What Are You Reading the Week of 29 September 2012?

Bare bones, but here it is!

I have to review The Walls of the Universe and Head Wounds this weekend. MUST!

Very surprised that the library coughed up The Garden of Evening Mists so soon after my request and intend to spend the rainy weekend hunkering down for a good read.

I'll probably be spending most of my reading time this weekend with Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway -- it's an Express Read due back at the library on Wednesday, and I haven't started yet.

I'm listening to Toby's Room by Pat Barker. In print I'm reading Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow by Juliet Grey, and on my Nook I'm reading Black Fire by Robert Graysmith.

I read the next book in the Inspector Montalbano series, The Track of Sand which I loved. After a couple of mediocre books in the middle of the series, Camilleri is back to form.

I'm currently reading my ER book, The Hopkins Touch. I was hooked from the first page. It's a well written biography of Harry Hopkins (one of FDR's go-to men) focusing on his diplomatic efforts during World War II.

I started the german Station 5 today. I'm not far into it yet. So far I can only tell that it's about an older woman who's going to get an artficial hip joint and according to the blurb it's all about the time of recovery and other patients on the station.

Bare bones is fine, Richard. Thanks for starting us off!

I'm a bit farther along in Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak. Thanks for the recommendation, Richard! I am really enjoying it, and have identified with different aspects of both Mildred Augustine and Harriet Stratemeyer in their earlier years. This is not just a book about the ubiquitous girl detective. It's about feminism, so many aspects of U.S. history, academic history, even a bit of world history, and so much more ... and I'm not even on page 100 yet!

I'm on Wish You Well by David Baldacci. It is very different from his other books and has me wishing for more time to just sit and absorb it.

I am reading The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks, and I am really enjoying it so far.

I'm reading Shikasta by Doris Lessing and Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse.

Read for the second straight time Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher by Tom Bethell. Started Where The Conflict Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga.

Thanks Richard, for starting us off. I don't mind bare bones either, I simply appreciate that you take the time to do it for us. So ... thank you.

I am vastly enjoying Garden of the Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng and after that have Running with the Kenyans in the hopper. I am then looking for a really, really good book to take to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, for not only reading, but reading out loud to my girlfriend. So if you guys have anything beautiful that comes to mind, let me know (Garden of the Evening Mists would have been perfect, for instance).

No problem about 'bare bones', richard, we're just thankful that you started the thread! :)

In between books, not sure what I'll grab when I get offline...

I'm glad the bareness isn't causing angst! I'm not up for much right now. I'm sitting out the next episode in the Doctor Who marathon on BBC America, so I figured I'd come post a notice of review.

I finished and really enjoyed The Walls of the Universe, which I'd recommend to any SF-friendly multiverse-story-enjoying between-book-puzzlin' soul. The review's in my thread...post #203.

I'm still enjoying my current sci-fi listen Carnival by Elizabeth Bear
on Nook I just finished my last baseball related book for the month Blockade Billy, and it was funny. I'd never heard of Luis Aparicio before this month and now he's been in 3 of my books.
on paper I'm basking in the friendliness of Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes and am thankful it's set in a small Indian village. Just thinking of the smells in the big cities makes me a little nauseated. Though, I have to say her description of small pox makes me glad I was vaccinated.
Yesterday I went grocery shopping and J. K. Rowling's new book The Casual Vacancy was on sale for 40% off. How could I refuse. That's up next, after Jana Bibi, and I hear the people are a little less welcoming.

I was lucky enough to snag a copy of Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes a few months ago for Early Reviewer. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was just one of those books that made me smile a lot and sometimes that simple fact is a wonderful thing.

Finished Murder at Vassar and started Elizabeth Peters' Night of four hundred rabbits. I'm also casually dabbling with Three men in a boat

>12 CarolynSchroeder: Thinking of your quest for a book to read aloud, Carolyn, I did a LT search of the tag read aloud. It appears that the only people we read to are children. Of course, I didn't examine all 11,890 entries to make sure that was true. Someone should tag things adult read aloud, no?

>15 Citizenjoyce: Hi, Joyce ~ How funny the coincidence of hearing so many references to Luis Aparicio all at once for the first time! I had a huge crush on him back in the late 50s/early 60s, when I was a preteen. My mom would take me and my little brother and sisters to Cominsky Park a couple times every summer to see the Sox play. I don't remember much more about him than he played shortstop and was young and a real cutie!

