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:
Last week I mentioned I was reading these two books at the same time.




Prague is set in 1989 to 1991 after the fall of communism and takes place in Budapest.
Fortunes of War is set before and during the Second World War. This caused me some confusion going back and forth between the books, forgetting what generation I was reading about.

Since we had visited Budapest in May I was pleased to recognize many of the places mentioned including the McDonald's, the first in post-Communist Europe.
It is the aftermath of the fall of Communism, when Hungary is experiencing the challenges and opportunities that integration with the West represented. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and become rich. The Americans and a Canadian in the story are there to either "experience the cultural event" or are there to make money.

The meaning of the title Prague rather than Budapest where it is set refers to the grass is always greener as in nothing happens in Budapest but everything happens in Prague.
I said last week that I was hooked. That was in the beginning. I was interested in the descriptions of Budapest immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. he does an excellent job at the beginning to draw you into Budapest and his introduction of the characters.
But as the book went on and Phillips attempts to make these characters "meaningful" and instead I just found them boring. I began to wander in the middle section of the book when the Hungarian printer is introduced and a business deal is set up. However, it slightly recovered towards the end and I'm gald I finished it.


Other than the story line about the financial aspect regarding the German industrialists during WW II the rest of Fortunes of War was just unbelievable. The characters are bland and have way too much money available to them. Their lifestyles just don't seem to fit into the war years.

There were lots of things annoying about this book.  The characters continually mention their answering machines. However according to Wikipedia "the first commercial answering machine offered in the US was in 1949, the Tel-Magnet, which played the outgoing message and recorded the incoming message on a magnetic wire. It was priced at $200 but was not a commercial success."
I highlighted this section:
"She routinely unplugged her phone, made no dates, and refused to attend meetings, script readings, or rehearsals. Dressed in sweat clothes, sneakers, and large, dark glasses, her hair tucked under a ball cap, she could do her shopping and and come and go as she pleased without being recognized."
Could phones be unplugged in the early 1940s?
Really? She went out in sweats??sneakers?? ball cap?? I think we've all seen enough old movies to know that no one went out dressed that way in the 40s.
So I am glad this was a free Kobo book download and I am glad I read it for the historical financial aspect of the monetary side of war.

STARTED THIS WEEK:

From the book jacket:
The Cold Cold Ground is the start of a major new series from Adrian McKinty, author of the acclaimed Falling Glass, Fifty Grand and the DEAD trilogy.
Featuring Catholic cop Sean Duffy whose outsider status in the mostly Protestant RUC makes it as hard to do his job as the criminals he’s fighting, this is the start of a new series set in Troubles-era Belfast. A body is found in a burnt out car. Another is discovered hanging from a tree. Could this be Northern Ireland’s first serial killer, or another paramilitary feud?




2012 books read (43 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

Prague - Arthur Phillips
Fortunes of War - Gordon Zuckerman

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