Book Lovers Club

voraciousreader

minus....people who don’t return books? POS! I mostly get my books from the library and with the exception of telling one or two people what I am reading, I tell NO ONE for fear that they will ask me for the book. The last thing I want is someone waiting for me to finish reading a book so they can get to read it before it comes due! And of course, I don’t want others returning a book late on my account. I once had five overdue books and couldn’t take out new books until at least one of them was returned. I had to beg friends to finish reading the books and return them so I could resume my obsession. Since that experience, I am mum on what I am reading. I’d sooner tell someone how much money I have in the bank than tell them what I am reading!

the Fantastiiks...got to see it shortly before it closed in the Village....Grew up with my mom singing Try to Remember....

one point that Lewis makes that is so spot on is that us book lovers don’t read when there is nothing else to do...we read for the pleasure of reading....finding the time...making the time to enjoy the experience of reading. And....we seek out others who feel the same way about reading....

My BFF and I could talk about books for hours and hours....is there anything more delightful than sharing the name of a new author...or...discovering that you both enjoy the same author? A Reading Life....Such a great title to the book....the peacefulness and enjoyment found when a book finishes that enriches your life....that’s pretty much what a reading life is all about....

pat01

Just finished "The Names of the Dead" by Kevin Wignall. This is a book that I got through Amazon firstreads. I quite liked it, modern day espionage with some human interest thrown in. I had never heard of this author before, but he has been writing books since 2001. Unfortunately my library only carries one other of his books.

MinusTwo

Finished a C.J. Box book The Disappeared (2018). Joe Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming. I haven't read all the books, but he has 3 daughters and the oldest two are now off on their own. He is definitely honorable, which sometimes causes him problems. And there are always some controversies between conservation and unbridled progress. I find all this series a good read.

carolehalston

I like Joe Pickett. I wish we had more/some real people like him.

JCSLibrarian

I finished reading another historical fiction by Ruth Sepetys, Fountains of Silence. It takes place in Franco’s Spain during the late 1950s. The fiction is interspersed with actual comments and letters from people involved in government during that time. Of course, there is the obligatory love story, but also a mystery involving an orphanage run by nuns and sanctioned by the government. Her books are generally meant for young adults so the writing is good, but gentle.

I did finish American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. A connection between the previous title is both authors used Spanish throughout the writing. I also saw many stereotypes of Hispanic people in both books. While Sepetys is a known author she received no where near the advance monies Cummins did. Sepetys did include more historically accurate information in an epilogue than Cummins did. I still do not quite understand the controversy about American Dirt.

Good reading!

magiclight

I'm about to learn how to see or so the reviewers writing about The Overstory by Richard Powers tell me. The first of many interwoven stories begins with "Now is the time of chestnuts." By the end of the first page I've already looked up images of chestnut, nutmeg, baja elephant, sal and acacia trees. Until I have time later today to sit for a while with this book, I'll hold off reading it. Any thoughts from someone who has finished this book? BTW, I have the paper copy and the cover is luscious.

JCSLibrarian

You will never think the same way about trees again after reading Overstory. Fantastic read!

magiclight

Thanks JCS, I am ready for a change in my thinking

carolehalston

I succumbed to curiosity and bought the Kindle version of Where the Crawdads Sing. I read it over a couple of days. The prose was clear and often lyrical but overall I wasn't as impressed as I expected to be, considering all the attention the book has attracted. I was left with a disappointed feeling. I did like the trial portion of the story. At the end it was more understandable that the protagonist said nothing in her defense. With all this said, I would love to be a part of a book club discussion! I will give the author credit for making the setting the main "character" in the story.

Now I'm reading the 2nd Harry Hole crime novel by Jo Nesbo. It is set in Thailand.