I started Robinson Crusoe two days ago, time to get into some classics :D

I am trying to find time to finish Wild Decembers by Edna O'Brien, lots of interruptions grrr.
My next has been highly recommended by a reader friend When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman..

~18 ~ Wow, thanks for looking that up Citizenjoyce. That is kind of sad, no? I mean, I would think reading to adults (especially in hospitals and such) would be a well ... a nice thing to do. I was thinking just something she would like (she is not infirm) ... I will come up with something!

I started God On The Rocks by Jane Gardam last night

Still working on N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

Finished the fascinating, thought provoking The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Started listening to Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt....

Happy Banned Books Week!

I've put The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips aside to read a banned book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. I bought it a year ago at City Lights Bookstore and finally have had the pleasure to begin reading it.

I finished and REVIEWED a fabulous ER book, David Gillham's City of Women.

Now I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

>19 Storeetllr:- Storeetllr, none of the books mentioned that Aparicio was a cutie. Now I know even more.

Carolyn, last year I listend to an audiobook of The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich and thought it was a story meant to be read aloud. I loved it, but many people in my book club didn't.

>24 seitherin: seitherin: I love The Silmarillion. Enjoy!

I did it again, staying up into the morning to finish Something Rotten. It's a very bad habit. Set to start First Among Sequels tonight.

I've finally written a review of Head Wounds, a Long Island noir novel by Chris Knopf, that doesn't embarrass me. It's in my thread...post #204.

I'm reading Pocketful of Names by Joe Coomer after reading a wonderful descriptive review here on LT. Enjoying it very much.

It's the last day of the quarter! Share your top 5 books from the last 3 months here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/142516

I've always wished I could find a person or small group of people who would allow me to read Stegner's Crossing to Safety to them. Citizenjoyce, I think you're right about The Plague of Doves, too -- one of my favorite books. I also feel that way about Marilynne Robinson's books and some of her essays -- "Psalm 8" is a favorite that I think would be perfect for reading aloud.

So, I just finished Amy and Isabelle tonight and it was wonderfully engrossing to me. I think Elizabeth Strout is a terrific author! :) I am reading The President's Lady now.

I finished the delightful Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes. Thanks all who recommended it. Now, or rather tomorrow, I get to start the new J. K. Rowling. Tonight there's just too much good TV on to read.

Black Fire wasn't catching my attention, so I'm trying Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson instead.

I have always wanted to read Dune so tonight I started it. I didn't get very far...it is a lot to process but I typically love these big meaty stories that introduce you to new worlds full of political intrigue and generations of complex family relationships. A book to really sink your teeth into. Now I just need to find enough uninterupted time to get into it.

I loved Dune when I read it. You're in for a treat, Iudita

I'm reading The Bone People and Carolan: the Life, Times and Music of an Irish Harper. Loving them both!

Reading Winston Churchill, The Life a moving and comprehensive biography.

#18 & 22
Years ago I made a cassette tape recording of myself reading folktales and fairy tales that covered a variety of subjects. I gave this recording to my Uncle who was at the time far from home in the M. D. Anderson clinic in Houston, TX. He loved it. I made it and gave it to him because I didn't have any money for a real gift but it turned out that he really liked the recording and listened to it frequently. It turned out to be one of the best things I could have done.

I also did the same thing for my niece when she was born.

The Garden of Evening Mists was terrific, and my review's on the book page. Just started A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I can see why this is a favorite of so many LTers.

#41 Benita, that's a really beautiful thing to do. I definitely think it's one of the best things you could have done for him. It shows so much care and love. Most bought things can't achieve that.

I started reading a travel book. Don't know why, because I have so many books started right now, but this one is on Barcelona. I hope it gives me a better handle on the history of that city so when I start reading the new Carlos Ruiz Zafon book I will have some background about the city that he loves so much. I continue to listen to Red Herring Without Mustard and read 1Q84 as well.

41 -- My uncle was a great storyteller -- mostly stories from his childhood and youth, but also tales handed down from family history. As he got older my aunt realized they contained information that future generations might want to have and wrote down many of them. But why didn't we think to record him telling them? (This was in the 1950s and no one I knew actually owned a reel-to-reel recorder, but I wish now we'd borrowed one.) The minute I heard he was dead it hit me that I'd never hear that wonderful voice again, all those stories, all that history. We treasure the stories his wife wrote down for us but I can see in the younger generation of our family that although they like the stories, they will never mean to them what they did to those of us who sat on the porch at his house in the evening and listened to him create indelible pictures in our minds.

