Reading Materials: September 2017

Sorry this is late! I barely know what day it is.

44. Ross Poldark, Winston Graham. (Library) A friend recommended the PBS series Poldark to me, and I’ve become mildly obsessed. When I learned that it was based on a very popular series of books from the 1940s, I decided to give the first one a try. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It has aged well, and the writing still feels fresh and sharp. The story is set immediately after the American Revolutionary War, but it takes place in England, in Cornwall. This is a time/place combination which I had not spent much time thinking about, so I was glad for some historical perspective as well as a great story. I’ve already put the second book in this 12-book series on hold at the library.

45. Every Dead Thing, John Connolly. (Library) John Connolly frequently pops up on “authors you may like” lists for me, so I decided to give one a try. It’s set in New York and New Orleans, which appealed to me as well. I liked the book, although I guessed the twist pretty early on, and I got a little tired of Connolly’s insistence on detailing the weight/fitness level/attire of every character. I am not rushing out to the library to get the next book in the series, but I may pick it up later.

46. The Secret Diary of Hendrick Groen, Aged 83 1/4. (Library, book club selection) This was a hard book to read. My mother spent almost two years in an assisted living facility, and it was informational to read about nursing home care in other countries. But I just couldn’t get into this character. The book spends a lot of time discussing the merits of assisted suicide, which cut a little too close for me right now.

47. Phantom Evil, Heather Graham. (Library) I must have some Puritan blood in me, because I have very little tolerance for novels in which attractive-yet-broken people solve all interpersonal drama through mind-blowing sex. Or, worse, when two attractive-yet-broken people are put in mortal peril, and the first thing they do afterwards is…. you guessed it. Other than that, this story was good. It’s another New Orleans story, which you know I’m always down for. It seems to be based in part on the lore surrounding the Lalaurie mansion in the French Quarter, in that it features a big, beautiful mansion that’s haunted/cursed.

48. The Round House, Louise Erdlich. (Library) This has been on my to-read list for a while, so when I espied it on the library shelf I picked it up. It follows the aftermath of a horrific crime perpetrated on a Native American family. The writing was tremendous, the characters well-developed, and the plot was interesting. I enjoyed reading it.

49. Panacea, F. Paul Wilson. (Library) I have been a fan of Wilson’s since a friend lent me the Repairman Jack series, which is outstanding. This book is similarly engaging. It’s got Dan-Brown-style pacing. I read it during a very difficult week, and it managed to distract me for several minutes at a time.

2017 Totals
Fiction: 42
Non-Fiction: 7

Advertisements

Leave a comment

Filed under Books

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

w

Connecting to %s
https://houseblendfamily.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/reading-materials-september-2017/
houseblendfamily.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-22
58812
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SOVBMQTKUAAFC4D4SDLFMD45HRV5DBVS
<urn:uuid:8f527f6c-0f64-4320-bed3-86b38d2cd7e5>
2018-05-23T01:36:51Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:J3UGPWGO3YHA3Z36CEJJLTCN4SEMNTGV
<urn:uuid:b3f7d623-0cbd-4eb2-bb8f-247e55c1d823>
https://houseblendfamily.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/reading-materials-september-2017/
length
response
<urn:uuid:7fcd89b4-ee1e-4d63-a4b6-74026c35bcb7>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-229-184-218.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf