What are you reading the week of July 14, 2018?

Happy New Week of Reading!

fredbacon has limited internet access this weeked so I am filling in.

I'm reading The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier. She is one of my favorite authors, but so far this is not my favorite by her. I love the historical component, but also adultery is used as a main plot point which I never like much.

I hope everyone is reading something delightful. Please share what you're reading so our TBR piles can grow (or shrink).

‘night Mother
by Marsha Norman
4/5 stars
Marsha Norman’s play is about an epileptic woman, Jessie Cates, who has had enough of living and is tired of losing control of her life. She prepares her mother for her suicide while her mother tries to talk her out of it. Very moving!

Still reading Spinning Silver, Dragon Rider, and White Nights.

I finished Ann Tyler’s latest book, Clock Dance. She’s so dependable. Not sure what I’ll pick up next.

>1 PaperbackPirate: Thanks for starting us off this week, Pirate!

>1 PaperbackPirate: Thanks for starting us off this week!

Greetings, all! My wife and I just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Ireland. Hadn't been there for 21 years, and it was our first time going there together. While away I finished The Light and the Dark by C.P. Snow, the 4th entry in Snow's "Strangers and Brothers" series, and read the fascinating novel The Surrounded by D'Arcy McNicke, about life on a Montana Indian reservation in the 1920s. On the plane right home, I began the charming Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson. My thoughts on the first two can be found on my 50-Book Challenge thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/281080.

I'm re-reading Lord Peter Views the Body and reading The Tao of Now, a collection of Tao-based poems.

I haven't been around much ... kind of pulling out of a reading funk. Picked up The Great Believers and absolutely love it so far (page 110-ish). Hope all are well!

My husband and I just got back from a whirlwind road trip to Houston, TX from Asheville, NC for the wedding of a beloved friend. I didn't get much print reading done, but we listen to audios.

I finished up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, thus completing my audio re-listen to the series. Jim Dale was amazing.

We also started and finished World War Z. This is my third time through on it, and I love it as much as ever. We even were traveling across the bridge in the Atchafalaya swamp in the section of the book with "Mets". One of these days, I'll get the unabridged edition. My copy was a gift, and the only version available then was the abridged one.

Still from last week in print: Anna Karenina, Vamos a Leer, Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, A Brief History of Time, Second Spanish Reader: Bilingual for Speakers of English, and Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons).

I also started Gaybash on the trip and my new audiobook, Hurry Down Sunshine, tonight.

Honeymoon With My Brother – Franz Wisner
2**

When his fiancée dumped him five days before their wedding, Franz called on his brother Kurt to help him cancel the event. Nonrefundable airline tickets, and deposits on the venue / musicians, etc helped make the decision for them. They held the party anyway, and then decided they’d go on the honeymoon together (with no champagne and no “honeymoon suites”). This is a memoir of a year and a half spent traveling the world, trying to forget.

Boring.

This should have been interesting, but I quickly tired of his continued laments about Annie (the fiancée), and his attempts to forget by bedding any girl who was remotely willing. Not to mention his constant references to what fantastic careers he and his brother had, the amount of bonus money he got, the famous people he met, the profit from selling their homes, etc. He came off as self-absorbed and immature. Annie was right to bail.

The Forgotten Garden – Kate Morton
Audiobook performed by Caroline Lee.
4****

In 1913 a little girl, only 4-years-old, is found alone on the wharf in Australia. She’s taken in by the portmaster and his wife, who are childless, and when no one comes to claim her they keep her and raise her as their own. Decades later her granddaughter tries to unravel the mystery of her grandmother’s origins.

What a magical story. The action moves back and forth in time, from the late 1800s to 1913 to 1975 to 2005. The four women central to the story are Nell, Cassandra, Eliza and Rose. Some of the sections are told from the perspective of a child, while others from the perspective of an adult. No one has the full story and anyone who has key elements is sworn to secrecy, so it’s a long, complicated and tangled tale that Cassandra tries to unravel and reveal.

I was engaged and interested from beginning to end. This is the first book by Kate Morton that I’ve read. It won’t be the last.

I don’t think I would have used the magical realism tag, but several other people have, probably because of the fairy tales that are a central plot point, and one brief mention of a ghost. (Eliza is an author and several of her fairy tales are related in the book; they are truly magical.)

Caroline Lee does a fantastic job of voicing the audiobook. She has a lot of characters to handle (most of them female) and I was never confused about who was speaking.

Reading Gilt Trip by Laura Childs. Cozy mystery set in New Orleans.
I am going to start today Spaceman, An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino I won.

