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.
The plot centers on a typical Manhattan family relocated recently from upper NY town Ithaca: Richard, a driven, self-important university administrator; his wife, Liz, a stay-at-home mom who has given up her career in support of Richard's; Jake, 15-year-old private school son; and Coco, their precocious adopted Asian six-year-old daughter. Jake is sent an explicit video via e-mail by a 13-year-old girl whom he had just met at a party the night before, and rejected her further advances after he has led her on. This event drives the plot.

This is a fast-paced book. The author  portrays conversations between family members. All her characters are believable, even if I didn't particularly like some of them.
She examines the intricacies of our fast-pace and very connected society. She shows a very believable picture of "helicopter" parents, so busy overparenting their children.
As an aside, I could have easily throttled Coco!!

From the book jacket:
Spurred on by a feeling of unease at the circumstances of her estranged father's death, Lone Christensen leaves behind her duties as an academic at Cambridge University to investigate what really happened during his final hours. Lone’s investigations eventually lead her to her roots in Copenhagen, where she must relive the memories of her own difficult childhood life with her father. Aided in her search for the truth by Lucien, a history student studying the Danish resistance movement during World War II, Lone uncovers her father's secret past, and one uncertainty leads to another. Soon the young researcher is up against a string of unexplained deaths, a shadowy detective who seems determined to bury the truth, and her father's deadly enemies - who are determined to ensure that his secrets have died with him, whatever the human cost.


This book made me shudder and it wasn't due to the content. This had to be the worst translation of a  book, full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. The absolute worst one in my mind, and repeated over and over as part of the description of one of the characters which referred to his sunglasses as Ray-Benns!! I even googled this, just in case it really was a brand name, but wasn't surprised when I was right and it meant Ray-Bans.
Lone, the main character was just a plain, impolite, unpolished, rude nasty piece of work that you couldn't like even if you tried.  The only redeeming factor and the only reason I stuck with it was because the story premise was interesting.


STARTED THIS WEEK:



From the book jacket:
A novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague have it better, but still they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making.


I'm hooked! 


ALSO STARTED THIS WEEK:

This was a free book offered by Kobo for my e-reader and since it's obvious I'm on a Nazi reading kick I downloaded it. Visiting Nuremberg last month has me hooked on World War II history.

From the book jacket:
In this riveting amalgam of political intrigue, poignant romance, and bare-knuckled action, six friends risk everything to thwart an international Nazi conspiracy.
In the financial devastation of the 1930s, a greedy, power-hungry group of German industrialists plot to usher in the National Socialist Party in order to rearm Germany and reap the financial rewards. Thus rises Hitler.
With Hitler in power, the Six Sentinels, graduates of an elite American doctoral program, uncover the industrialists' plan to hoard hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal war profits. Using their financial and familial connections around the globe, they work to foil the machinations of the financiers of the Third Reich. In a daring strategy of Robin Hood-style thievery, the sentinels put their lives on the line to serve justice - and thus become embroiled in a dangerous and violent international conspiracy.









2012 books read (41 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. Sandersen

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

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.