What are you reading the week of October 10, 2010?

[DUgosh]

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

[meowomon]

1. In Touch Weekly

October 11th issue.

[scarletwoman]

2. The Cloud of Unknowing by Thomas H. Cook

I'm two thirds through it, I'll probably stay up late tonight until I finish it.

[MrSlayer]

3. Gauntlgrym - R.A. Salvatore

The newest in the Drizzt series. Just released.

[Broken_Hero]

4. Temple of the Winds, by Terry Goodkind,

so far the series is above average. Some of the writing seems cliche, but there are some elements that Goodkind has added, that I've never read/seen before in a fantasy novel.

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

5. Eater by Gregory Benford

and 'The Zombie Survival Guide' by Max Brooks in the throne room. The former is science fiction written (very well) by an astrophysicist, and the later, well, you can never be too safe, or too sure.

http://ih1.redbubble.net/work.1441756.5.fig,baby_blue,mens,fbfbfb.zombie-fist-v3.jpg

[abluelady]

15. "Salvation City" by Sigrid Nunez

[Just One Woman]

6. C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

[saltpoint]

7. Hiaasen is terrific.

I'm a short ways into THE EASTER PARADE by Richard Yates.

[DUgosh]

9. he really is

I love Hoot, Flush and Scat even though they are for younger readers

[doc03]

8. Heat Lightning by John Sandford n/t

[madfloridian]

10. Good book. One of my favorite writers.

[madfloridian]

11. Herding Donkeys by Ari Berman.

Very interesting.

[azmouse]

12. "The Gates of Hell Are About To Open" by John Connolly

It's a book intended for young adults but dang if it isn't pretty funny for old adults too! :)

[japple]

13. David Payne's book, Return to Wando Passo eom

[japple]

18. Excellent writing and good story, though I couldn't stand the

main character (tho' I did "feel his pain.")

[LWolf]

14. "Paper Towns," by John Green.

Finished "The Knife of Never Letting Go," by Patrick Ness yesterday.

I can recommend "Paper Towns" for high school age readers. The other, not so much.

I'm currently reading through a stack of books recommended for YA males; DUer villager pointed me in the right direction to find them.

[hippywife]

16. Some Soul to Keep by J. California Cooper.

Two more to read after that. :hi:

[MaineDem]

17. "61 Hours" by Lee Child

I'm waiting for the new Ken Follett book.

[didact]

20. Read this one...pretty good, my first one for the series*

nfm

[fadedrose]

22. Read the first - all of them

They're good, real good, and tell how he became a loner, where he got the money that comes to his bank account, etc....

Wish I hadn't read them so I could enjoy them all over again...

[MaineDem]

24. I've only read two

I'm going to go back on Audible and see if I can get the beginning books. I'd love to know the backstory on Reacher.

[didact]

19. American Assassin by Vince Flynn........is that wrong? :)

[MaineDem]

25. I've read all his books except the new one

I enjoy them for the entertainment.

[didact]

40. The latest is very good, his last couple may have dropped a notch...

but this one is excellent, even though it's a prequel

[AngryOldDem]

21. "The Twenty-Seventh City" by Jonathan Franzen

I wanted to re-read "The Corrections" before I get into "Freedom," (whenever my library gets it) but it was out. This book was on the shelf, and I'm about 150 pages into it and wondering if it's going to be worth my while to continue. It came out in '88 -- must have been one of his first (if not the first) efforts.

[krispos42]

23. "The Island of the Sequinned Love Nun" by Chris Moore.

It's funny. :D And sexy.

[MaineDem]

26. I have it but haven't read it yet. n/t

[matt819]

27. A few, of course

Just finished Bad Blood by John Sandford, the fourth, I think, in the Virgil Flowers series. Virgil's a hoot, and Minnesota is a very strange place in John Sandford's world.

Also, just finished listening to Killer Instinct by Joseph Finder. As usual with Finder, a pretty good thriller - well, maybe thriller's not the right word, but he's a master at ratcheting up the tension. At one point I almost stopped reading because the crap was endlessly being heaped on the main character and he took a while to respond. There are only a few women characters, and they are annoying as hell, which is, if memory serves, sort of consistent in Finder's books.

Also in the middle of The Black Cat by Martha Grimes - typical British police procedural. Reliable, entertaining, quirky characters.

[fadedrose]

28. Thanks for the "Virgil" reminder

I read the very first one and liked it, meant to get the others, and got sidetracked somehow and forgot about him. Heat Lightening is going on my list...