So many of his stories are so clear in my mind that I feel as though I must have been an eyewitness to them, even though they happened before I was born. Do children know how to visualize anymore? So much is shown to them. My students used to wish for pictures in the books I read to them, wanting to know what the characters looked like. I tried to teach them to create the characters in their minds, but they just wanted to know if there was a movie of the book that they could see.

I am reading The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt. So far very enjoyable. I am having a hard time putting it down!

I think kids are starved for stories and using their imagination. I always try to summon one or more from my reading(s) when my niece comes to stay (she is 11). She LOVES that, getting in jammies and listening to stories. The last one I recalled was from that book The Art of Hearing Heartbeats - a fairy tale (with a rather sad ending). I put some twists on it though. She is a typical, lives on I-touch/computer, 11-going-on-18 ... but she seems to relish getting away from it all and creating and listening to stories. She loves being read to and reading to me too.

Please excuse the off topic post, but can someone explain something to me? If two apostrophes, the text, two apostrophes is supposed to produce italics, how come it doesn't in the post I'm trying to use it in? This is in my newly created thread (http://www.librarything.com/topic/142938). I want the first paragraph to be in italics ans enclosed it in two apostrophes, but nothing happened. Why?

Hi Catreona. The way to format text in LibraryThing messages is to use HTML. To get italics use the HTML for it, to wit:

<i>Text to be formatted</i> which yields Text to be formatted.

Robert

To inaugurate my new thread, I'm going to post the message I received announcing the start of registration for the National Federation of the Blind's annual Braille Readers Are Leaders contest:

Cool! I've been wondering how that was done - thanks Catreona & Mr. Durick!

Just finished Road to Valour, and it was just as good as expected. (I'll indulge in a little bit of evangelism here: READ THIS BOOK! READ THIS BOOK! Ok, I'm done now. It was really good.) So nice, after hearing so much about whiny, overpaid sports celebrities, to read about a humble star who risked his life to save others. Wow.

Now moving on to The Sandcastle Girls: I forget who here recommended it? But I'm agreeing!

I finished A Room Full of Bones by Elly Griffiths and now I'm back to Everything Matters! and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

All are excellent!

I'm so pleased to see that Dinaw Mengestu and Junot Diaz have been awarded MacArthur fellowships -- the so-called "genius" grants. I've been wanting to read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears again anyway.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-macarthur-genius-junot-di...

#49 Just interested. How did you manage to do that without your first mention of 'text to be formatted' coming out in italics? In my world, that kind of thing gets you burned as a witch.

When my cousin and her husband attended a performance of the ballet Midsummer's Nights Dream her husband did not know the story, so she got a copy of the Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and read it aloud to him. I don't know if they went back to the ballet, but she said reading it turned out to be a very romantic thing for the two of them. :-)

>53 Booksloth: I've reviewed a novella, Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear, in my thread...post #205.

It's the sequel to a short-story collection set in an alternative reality where the Prussian Empire controls 1938 London, and the future freedom of England depends on an elderly forensic sorceress and an even older wampyr.

I'm not sure why, but Between the Woods and the Water isn't taking me along with it like the earlier A Time of Gifts did, even though I started to read the one straight after the other. Perhaps it's a case of one castle too many or perhaps I find German culture and history more interesting than Hungarian. Either way, I find myself looking at the words (as Eric Morecambe once put it) rather than reading the book.

Began to read The Country Wife and have nearly finished both Paradise Lost and The Illustrated Pepys.

56> That's John Milton's Paradise Lost, by the way - the touchstone has brought up something else.

I am reading The Wild Child by Mary Jo Putney, a historical romance. First in a trilogy.

Started both Far Bright Star and A Walk Across America yesterday. Got The Mark of Athena downloaded to my Kindle this morning and will, no doubt, begin it almost immediately.

I've just started J.K. Rowling's adult fiction book The Casual Vacancy.

#60 Please let's know your thoughts after reading, lots of hype down under, a half hour interview with the author was quite interesting, I am not a Harry Potter reader, however this one could be darkly interesting!!

53, Booksloth, the less than and greater than signs in the first instance are not entered by their keyboard keys but by the ASCII code for them which has the effect of making them not markup language per se but simply instances in the markup language. If I were not sick I would post the code for you; it requires looking up and using the ASCII code for an ampersand. I usually get those codes here.

Robert

@Iudita: Dune is great, the sequels less so.