MinusTwo

Went a little crazy last Friday when I left the med center. I stopped with a donation for the battered women's center & it's near a Half Price Books. I've been looking for a couple of old Nevada Barr books and they had some of them. Of course I ended up with several others. Then took a box of books to my regular used book store - Book Scene. They have several shelves with books priced at $0.75. Well how can anyone resist? Then since I have several hundred dollars worth of credit, I roamed the shelves. Hmmmm - most of what I wanted was 'no trade' (can't use your credit) but I still managed to get 10 on my account. It's buy four at 1/2 price deducted from your credit and the fifth one is free. Then I stopped at the library and donated about 30 books in the Tom Swift collection from 1933 - 1978. Three boxes out. 35 books in for under $50, not counting the cost for Educated.

Yes I finally did cave in and buy a used copy of Educated. Still not sure I want to read the book, but I have friends bugging me about it. I'll have to pick the day carefully to start it and it's not today for sure - dark & gloomy & rainy.

VR - you'll appreciate that neither had the CS Lewis book, or the Dyer I wanted. Luckily I still have my Christmas Amazon gift card.

Reading J.A. Jance Field of Bones (2018). I haven't read a book in the Sheriff Joanna Brady series in quite awhile. As the novel starts, she's 9 months pregnant, running for re-election in Cochise County, AZ, and it's election night. And have more John LesCroart book before I start the new batch.

voraciousreader

Minus...wow! Wow! Wow! Despite not having a Dyer or Lewis book...I would have loved to have joined you!

reading Wright and New York...coincidence there was a blurb on the back cover by the author of Victory City. This book gives a glimpse of his personality that I was familiar with, but is alsoquite an intimate portrait as it relates to his New York experience. I now have a better understanding of why his footprint in New York is lacking....yes..we have the Guggenheim...but you would think we should have had more of his work...

Jelson

I set aside fantasy/timetravel/ladymysteries for a non-fiction book A Polar Affair by Lloyd Spencer Davis who is a New Zealand penguin biologist. The author, who is known for his meticulous supposedly breakthrough study of penguin sexual habits, is shocked to learn that a physician, George Murray Levick on Robert Falcon Scott's 1910 Antarctic expedition who had passed his time on Cape Adare becoming the first man to study Adelie penguins and whose subsequent book was essentially a penguin bible - had actually suppressed his own observations on the more disturbing aspects of penguin behavior. Spencer Davis tries to find out more about Levick and his reasons for not including all of his observations in his groundbreaking book. Spencer Davis's research into Levick is interwoven with the story of polar exploration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as his own research and theories regarding the evolutionary biology of Adelie penguins. The heroic expeditions of Nansen, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and others, the many men who made multiple trips to or in search of both North and South Poles, the many who died, the unimaginable conditions, the sheer luck that meant the difference between survival and disaster. I only wish I had a map of Antarctica beside me and that the book had provided a timeline of the expeditions. No matter, I will just have to read this book again!!

pat01

After reading some so-so books I got through Amazon first reads, I returned to Susan Meissner and A bridge across the Ocean. I had read and really enjoyed Secrets of a Charmed life, and I really enjoyed this book too. Spanning WWII Nazis and the resistance, post WWII and war brides, and modern day ghost hunters, I found I couldn't put this book down. Moving on to some non-fiction David McCullogh's The Wright Brothers.

magiclight

Two nonfiction books I've recently enjoyed are Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes and Kassia St. Clair's The Secret Life of Colors. The former, written by a journalist, is an engagingly well researched book about the Great Lakes in the US. I learned that they provide more shoreline in the US than the Atlantic and Pacific and experience constant internal and external stressors. The latter book on colors is an easy pick up and read any page book about the origins of color in the natural and cultural world. I did not know there is a color "woad" and that King Louis XVI called a faded rose color 'puce-the color of fleas.'

MinusTwo

Having a wonderful time reading & re-reading Nevada Barr's series about Anna Pigeon, National Park ranger. I didn't read them in order the first time, but I've been collecting to have the whole set. After trips to 3 used book stores, I'm only missing three. I love reading about our National Parks and the stories can really keep me up reading way past a sensible bed time.

