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 was away on a river cruise since my last post so this is a recap of my reading since then.

FINISHED:


Synopsis here.
This is an interesting novella, winner of the Booker prize. I felt that the main character was hard on himself.
Tony Webster,is  a sixty something lonely divorced man filled with nostalgia and regret about the past. The other characters, especially Veronica were not interesting or likable.


Synopsis from Goodreads
Beth and Jennifer know their company monitors their office e-mail. But the women still spend all day sending each other messages, gossiping about their coworkers at the newspaper and baring their personal lives like an open book. Jennifer tells Beth everything she can't seem to tell her husband about her anxieties over starting a family. And Beth tells Jennifer everything, period.

When Lincoln applied to be an Internet security officer, he hardly imagined he'd be sifting through other people's inboxes like some sort of electronic Peeping Tom. Lincoln is supposed to turn people in for misusing company e-mail, but he can't quite bring himself to crack down on Beth and Jennifer. He can't help but be entertained-and captivated- by their stories.

Cute. And as an IT person who remembers Y2K (yawn) and the advent of office email this made me smile at the memories it evoked.


Synopsis from Goodreads
Two brothers race to stop a political mastermind's massive bioterrorist plot in this terrifying espionage thriller.
In remote pockets of the Third World, a deadly virus is quietly sweeping through impoverished farming villages and shanty towns with frightening speed and potency. Meanwhile, in Washington, a three-word message left in a safe-deposit box may be the key to stopping the crisis—if, that is, Charles Mallory, a private intelligence contractor and former CIA operative, can decipher the puzzle before time runs out. 
 
What Mallory begins to discover are the traces of a secret war, with a bold objective—to create a new, technologically advanced society. With the help of his brother Jon, an investigative reporter, can he break the story to the world before it is too late—before a planned “humane depopulation” takes place?
 
As the stakes and strategies of this secret war become more evident, the Mallory brothers find themselves in a complex game of wits with an enemy they can’t see: a new sort of superpower led by a brilliant, elusive tactician who believes that ends justify means.

The premise of this story was good but it just moved too slowly for me.




For her previous novels (Things We Didn't Say, The Life You've Imagined, Real Life & Liars), author Kristina Riggle has garnered fabulous reviews and established herself as a rapidly rising star of contemporary women's fiction. In Keepsake, she explores that most complicated of relationships, as two sisters raised by a hoarder deal with old hurts and resentments, and the very different paths their lives have taken. As always, Riggle approaches important topics poignantly and honestly--including hoarding and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in her remarkable Keepsake--while writing with real emotional power and compassion about families and their baggage. For readers of Katrina Kittle and Elin Hildenbrand, Kristina Riggle's Keepsake is a treasure.

I found this story a little uninspiring. It reminded me of Dirty Little Secrets. I couldn't really like any of the characters either.



Murder has always been easy for the Butcher’s Boy—it’s what he was raised to do. But when he kills the senior senator from Colorado and arrives in Las Vegas to pick up his fee, he learns that he has become a liability to his shadowy employers. His actions attract the attention of police specialists who watch the world of organized crime, but though everyone knows that something big is going on, only Elizabeth Waring, a bright young analyst in the Justice Department, works her way closer to the truth, and to the frightening man behind it.


Now this book had my interest! The story is a little quirky and caught my attention.
It was originally published in 1983 and re-released in 2003 so it feels a little dated. Finding a phone is an issue, computers are black with green text, printouts are on continuous paper. I did find it interesting that the word "avatar" was used.
The characters are smart and I became interested in their personalities. I would definitely read more of his work.




There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, shocking and sudden, leaving her husband haunted by the details of their last afternoon. No one expected that drizzling Thursday in June to signal the approach of two more tragedies — deaths that shook both the apparently blessed and the obviously afflicted. William Trevor gives us an unputdownable novel, beautifully written and wonderfully sympathetic.

My first comment doesn't have to do with the story but I felt that there were so many grammatical errors that distracted me, being as anal as I am. But the lack of apostrophes in their proper places drove me crazy.

It is a real quick read and I didn't want to put it down. It is a sad book dealing with death and loneliness. There is abuse of an orphan as well to deal with. 

STARTED THIS WEEK:


Peter Temple is currently being hailed as the finest crime writer in Australia, but it won't be long before he is recognized as what he really is--one of the nation's finest writers, period. Born in South Africa, Temple is writing a dynamic kind of literary thriller that ultimately defies classification. "The Broken Shore," his eighth novel, revolves around big-city detective Joe Cashin. Shaken by a scrape with death, he's posted away from the Homicide Squad to the quiet town on the South Australian coast where he grew up. Carrying physical scars and more than a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs, and thinking about how it all was before. But when a prominent local is attacked in his own home and left for dead, Cashin is thrust into what becomes a murder investigation. The evidence points to three boys from the nearby aboriginal community--everyone seems to want to blame them. Cashin is unconvinced, and soon begins to see the outlines of something far more terrible than a burglary gone wrong. 
Winner of the Colin Roderick Award for Australian writing as well as Australia's major prize for crime fiction, the Ned Kelly Award, "The Broken Shore "is a transfixing and moving novel about a place, a family, politics and power, and the need to live decently in a world where so much is rotten.

2012 books read (87 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
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
The Paris Directive - Gerald Jay
Criminal - Karin Slaughter
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Moshin Hamid
The Good Muslim - Tahmima Anam
My Korean Deli - Ben Ryder Howe
The Ghosts of Belfast - Stuart Neville
Bad Boy - Peter Robinson
The Guilty Pleas - Robert Rotenberg
The Vault - Ruth Rendell
A Train in Winter - Caroline Moorehead
Turn of Mind - Alice La Plante
The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka
Swipe - Evan Angler
Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart ABANDONED!
The Butterfly Clues - Kate Ellison
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
Attachments - Rainbow Rowell
Viral - James Lilliefors
Keepsake - Kristina Riggle
The Butcher's Boy - Thomas Perry
Death in Summer - William Trevor