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.


I've been on a reading marathon this week in spite of things to be done. Getting my books from the library makes me read quicker (I think) as I have a deadline and suddenly a whole bunch of holds became available.

FINISHED THIS WEEK:


Synopsis here.
McGuinness did a great job of conveying the isolation, mania, hidden corners, mad luxuries of  Bucharest at the height of paranoia in 1989. 
I knew nothing of Romania.
 The descriptions make you feel the city around you and frustrated me with the amount of destruction of old buildings and churches that were carried out. The city is the most wonderful and noteworthy character. 
The main character wasn't my favourite but then he is only twenty one so he is immature and that may be part of the charm.


From the book jacket:
After ten years in New Zealand, Suki returns to London, to a city that won't let her in. However, a chance visit with Peggy—an old family friend who still lives in the building where she grew up—convinces Suki that there is a way to reconnect with the life she left behind a decade earlier. But the more involved she becomes with Peggy's dysfunctional family, including Peggy's wayward sixteen-year-old grandson, the more Suki finds herself mysteriously slipping back in time—to the night of a party her parents threw in their garden more than twenty years ago, when something happened in an old, long-unused air-raid shelter. . . .

A breathtaking whirlwind of mystery, transgression, and self-discovery, Bianca Zander's The Girl Below is a haunting tale of secrets, human frailty, and dark memory that heralds the arrival of an extraordinary new literary talent.

Meh! Hated it. Abandoned.


From the book jacket:
Drowned, set in the idyllic countryside during a short-lived Swedish summer, gets under one’s skin from the first page, creating an atmosphere of foreboding in which even the perfume of freshly picked vegetables roasting in the kitchen becomes ominous.
   On the surface, the story couldn’t be simpler. A single young woman visits her older sister, who is married to a writer as charismatic as he is violent. As the young woman falls under her brother-in-law’s spell, the plot unfolds in a series of precisely rendered turns. Meanwhile the reader, anticipating the worst, hopes against hope that disaster can be averted.

This was labelled as a psychological thriller but it just felt like a boring, simple "love" story. 


From the book jacket:
From the author of Timequake, this "irresistible" novel (Cleveland Plain Dealer) tells the story of Eugene Debs Hartke-Vietnam veteran, jazz pianist, college professor, and prognosticator of the apocalypse. It's "Vonnegut's best novel in years-funny and prophetic...something special." (The Nation).

This is satire at its best. His description of a country where the yen is a stable and accepted currency in the States  alongside the reduced dollar, a tank of gas costs a small fortune, the rivers are clogged with  plastic bottles, and a new ice age is bearing down on it all. Considering he wrote this in 1991 depicting a country ten years later is remarkable in his insights into today's world and economy.
I also loved the numerology games he plays throughout (I guess that's the analyst in me).


From the book jacket:
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries. Charleen, a divorcee eking out a living as a poet and part-time assistant for an obscure scientific journal, returns home to attend her mother's wedding, and is caught up in a series of unexpected--and terrifying--events.

It's been years since I read anything by Shields.  This was published in 1977 so it was a little like a trip down memory lane for me. A time when women wore slips, you have to look up a phone number in the telephone book, the bus costs less than a dollar. 
The story of two sisters was also intriguing. How differently they remember the events of their childhood.
The way the main character thinks everything out in her head made me smile as it sounded like myself talking to me.
It was a very quick read for me.


STARTED THIS WEEK:

From the book jacket:
Marriage can be a real killer. 
   One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn takes that statement to its darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed that her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit and deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn. 
   On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? 
   As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?
   With her razor-sharp writing and trademark psychological insight, Gillian Flynn delivers a fast-paced, devilishly dark, and ingeniously plotted thriller that confirms her status as one of the hottest writers around.



I am hooked on this book, I cannot put it down!!

2012 books read (65 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
This Beautiful Life - Helen Schulman
The Copenhagen Project - K. SandersenPrague - Arthur Phillips
Fortunes of War - Gordon Zuckerman
The Cold Cold Ground - Adrian McKinty
Before the Poison - Peter Robinson
The Mozart Conspiracy - Scott Mariani
Dancer - Colum McCann
Pig Island - Mo Hayder
Old City Hall - Robert Rotenberg
The Paris Wife - Paula McLain
The Last Good Man - A. J. Kazinski
Homesick - Roshi Fernando
Black Friday - Alex Kava
Only One Life - Sara Blaedel
A Perfect Evil - Alex Kava
People Like Us - Dominick Dunne
The Ottoman Motel - Christopher Currie
Even the Dogs - Jon McGregor
The Red Book - Deborah Copaken Kogan
Faith - Jennifer Haigh
The Salesman - Joseph O'Connor
The Last Hundred Days - Patrick McGuinness
The Girl Below - Bianca Zander ABANDONED!
Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut
Drowned - Therese Bohman

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.