MelissaDallas

Thanks to all of you who commented on Isaac’s Storm. I finished it last week and enjoyed it a lot as a Texas gal with a history teacher mom. Another tie: after some years in general practice after WWII, granddad decided he wanted to be a psychiatrist, so they moved from Perryton to Galveston when my mom was in high school so granddad could go back to medical school for his specialty. I grew up hearing Galveston stories.

voraciousreader

melissa..so glad to hear that you enjoyed reading Isaac's Storm. I often think about the book. There are so many interesting back stories that grew out of the storm. Besides wanting to throw a shoe at the TV screen as Katrina approached to get the attention of the people of New Orleans and scream at them, “Hasn't ANYONE read Isaac's Storm?"I learned about Rabbi Cohen, a storm survivor's contribution of helping Jews immigrate across the midwest, south and west via The Galveston Movement. Years before I read the book, a friend had enlightened me about the Galveston Movement because some of his family members were a part of it. At the time I knew nothing about the it nor did I know about the Rabbi and his family's close call with death from the storm. I think about that incident and it makes me believe that sometimes miracles happen for a reason....

the book also makes me think about the puzzling idea of building up shorelines. Galveston had been the capitol of Texas before the storm...afterwards the capitol was moved inland to Austin and so moved most of the surviving population of Galveston. I think of that and wonder why we never learned from that calamity. After Sandy a local marina was wrecked and in its place are three story townhouses. Why? I will never understand.

And climate change? I won't go there except to say that the storm that happened over 100 years ago is easily forgotten. As the author Larson suggests, perhaps it has been mostly forgotten because close to 10,000 or more people perished...entire families...so there are no family members to remember their loved ones. For all intents and purposes, the city was wiped out...and so were its inhabitants. Furthermore, it has been suggested we will never know the exact number of deaths for that very reason...and...did climate change have something to do with the most deadly natural disaster in US history? You may also ask? What about the San Fran 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires? “Only" 3,000 perished from that disaster. The Galveston hurricane that has no other name gets its due thanks to Larson's riveting writing.....

kathindc

If memory serves me correctly, as I read the book over four years ago, didn’t Isaac’s brother keep telling him the storm was more dangerous than Isaac thought as well as reports coming from Florida and Europe. I kept wanting to throttle Isaac. What is interesting to me is a lot of times the European model gets our weather correct over our forecasters. I like it now that at times our TV stations give both reports.

MinusTwo

Loved Isaac's Storm, but then I love Galveston.

I've been looking for Bill Crider books for awhile. They are hard to find in used book stores. Crider died in 2018. I finally just found & read an autographed copy of Dead on the Island (1991), a wonderful mystery set in Galveston. It's so true to everything I know about the island - restaurants, shops, traffic, buildings, water lines from the 'big storm', etc. He even mentions Shrimp N' Stuff. Of course this was the way the island was before cruise ships came in 2000 but there's still lots of history left.

Good description of the 'present day' character's ties to the "uncles" who ran the "past" crime business - who were of course the Maceos - uncles of Tillman Fertitta. Don't know if you follow restaurants, but good old Tillman just snapped up "The Palm" restaurant chain. I thought he might stop after 'Mortons', then maybe after 'Del Friscos', then after the Las Vegas Casino. Not much left that he doesn't own.

Interesting quote from Texas Monthly Magazine. ...what the Maceos ran for thirty years was indisputably an organized-crime syndicate. The brothers' slot machines were ubiquitous, and their homemade booze was distilled and bottled in a large Galveston warehouse. They could defy the law because the local lawmen were on their payroll—"Paid them off, every month, in cash," according to 85-year-old Pete Salvato, a close ally of the Maceos who operated casinos in the Galveston County town of Dickinson. "They used the law to chase the competition out of town." Judges and politicians were equally compromised. Additionally, the Maceos owned a number of legitimate local businesses—a fish house, a dairy, a trucking company, a concrete-mixing company—and applied their muscle to ensure that these industries as well remained under their control. The Maceo era came to an end on June 19, 1957,

voraciousreader

minus...Galveston has been on my bucket list for a very long time....hope I will, one day, get to scratch it off my list...

voraciousreader

kath...yep. His brother seemed a bit more worried....