I'd read it again, but you're right: you need time (quiet too) to read it properly.

(53) @Booksloth, there's a secret way to do it...but I don't know how....

&#60; yields < and &#62; yields >

Robert

a few months ago I gave my copy of The Accidental to a friend. I had tried to read it and just couldn't get into it. I told her I had trouble and quit reading it about 70 pages in. The other day she gave me my copy back and said that she just couldn't get into it either. Did anybody read this book and like it? How did it get to be a Booker Prize finalist?

Interested in feedback about The Casual Vacancy as well.

#62 - Thank you for explaining but you lost me around 'Booksloth'. Not your fault and I should have pointed out I'm not that computer literate. It's enough for me to know there is a reasonable explanation and that it's not magic. Hope you feel better soon.

Back to the thread - I've taken a quick break from The Bone People which, though lovely, is getting a bit repetitious with still nearly 200 pages to go, to read Blow Your House Down. I started it around 11.30 tonight and here I am now (1.25am) still unable to put it down.

Sitting here feeling viscerally glum but not entirely inactive I did post the codes in 65. You just type in the five characters where you want the symbol to appear in your posted message.

Robert

50 Heduanna I am about 80 pages to the end of The Sand Castle Girls and it is an excellent read. Hard to read parts at times... but still a very good story and one I knew little about. I highly recommend it.

Thank you Robert.

I realized this evening that I'd not read or reviewed a Member Giveaway book, Heaven Sent by Becca Fisher. I since have rectified that situation.

>66 benitastrnad:. Benitastrnad, I read The Accidental several years ago and, although I finished it, I thought the premise was ridiculous: a stranger shows up at your door and stays for dinner because you think she a friend of your husband and he thinks she's a friend of yours. She makes herself quite at home. And returns the next day. You and your husband never ask each other who the woman is! Preposterous! That was the gist of the book. (I may have the details wrong since I read it a while ago but that's the general idea.)

She recently published There But For The. Its premise: a man comes to dinner with a friend. He doesn't know the hosts but asks to be excused and goes upstairs to use the bathroom but instead locks himself into the spare room.....for months!

She seems to specialize in preposterous story lines.

#69 Got that. Thanks!

I'm carrying Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire around with me, I have stalled around page 100... I'm actually reading Definitely Dead. I have a stack of urban fantasy from the clearance bin, I may visit those later this week, see if anything catches my interest there.

#72
That was kinda the feeling that I got from the book. I Purl Ruled it, but felt guilty because it was so highly praised by the critics. I passed it on to a friend because I thought that perhaps I had made a mistake and was just unable to appreciate it. When she didn't like it I began to wonder if the critics were the ones who made the mistake. I am thinking it was them and not us.

Just finished Wish You Well and now starting Last Man Standing both by David Baldacci.

>49 Mr.Durick:: Thanks, Robert!

>54 benitastrnad: benitastrnad: What a lovely story.

>75 benitastrnad: benitastrnad: Perhaps a case of the emperor's new clothes? I mean, she's an international superstar, which is pretty rare for an author, *and* richer than the queen several times over last I heard. Of course anything she writes is *just maaaahvelous, darling*

Mind you, I'm a big HP fan, and I did download -The Casual Vacancy, will probably start it this weekend. But, I'm not expecting much.

Finished the coming of age story, Tell The Wolves I'm Home. Starting to listen to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.

Last night I read some more of Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, finished At Bertram's Hotel, an excellent read, and started another Agatha Christie, Elephants Can Remember. Falling asleep is such a bother! Tonight I'll probably return to First Among Sequels.

I've posted my mega-~meh~ review of The Devil's Hearth in my thread...post #208.

I finished and reviewed The Casual Vacancy and loved it - couldn't stop reading. I think Rowling does a great job letting her characters explain poverty, mental illness, and teenagers.

I finished and was (pleasantly) surprised by Robinson Crusoe. I started Een handvol duisternis (collection of stories by Philip K. Dick) next.

Finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and it definitely wasn't my cup of tea. I disliked most of the characters and the story just didn't interest me. The outcome did though, so I finished it anyway, but no surprises there. It was on the 1001 books list, so I got to cross one more off, the best thing for me about this book.

I now started Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey after warm praise by ampipsmith and I love everything about it! It's an enchanting story that immediately draws you in. It's about 900 pages, so I expect to be in for a marvellously long enjoyable ride.

