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.
You might also like to check out my Friday Finds highlighting new reads I discovered during last week that got added to my TBR (to be read) list over at Goodreads.

Finished this week:

Synopsis over here.

So I persevered with this choice.  I was tempted to give up at one point especially when he goes on and on about physics and other scientific jargon. I stayed with it, albeit skimming certain sections and am glad I finished it. The parts I really enjoyed were the history of the French castles and then researching which castles still exist to add to my Bucket List along with Carcassonne  which I discovered when I read Labyrinth by Kate Mosse several years ago.

I thought the characters were flat, I wasn't drawn to any of them.  Knights, castles, fighting and suspense should have drawn me in but alas...

Also finished this week:

Synopsis here.

This was my first JG Ballard book and I liked it. I do think a Nick Horby  book is much more fun to read on this type of topic.

I know Ballard's point is the shallowness of middle class society but I just couldn't get into any of the characters especially the film lecturer who despises Hollywood cinema so much she organizes the burning  down of the NFT.

I did enjoy the geographical references to London and could relate to all the places that the protests were held in.

Also finished this week:

From the book jacket:

Could you survive on your own, in the wild, with everyone out to make sure you don't live to see the morning?
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival.


I realize I'm late jumping onto the band-wagon, I had bought this for my 17 year old nephew at Christmas and assumed it was a YA book. As well I am not usually a big fan of dystopian novels (see Timeline above). I bought it because Kobo where I buy my e-reader books had a special for the trilogy.
Boy, was I wrong. From the first page I couldn't put it down!!!
There were times I could have cried, there were I gasped as the plot turned and twisted. 
We will be going to see the movie very soon as I am curious to see how it is done. 


Started this week:

From the book jacket:
Against all odds, Katniss has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol - a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create.
Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying.

I am still captivated!

Plan to start reading this week:

I'm not going to include the synopsis here as I don't want to know!!!

2012 books read:

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 

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 really liked this book, but if reading  about violence and racism will bother you then I don't suggest it for you. This is a continuation of the Red Riding quartet , I read 1974 a couple of weeks ago. The same two characters narrate the story, a copper and a jaded journalist, at times it is hard to distinguish who is speaking.


This is a gritty look into a very bleak world that is corrupt and violent.
I am looking forward to the next book, Nineteen Eighty .

Also finished this week:

 

From the book jacket:

The new psychological thriller from No 1 bestselling Swedish crime sensation Camilla 
Lackberg. A woman is found dead, apparently the victim of a tragic car crash. It's the 
first in a spate of seemingly inexplicable accidents in Tanumshede and marks the end of 
a quiet winter for detective Patrik Hedstrom and his colleagues. At the same time a 
reality TV show is being shot in the town. As cameras shadow the stars' every move,
 relations with the locals are strained to breaking point. When a drunken party ends 
with a particularly unpopular contestant's murder, the cast and crew are obvious 
suspects. Could there be a killer in their midst? As the country tunes in, the bodies 
mount up. Under the intense glare of the media spotlight, Patrik faces his toughest 
investigation yet!

Having read Lackberg's previous three books in this series I feel like I am visiting old friends. I did feel that this plot was a little tighter than The Stone Cutter.
The story is built around a reality TV show which is being filmed in the area. I felt these characters could have been a bit more developed, rather than having them hanging on the sidelines.
I will continue reading her as I really enjoy the setting in Sweden to the point that I had to look at a map to figure out where the various towns are located. Also as I said, I feel like Patrik and Erica are old friends, I was pleased they enjoyed their wedding. I am happy that Anna is back and as always love reading about the crazy stuff the chief of police Mellberg gets himself into.

Started this week:
 

From the book jacket;

When you step into a time machine, fax yourself through a "quantum foam wormhole" and step out in feudal France circa 1357, be very, very afraid. If you aren't strapped back in precisely 37 hours after your visit begins, you'll miss the quantum bus back to 1999 and be stranded in a civil war, caught between crafty abbots, mad lords and peasant bandits all eager to cut your throat. You'll also have to dodge catapults that hurl sizzling pitch over castle battlements. On the social front, you should avoid provoking "the butcher of Crecy" or Sir Oliver may lop your head off with a swoosh of his broadsword or cage and immerse you in "Milady's Bath", a brackish dungeon pit into which live rats are tossed now and then for prisoners to eat.

This is the plight of the heroes of Timeline, Michael Crichton's thriller. They're historians in 1999 employed by a tech billionaire-genius with more than a few of Bill Gates' most unlovable quirks. Like the entrepreneur in Crichton's Jurassic Park, Doniger plans a theme park featuring artefacts from a lost world revived via cutting-edge science. When the project's chief historian sends a distress call to 1999 from 1357, the boss man doesn't tell the younger historians the risks they'll face trying to save him. At first, the interplay between eras is clever but Timeline swiftly becomes a swashbuckling old-fashioned adventure, with just a dash of science and time paradox in the mix. Most of the cool facts are about the Middle Ages and Crichton marvellously brings the past to life without ever letting the pulse-pounding action slow down. At one point, a time-tripper tries to enter the Chapel of Green Death. Unfortunately, its custodian, a crazed giant with terrible teeth and a bad case of lice, soon has her head on a block. "She saw a shadow move across the grass as he raised his axe into the air." Try not to turn the page!

I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this one...I'm not a huge fan of futuristic sci-fi types of stories.

Also started this week:

From the book jacket:
The peasants, goes a tedious old joke about Wat Tyler's mob, are revolting. In JG Ballard's unnerving, prophetic novel Millennium People, however, it's the middle classes that are staging the revolution: blowing up the NFT, burning their books and defaulting on their maintenance charges. Rejecting, in short, everything that they've worked so hard for--The Bonfire of the Volvos, as one rather droll chapter heading has it.

At the forefront of this petit bourgeois insurrection are the occupants of Fulham's Chelsea Marina, (as ever with Ballard) an exclusive housing community. Led by the charismatic Dr Richard Gould, a disgraced paediatrician turned "Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set", Marina residents Kay Churchill, a former film lecturer; civil servant Vera Britain and Stephen Dexter, the parish vicar and an injured airman (another Ballard perennial) have unleashed an arson campaign against targets deemed suitably middle class.

David Markham, a psychiatrist and the book's steely narrator, is drawn into the Marina's inner circle after his ex-wife Laura is killed in an apparently meaningless bomb attack at Heathrow airport, (prime Ballard territory, of course). Meaningless is the insistent motif: Markham's current wife Sally was crippled in a freak accident and the murder of a banal if inoffensive television presenter (loosely modelled on Jill Dando) is one of the seemingly random violent acts unleashed by Gould, precisely because of their apparent randomness. "The absence of rational motive", as he says, "carries a significance of its own".

This is my first novel by this author and the last he wrote. So far, so good.
While researching the author at Goodreads, I came across the following:
The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective Ballardian,defined by the Collins English Dictionary asresembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.  

2012 books read:

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