Goodreads-currently reading
Once again I have started to keep up with my “for fun” (translates to mostly fiction, although not always) reading through Goodreads. I joined the yearly challenge and thought I might not make it to my goal of 45 this year, but after 3 months of reading, I think I’ll make it. I’d forgotten I can read fairly quickly once I get far enough into a book and the mystery and action are well along.
The sudden burst of reading fiction — I have always read a lot of non-fiction — comes about because I am not on “screens” for work so much now that I am retired; I have found Libby, the library borrowing app, thanks to friend Kay for telling me; and, I got a new Kindle paperwhite that has the orange tint to the page. That orange tint is warm, inviting and a world unto itself.
The Libby app is impressive. My library card lets me login on my iPad, put a hold on upt to 10 books (which after reading The NYT Book Review on Sundays is always maxed out) and borrow up to 20 ebooks or audio books. You can read a chapter to try the book out, just as you might if standing in the stacks of the library itself, and you can read further reviews for the book on Goodreads or Amazon. A world of books I want to read floods my screens. And having several on the Kindle at once, lets you read according to mood.
The last 5 books read
After 37 books this first quarter, there are some books that were supposed to be great that just didn’t speak to me and others that I might not have found had it not been for perusing online libraries or NYT reviews. After I read Margaret Atwood’s review for Steven King’s 50 years in the NYT last weekend, I ended up consuming King’s “Holly”. King is, I’ve always thought, a fantastic writer, but his subjects have been a little out of my interest range. I’m not sure I want to put his ideas in my head. I did like Holly as an investigator but it was a stretch to see the “bad guys” were so far gone in their approach to dehumanization.
The shocking read so far has been “Birnham Wood”. I don’t really write book reviews anymore afterall, why should I have to, I’m retired. “Birnham Wood” is long but memorable because of its shock value ending. Or was it cheating. At least she didn’t end with, “And then I woke up.”
Two books I highly recommend: “The Lost Year” by Katharine Marsh, a clever and informative YA novel about the 1930s famine in Russia and Ukraine; and Kristin Harmel’s “The Book of Lost Names” about the memory of Jewish people who were helped to escape to France during WWII.
The top disturbing book was Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl guide to the future” with its ironic title. Oh the things we do not know. I wonder about Kate’s health as she visited highly radioactive sites (even though they were declared not so) like the red forest, or the sheep farm near Chernobyl. I wonder where wool from that sheep farm has been shipped. Is their wool clothing out in the world just like the radioactive food that was sent to help with the famine in Africa?
As for Sci Fi, I love John Wyndham books and thought I would re-read a few, but the library here (and Amazon) does not carry Wyndham books. Sigh, I will need to dig through the remaining boxes in storage to see if I kept any paperbacks. But I did find Blake Crouch and “Upgrade” was riveting.
It’s an interesting thing to think of which books will be my top 5 for the year. But you’ll have to wait, as will I, to find out.
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J’s bookshelf: read
Unnatural Death
by Patricia Cornwell
Holly
by Stephen King
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
by Sarah McCammon
Postmortem
by Patricia Daniels Cornwell
Body of Evidence
by Patricia Cornwell