MelissaDallas

If they’d just listened to the Cubans instead of being arrogant pricks..

carolehalston

I like Galveston, too. It has its own charm.

I just finished a Karin Slaughter stand alone novel called Pieces of Her. The main character is a young woman who does not know her mother's real background. The plot is the daughter's journey to understanding the back story which explains much about the present. The book alternates between present time and past time when the mother was young and got caught up in a revolutionary cult. I find Slaughter to be a good story teller.

voraciousreader

i just got Erik Larson’s newest book, The Splendid and the Vile. I read the first page and what a wallop! Just cleared all of my other delicious books off my coffee table and I am going to dive in!

MinusTwo

VR - looking for a review down the road. I'm finally starting Educated - with MANY mixed feelings, but my BFF keeps asking me to discuss it.

I just finished John Lescroart's 2019 The Rule of Law. He's always been one of my favorites, but someone here (maybe Pat?) said they were disappointed. I agree, The Rule of Law (2019) was not one of his better books. He sort of tried too hard to bring tons of old characters together. Though I've read all his previous books and was nominally familiar with the people, and have heard him speak - it was a stretch - or a slog. It almost felt like - "OK, I've wrapped them all up & I'm done." I like him & I like San Francisco, so I won't give up on him.

Interesting to discover in Lescroart's "thank yous", that Max Byrd, Rob Leininger & C.J.Box are listed as his 'writer colleagues'. I don't know the first two, but I like Box's game warden novels. I actually have plans to hear Box speak & read at one of our Indie bookstores next Thursday. (preceded by a rainbow trout dinner at one of my favorite restaurants that I rarely go to because it's across town).

MinusTwo

For Eric Larson fans - I just read his 6 'best book' choices. Thought you might be interested.

1) The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman (1962); 2) The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930); 3) War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869); 4) The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993); 5) Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Mlllhauser (1996); and 6) Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983).

I've read them all except Martin Dressler..., although some readings were many years ago & I should probably re-visit.

ruthbru

I just got back from a vacation (where I read a number of historical biographies, none of which I will recommend). I just now ordered the hardcover of The Splendid and the Vile. I want to read it in 'real' book form & I know I will want to keep it. Exciting!

Minus, I loved The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman (actually anything by her is wonderful). That book was John Kennedy's 'Bible' of how not to lead. How rash actions taken by leaders can have unintended consequences and spiral out of their control.

pat01

Minus, the John Lescroart book I recently read was "Fatal", and it was an OK book but seemed kind of like it had too much going on. Not the John Lescroart I remember from years back with Dismas Hardy. Currently I am reading "The Wright Brothers" by David McCullogh - what a great story and a great storyteller! I'm really enjoying learning about them.

MinusTwo

Pat - I think that's it exactly - too much going on.

I read Educated. I'm not sure when I'll be able to recover my equilibrium. SO sorry I yielded to the temptation to pick up the damn thing. The fact of the matter is we can't always or maybe even usually "fix things" in relationships. Particularly with people we love dearly.

JKL2017

Thanks, Minus. I have Educated on reserve at the library but think I may not want to read it now. I just finished Rising Out of Hatred (a very interesting story of a young man raised to be a white supremacist who disavowed those beliefs after attending a liberal college in Florida) and Olive, Again (which I enjoyed even more than Olive Kitteridge). Not sure what I’ll start next but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

Carole, I too like Karin Slaughter and enjoyed Pieces of Her. Slaughter is a predictably good story-teller.