[matt819]

30. Virgil's one of those characters you want to be

He's not high on that list, but I think it would be pretty nifty to be him. No. 1 on that list is Jack Reacher. Burke is somewhere on that list.

[fadedrose]

32. Ya, but

the same shtick can get tiresome...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

29. Just finished The Four Last Things by Andrew Taylor (plus two other recently discovered authors)

It's the first novel in a trilogy in which the books are in reverse chronological order.

The first book tells of the kidnapping of a four-year-old girl by a deeply disturbed woman and her not-too-bright and psychologically damaged male accomplice. There are hints in the book that the girl's father and great-uncle know something that no one else does and that the kidnappings somehow tie in to a crazy old woman who wandered off the streets into a church and cursed the girl's mother, who is a deacon in the Church of England.

I've been reading European mysteries in preference to American mysteries lately, because the Euros seem to write with more psychological and philosophical depth.

Recent discoveries include Susan Hill, whose The Secret Haunts of Men and The Pure in Heart are the first two books in a series about a policeman in a small English city (modeled on Wells, England, I think) who is the maverick in a family of doctors. While moral and ethical, he is emotionally clueless, to his great detriment.

I also liked Tana French's In the Woods, about a police detective who, at the age of twelve, wandered into the woods in an area outside of Dublin, Ireland with two friends and was later found covered in blood, with no memory of what had happened (and his friends were never seen again.) His family moves and sends him to school in England to escape the notoriety, but twenty years later, he's a Dublin police detective, assigned to a case in which a young girl is found dead in those same woods.

Another European favorite is Icelander Arnaldur Indridason, who probes the dark side of his country's society. I didn't know that Iceland had immigrants, but his latest book, Arctic Chill, is about the murder of a young immigrant boy from Thailand.

If you've enjoyed the Wallander series on PBS (or if you haven't), try Henning Maskell's Wallander books, all {?} of which have been translated into English. I don't really like Kenneth Branagh's portrayal, which makes Wallander look and act as if he just crawled out from sleeping in an alley. The (subtitled) Swedish version, available to viewers of MHz Worldview TV about 1 Sunday night per month, is much truer to the books and features a portrayal of Wallander as a much more normal person.

[fadedrose]

33. Gees Lydia, I thought you were all mixed up...:)

I had to go to these two sites, and you're okay, you're not mixed up.
you'd think with all the words in the English language there would be NO duplicate titles, especially two entitled, The Four Last Things

See for yourself (I just happened to request the other one from the library)...

http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/T_Authors/Taylor_Andrew.html

http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/H_Authors/Hallinan_Timothy.html

Taylor's is 1997 and Hallinan's is 1989. I will have to give Taylor a try.

Taylor has a lot of awards, but I feel that Hallinan deserves some as well.

[hippywife]

35. I just requested three of your recommendations.

The Tana French, Into the Woods, and the two Susan Hill Books. The first one should be The Various Haunts of Men.

Thanx! I look forward to reading them. :hi:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

36. Right!

The VARIOUS Haunts of Men.

Anyway, remember that the Brits don't always go for happy endings.

[fadedrose]

31. Recommending A NAIL THRUGH THE HEART by Timothy Hallinan

So good, am surprised that I liked this and the 3 books after this so much. I usually shy away from books from the far east because I don't know the language or the culture. I think I really like Thai people

I love Poke Rafferty and his friend policeman, Arthit. Their conversations about the crimes they're working on are so enjoyable. The stories are good, the characters well developed. "Victims are guilty, and killers are innocent," in a few (probably most)of these stories.

I read the first book last because I had to wait for to come in from another library. I think I'll check out Hallinan's books that he wrote in the nineties as well.

http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/H_Authors/Hallinan_Timothy.html

Do yourself a favor and check'em out.

[HuckleB]

34. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet," by David Mitchell. -- (It's FANTASTIC!)

[Fire Walk With Me]

37. Just got Alastair Reynold's newest, Terminal World, after not having a book for a couple of weeks.

I'm glad that I'm breaking my dry spell with an AR book.

[JitterbugPerfume]

38. The Autobiography of Mark Twain

It is a huge book , and I just started!

His association with General Grant is fascinating reading , and if the rest is as good it will be awesome.

I am not even to the real autobiography past yet , which is about 250 pages in . He made some false starts , which are included at the beginning . This will take a while because if I run into something I don't "get", Google is my friend.

So far--I now know what Linsy Woolsey is thanks to the Google.

This is just volume one , so I will be immersed in Mark twain for a while!

[yellowdogintexas]

39. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest damn Good