into senility, his son Julian takes over the reins-and not all is well. The company's hedge fund now owns innumerable toxic assets, and Julian fears what will happen when their real value is discovered.

Artair Macleod, an actor manager whose ex-wife, Fleur, was all but stolen by Sir Harry, discovers that his company's monthly grant has not been paid by Tubal. Getting no answers from Julian, he goes to the local press, and an eager young reporter begins asking questions. Bit by bit, the reporter discovers that the grant money is in fact a payoff from Fleur, written off by the bank as a charitable donation, and a scandal breaks. Julian's temperament and judgment prove a bad fit for the economic forces of the era, and the family business plunges into chaos as he tries to hide the losses and massage the balance sheet.

A story both cautionary and uncomfortably familiar, Other People's Money is not a polemic but a tale of morality and hubris, with the Tubal family ultimately left searching only for closure. Bold, humane, urbane, full of rich characters, and effortlessly convincing, this is a novel that reminds us who we are and how we got ourselves here.