Also, for my website I'm reading some esoteric/new age stuff. The path to love: renewing the power of spirit in your life by Deepak Chopra and The Gift of Loving-Kindness: 100 Meditations on Compassion, Generosity, and Forgiveness by Mary Brantley and Tesilya Hanauer.

I am really enjoying Perfectly Pure And Good by Frances Fyfield, the author is new to me, I just love her way of writing and her descriptions of the unusual characters,this his lady I shall be following up!!!

#72/75 That premise may be closer to real life than you think (okay, this one didn't go on for days). When I was about 13 there came a knock at the door one evening and a man stood outside beaming and announcing "It's Jenny from Birmingham!" - he was followed up the drive by (presumably) the aforementioned Jenny and their teenaged daughter. Now both my parents had distant relatives in the Birmingham area so they smiled politely and said "Oh, how lovely! Come in!"

A rather strange evening ensued. Lots of polite but unrevealing conversation and lots of coffee (the only thing my mother could remember about the Birmingham branch of the family was that they were strict Methodists so she didn't like to offer them alcohol). At the end of the evening, the family left with promises to call in again 'the next time they were passing' and my parents turned to each other as Mum said "So who the hell were they?" "Dad replied "I haven't got a clue; I thought they were something to do with you." Perhaps a demonstration that you can take good manners just so far. It reminds me of the old quip "Next time you're passing, please do."

Back to the subject in hand - Blow Your House Down was gripping but very strange but it's got me back on a crime binge and I'm attempting my first Wallander book, Faceless Killers - so far, so good.

Just finished a somewhat chilling, but good read, The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay, and love When Witches Wands Won't Work which I'm pretty sure is not for kids, but for adults ~ it's hilarious!!!

I am reading Shiver by Lisa Jackson and White Lies by Linda Howard.
next up will be Hoodwinked by Caroline Burnes and In the Woods by Tana French.

A few chapters into Some Kind of Fairy Tale, a new novel about a girl whose been missing for 20 years and presumed dead showing up at her family's house. Intriguing so far.

Started rereading The Hobbit in preparation for the movie. Or rather Movie #1 of 3!

I finished the excellent review of medical ethics Creating Humans by Alexander McCall Smith. Now into a very different direction with an audiobook of The Midwife's Apprentice a Newbery Award winning novel about midwifery in the Middle Ages. On paper I've started Call the Midwife which I noticed is being produced by PBS in the US starting this Sunday.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Faceless Killers and I can't say I'm that excited (though I will finish it). Such a disappointment when a book or series that has been much-promoted turns out to be just more of the same old same old.

Finished The Illustrated Pepys and The Country Wife.

I have just finished reading the novel Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen .

I'm currently reading Breakdown by Sara Paretsky.

#93 Booksloth: I thought the same thing when I read Faceless Killers earlier this year. I found it quite interestng since I know very little about scandinavian culture, but the story and the detective work was not that great actually.

Well, I finally reviewed the pleasant, nice, perfectly okay Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes, in my thread...post #300.

Well, I finished The President's Lady: A Novel About Rachel and Andrew Jackson last night. I found it totally riveting although at times it did drag in places. I didn't know all that much about Andrew and Rachel Jackson's marriage, but felt so sorry for them and the hardships that they had to suffer through.

I immediately picked up Duplicate Keys and started reading it.

>99 moonshineandrosefire: Their love story was so moving to me...and her death on the eve of victory...!

I'm just now starting A Singular Hostage by Thalassa Ali. I'm not even past the prologue yet. I hope it lives up to my expectations, it sounds so intrigueing and promising.

It is about a young woman who, during the British Raj went to India to find a husband, and, instead, finds herself pulled into a political plot when the small son of a Maharajah's courtier is being held hostage by the Maharajah and it is up to her to save him as he is dying from neglect.

I am so looking forward to this one!

#100 - Andrew Jackson was completely convinced that his political rivals and the vicious and dirty campaign they waged against him hastened her death from a heart attack. He never forgave the people who he believed killed her, and mourned her death for the rest of his life.

#97 " . . . the story and the detective work was not that great actually" describes it very well indeed. I just finished Faceless Killers and certainly won't be bothering with anything else in the series. When the books started to be televised here (UK) a few years ago there was a lot of publicity about how great they (supposedly) are but I'm obviously missing something. One thing I will say in this book's favour is that it is probably truer to real police work than many other books in the genre in that I'm sure a lot of real police officers must try to use logic, work on their hunches, practise maverick feats of derring-do etc only to find the real criminal appears (if they appear at all) out of left field, leaving clues unexplained and bearing no particular connection to the investigation. I'm sure it happens all the time but I don't need to be bored to death reading about it.