Today's post will cover the last two weeks as I have been away!!
FINISHED:
Synopsis here.
From the library.
I  enjoyed this despite being a little disappointed in the ending. I kept hoping things would work out for Simon. Lots of dysfunctional characters and a fairly fast paced storyline that keeps you gripped till the end. Some of the children were really strange characters and a little scary. I can't really imagine a small town being this weird but I'm sure it happens.


From the book jacket:
On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they're dead, too. Their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they're in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own particular homage as their friend's body is taken away, examined, investigated, and cremated.
All of their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives. We meet Robert, the deceased, the only alcoholic in a sprawling group of junkies; Danny, just back from uncomfortable holidays with family, who discovers the body and futiley searches for his other friends to share the news of Robert's death; Laura, Robert's daughter, who stumbles into the junky's life when she moves in with her father after years apart; Heather, who has her own place for the first time since she was a teenager; Mike, the Falklands War vet; and all the others. 
Theirs are stories of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world. These invisible people live in a parallel reality, out of reach of basic creature comforts, like food and shelter. In their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives.
Intense, exhilarating, and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society--littered with love, loss, despair, and a half-glimpse of redemption. 

From the library.
This is not an easy read by any means. I don't mean only the story but also the fractured sentences and unfinished thoughts. It is beautifully written for such a sad reflection on a lot of lives these days.


From the book jacket:
The Big Chill meets The Group in Deborah Copaken Kogan’s wry, lively, and irresistible new novel about a once-close circle of friends at their twentieth college reunion.


Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, homeschooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place, both among the East Coast elite and within the social milieu of her prep-schooled beau, Bucky. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage, finding escape in both art and in the arms of another woman. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage, including a heartrending turn as Nora in A Doll’s House. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words, spending long hours as an editor at the Crimson.

Twenty years later, all their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window slams shut. Addison’s marriage to a writer’s-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter, as troubled as her children’s psyches, and as mismanaged as her trust fund. Hollywood shut its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her director husband can pay the bills. Jane, the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper whose foreign bureaus are now shuttered, is caught in a vortex of loss, having lost her journalist husband—the father of her young child—to war, her adoptive mother to cancer, and quite possibly her current partner due to an errant email.

Like all Harvard grads, they’ve kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

This was a fun book about typical people's lives.
I had never heard of Harvard's Red book until I read this book.
 The “red book” is an anniversary chronicle that is sent to Harvard alumni every five years, asking them for basic information, such as address, email, occupation, spouse/partner, children, if any, and a concise summary of the past half-decade of their lives. I liked how the author built her stories around their "red book" input.
I loved how she hopped  from one character to another and managing to blend their lives together,


From the book jacket:
When Sheila McGann sets out to redeem her disgraced brother, a once-beloved Catholic priest in suburban Boston, her quest will force her to confront cataclysmic truths about her fractured Irish-American family, her beliefs, and, ultimately, herself. Award-winning author Jennifer Haigh follows her critically acclaimed novels Mrs. Kimble and The Condition with a captivating, vividly rendered portrait of fraying family ties, and the trials of belief and devotion, in Faith.

This book gets off to a plodding start but it redeems itself in the ending. It took over half the book for the author to develop the characters and I wish she had developed the narrator of the story as I really wanted to know more about her. It felt like she was trying desperately to pad the story with fillers as the story line itself is a bit thin. 
I identified with a lot of the Irish and Catholic descriptions of life.


From the book jacket:
It Is The Hottest Summer In Dublin's History, and Billy Sweeney, a middle-aged salesman with a failed marriage, a faltering career and a tumbledown house, has more than the weather on his mind. His youngest daughter lies in a coma in the hospital, following a mysterious attack. Devastated by the unfolding consequences of that terrible night, frustrated by officialdom, and failed by the system, Billy finally tires of seeking legal justice. He decides to take the law into his own hands, but when his plans go spectacularly wrong, the results are terrifying, often hilarious, and in the end, unforgetabble.

I've enjoyed a lot of O'Connor's books in the past. This felt different and it was certainly a tough read. I read it in between reading Faith and The Last Hundred Days.

This is a very dark and gripping novel. I definitely did not like the main character but yet you could identify with him. The way the story twists certainly keeps you reading, however the long drawn out central part of the book had me skimming the pages. This might be because I felt in a hurry to finish it.



STARTED READING:

From the book jacket:
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows. In The Last 100 Days, Patrick McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time and place as the city struggles to survive this intense moment in history. He evokes a world of extremity and ravaged beauty from the viewpoint of an outsider uncomfortably, and often dangerously, close to the eye of the storm as the regime of 1980s Romania crumbles to a bloody end.

This is a fictional description of the last days Ceaucesu's Communist regime, however I am intrigued enough by his narration that I will be looking for non-fictional books to read further about this period.