The "I am currently reading" thread

[jaffa1]

10 hours ago, missonna said:

I'm only halfway through The Tattooist of Auschwitz & I'm already in love with Lale & Gita. Besides Heather Morris told that the film rights are being considered. They might shoot really strong and touching film.

I've  just read that book too, I just can't  get my head around the fact that there were so much gold and diamonds around in those days, I'm  sure  there wasn't  within the working class in Britain.

Then I started to wonder if parts of the story was just fiction.

[Brooker11]

3 hours ago, jaffa1 said:

I've  just read that book too, I just can't  get my head around the fact that there were so much gold and diamonds around in those days, I'm  sure  there wasn't  within the working class in Britain.

Then I started to wonder if parts of the story was just fiction.

The Auschwitz Memorial Foundation have slated this book for being total fiction.

[metalman]

Some I've read recently: 

 

John Scalzi - The end of all things. Four linked novellas rather than a novel, but a decent conclusion to the Old Man's War series (unless he writes some more in the future).

Francis Beeding - No fury. Unusually for a 1930s detective, involves a serial killer. Very enjoyable.

John Rhode - In face of the verdict. Another 1930s effort with Rhode's usual ingenuity of murder method.

Ivan T. Sanderson - Invisible residents. One of about 7 million UFO books published in the late 60s/early 70s. Hokum but quite interesting hokum for all that.

[lectrolove]

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee. An account of a truly epic walk taken in the 1930s. I'm loving this, I've read Cider With Rosie a couple of times but never really considered this one until it popped up recently as a  Kindle deal and I think it might be the better of the two. Absolutely hilarious in places.

[Guest]

A Warning by Anonymous.  Nothing new about the fetid malignant narcissist, with added Republican finger-wagging.  Read Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward instead for a similar perspective (though there's a lot of Bannon), or Russian Roulette by David Corn and Michael Isikoff if you want the Russia story (and Collusion by Luke Harding).   Just started Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch.  Looking forward to seeing who gets the definitive Ukraine account.

 

Also Hall of Mirrors by Christopher Fowler,  and The Black Tower by PD James.

[metalman]

A. Fielding - Murder at The Nook (1930s detective story by an author who was one of the stalwarts of the Collins Crime Club list at the time but has now vanished into obscurity so completely that nobody knows who he (or she) was. Not bad this one, quite Freeman Wills Crofts-like in some ways.

A. Fielding - The Upfold Farm mystery. Another one, but not so successful and the writing style seems so different it could almost have been written by a different person. 

Robert B. Parker - Now and then. A typical Spenser novel but as usual very readable.

 

Now I'm half way through Raymond Postgate's Somebody at the Door, recently reprinted in the British Library crime classics series, and enjoying it a lot.

Edited December 5, 2019 by metalman

[feargal]

Just finished The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, sequel to The Handmaid's Tale.  Very good! 

[Funky_Gibbon]

Salvation Lost by Peter F. Hamilton, book 2 of the Salvation Sequence.

 

The first book in this series, Salvation, was a bit experimental by PFH standards in that he cast aside his usual epic scale storytelling from a hundred viewpoints and instead reduced it to a stories of about half a dozen people travelling together in a vehicle to investigate the remains of an crashed alien starship, with each of them having an event from their past told in vignette, almost a collection of only slightly related short stories, as well as one other story that appears almost entirely unrelated to anything else. It was only in the final few chapters that all the threads were drawn together to reveal what the story is about. It was an interesting but not entirely successful change in style IMO.

 

The sequel is more of a return to his roots and is back to the epic scale storytelling and could almost be considered treading over old ground in some ways but he does these kind of stories so wonderfully that I simply don't care. The blood-dimmed tide is well and truly loosed and I can't wait for the final book.

 

 

[Guest]

The Lonely Hour by Christopher Fowler.  It's a tad darker than the previous Bryant & May tales.  And Running Against The Devil by Rick Wilson.  How to prevent Trump grabbing four more years and subsequently establishing a Trumpian dynasty, while hopefully enabling the dems to avoid self immolation by facilitating a Trump victory .

[Pettytom]

I’ve just finished “Cruel to be kind” which is Will Birch’s biography of Nick Lowe.

 

It is a compelling book, which tells of Lowe’s genius and his fragility. A must read for any 70’s, or 80’s music fan.