So still on the hunt for a good murder story, I'm now trying The English Monster to see if that will be any more entertaining.

Ed to close italics - apologies to Framboise if you had to do it for me!

#92: Thanks for letting us know about Call the Midwife. I'd never heard of it but watched the first episode on pbs.org last night. I love British shows and this one is really interesting. I'm ordering the book too. She wrote a trilogy about working in the East End.

#93, #97 - Actually, Faceless Killers is the only Wallander novel I've liked -- though I also liked some of the shorter Wallander mysteries (anthologized in The Pyramid). I bought several more of the novels and set out to read them in order but I didn't care much for The White Lioness or The Dogs of Riga -- they were okay, but they seemed to abandon the things I'd most liked about Faceless Killers -- the austere Scandinavian setting, the spare, uncluttered way in which the story was written -- which all seemed to give me such a sense of Wallander himself. He seemed to be a different person in the later books, a man I wasn't as interested in reading about anymore. I've been trying to talk myself into giving the series another chance, but there are so many other temptations in the tbr pile.

So I'd recommend you give one of the later Wallander books a chance . . . since we seem to have had the opposite reaction to Faceless Killers, maybe you'll really like the others.

>93 Booksloth:, 97 and 105 - The first Mankell I read was Return of the Dancing Master, which is a standalone, and I was not impressed, so then I read Faceless Killers because I thought, being a Kurt Wallender mystery, it had to be better. Well, no, it wasn't really, not horrible but just sort of meh. However, as I wrote in my mini-review of Faceless Killers: "Okay, so why, if Faceless Killers struck me much the same as Return of the Dancing Master (another standalone), am I now listening to The Man from Beijing? I must enjoy them on some level, right?" Guess so, because I went on to read (and appreciate a lot more than the first three) Dogs of Riga and The Fifth Woman, and I now have One Step Behind on the pile. Perhaps Mankell is, like Scotch whiskey, an acquired taste?

(Obviously, I have not been reading them in order, something I usually do. Not sure why.)

Or, Mary, it's simply not a good fit for you.

This is what I've decided to believe about the Wallander books.

Though NOT about Scotch.

92 and 104. I just started Call the Midwife and really am enjoying it. I might have to get the book too!

#105 etc Thanks for your comments and recommendations. Aside from the reasons I gave earlier, I think another problem I had with Wallander was that I've just had about enough of 'tortured' detectives. Wallander, in just this one book, reports to work drunk, drives his car when drunk, comes close to assaulting a female co-worker and forgets to ask vital questions when interviewing suspects. It seemed a bloody miracle to me that he had a job at all, still less that he actually managed to catch any criminals. Okay, I know police work is tough but aren't there any cops out there who are actually sane and capable?

Ah well, on to the next read - I'm only a chapter in to The English Monster so far but I have to say that something about the writing style made me wake up this morning already reaching out for it. I so hope that feeling continues.

2012 The Crystal Skull by Manda Scott. Just started. 50 pages in.

109 - I agree about the "tortured" detectives . . . and as I got into the series, it was one of the things that eventually turned me off about him. Later, when I tried to read the Ian Rankin books, I felt that way about his hero and gave up after the first couple of books.

#109 & #111
I agree about the "tortured souls" as detectives as well. I like some of it, and when the Wallender books first appeared I think that this idea was a bit revolutionary. However, I think it has been done to death. I was so aggravated by this type of anit-hero hero, especially as depicted by that master of the "tortured soul as detective" Jo Nesbo that I have decided to not read another of his grotesque novels again. I also think that this explains why the child heroine, Flavia De Luce has some appeal. She is quite refreshing even though I found her boring at times and the stories very simple.

Shantaram de Gregory David Roberts, interesante Novela que narra la historia real de la transformacion de un hombre que atravesó todos los estados del espiritu y todas las pruebas del cuerpo.

I am about to start In the Woods by Tana French. Also, for a fun,light read: Hoodwinked by Caroline Burnes.

Oops! I forgot to put the new thread up until now! Sorry!

#113 Me encantó este libro y se sintió desconsolado cuando llegué al final. Espero que lo hayan disfrutado tanto como yo lo hice! (Por favor, disculpe mi español - Yo no hablo el idioma.)

Where is the new thread??????

Message #115!