Lilac Girls – Martha Hall Kelly
Audiobook performed by Cassandra Campbell (Caroline), Kathleen Gati (Kasia)and Kathrin Kana (Herta)
3.5***

Using three different narrators, the novel tells the WW2 story of the women prisoners held at the notorious Nazi prison camp Ravensbrück. Kelly used two real-life women: Caroline Ferriday, a New York socialite and Broadway actress, and Dr. Herta Oberheuser, a German physician who became the only female surgeon operating at the prison camp. The third narrator is Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager who is sent to the camp along with her sister, mother, and several friends after her work in the Resistance is discovered. In the author’s note at the end of the novel, Kelly states that she Kasia and her sister, Zuzanna, are loosely based on Nina Iwanska and her sister Krystyna, who were both operated on at Ravensbrück. She further populates the novel with a variety of fictional and real characters supporting these three central figures.

I was most interested in the scenes that take place at Ravensbrück. I knew some of the story of this horrible place and the “experimental surgeries” performed on the women there, but Kelly made it personal and vivid. I also really like how she explored the PTSD (though it wasn’t called that then) suffered by Kasia and Zuzanna and the other “Rabbits” in the years following their release from Ravensbrück.

As for Caroline’s love story with Paul Rodier – it is completely fabricated. I understand why Kelly did this– she was trying to make Caroline more real and to give her a stronger connection to France and what happened in that country during WW2 – but I thought it was a distraction from the central plot. If I were her editor I would have cut it.

I also thought that of the three women, we learned the least about Herta Oberheuser. She was the only woman tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. I wish that Kelly has spent a bit more time fleshing out her character.

All told, this is a good historical fiction debut about a fascinating and important, but less-well-known, episode of WW2. I would read another book by Kelly.

Cassandra Campbell (Caroline), Kathleen Gati (Kasia)and Kathrin Kana (Herta) do a marvelous job narrating the audiobook. Using a different voice artist for each narrator really helped to keep the stories straight.

I'm over halfway through the very good Maze at Windermere.

The Pillowman
by Martin McDonagh
2.5/5 stars
This strange play is about a writer who is interrogated by the police for writing stories about children who have been abused and which are similar to recent child crimes in the first act. The play also has two other acts that cover the main character’s stories. I found this quite confusing till I found more information online about the book/play but I still had trouble wrapping this around my brain.

I finished Camilla Lackberg's The Drowning, and enjoyed it enough that I immediately picked up the next in the series, and am now reading The Lost Boy. Her crime novels are so very engrossing and entertaining, and I love the Swedish setting.

I enjoyed re-reading Lord Peter Views the Body, and now I've started Gaiman's Fragile Things.

I finished The Sociopath Next Door. It presents the sociopath in its various guises with some hints as to how to recognize them which is its value. Other than that it's moralistic and simplistic.

ahef.....I love Camilla Lackberg's novels as well!!

Finished White Nights by Ann Cleeves and started the next book in the series, Red Bones.

I wrapped up the Maze at Windermere which was very good but the ending was a slight let down. The writing and the fascinating characters made up for it.

I've moved onto Lying in Wait a mystery by Liz Nugent. So far, it's really engaging!

>19 hemlokgang: Camilla Lackberg is really enjoyable. If you like her, you would probably like the novels of Carin Gerhardsen as well - also a Swede and similar in tone.

I finished Camilla Lackberg's The Lost Boy. It is the only one of her novels that I haven't found completely engrossing, and I was uncomfortable with the ending. It wasn't a bad book, just not her usual gripping self.

Am now reading a book loaned to me by my brother. It's called The Feather Thief and is the true story of a man so obsessed with the creation of fishing flies that he pulled off the largest-ever theft of bird specimens from an important museum, all for the sake of using their feathers for flies.

>4 Copperskye: >5 NarratorLady: Happy to help! This is my most watched thread of the week!

I just finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. I thought it was going to be a magical realism story but it turned out to be more sci fi. It was interesting.

Awwww, man. My audiobook for this week, Hurry Down Sunshine is a no-go. Track 15 on CD 1 is thrashed beyond playing. I tried two different players even. I'll take it back to the library and listen to Where the Mountain Meets the Moon instead. I'll definitely be keeping it on my TBR though. It was excellent up to the part where the CD started skipping and then crashed.

Finished Circe yesterday, and rereading it this morning. What an amazing book! Have Song of Achilles on order...

Noises Off
by Michael Frayn
3/5 stars
This play was actually 2 plays inside of one production. We see the crew and the actors' dress rehearsal and getting the play ready then performing the play which goes badly. I had some trouble visualizing this play in my mind. I think this play would be better viewed than read.

Finished Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Really enjoyed it.

Next up is Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

I started reading The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, but I really wasn't into it. By the end of the second chapter I was deeply bored. So I've switched back to Scandinavian crime, and have hit the excitement jackpot with Kristina Ohlsson's excellent The Disappeared. This is the third of Ohlsson's novels that I've read, and they just keep getting better.

The new thread is up over here.