pontalba

Oh, that was funny. When I saw Kerry (Reichs), I totally misread it and thought it said Kathy....I looked it up on Amazon because I thought it was an odd title for Kathy Reichs to have written...... I didn't know she had a daughter, and one that writes too!! Good for them! I have read a bunch of Kathy Reichs books, but for me at least, they lost their zest. I ought to go back and try her again. It's been quite a few years since I have read any of her at all. That was a nice haul, Gaia. LP is right, the Jane Eyre is a lovely copy! And I think it would be fun to compare the Dutch and English versions, just to see how the translator has done their job.

Thanks, louya! Same back atcha! Hmmmm,. Husband has it in his stack. I'll have to take a look. Hey! It will totally help, man.......!

Lupton has a new one coming out in July. I know I'll be purchasing it asap. I've put Disclaimer on my Amazon Wish List to wait for a better price over here.

Yes, well, all true. I have put it on my kindle, it was a good price..........

Thanks, Noll. I liked it enough to put the second in the series on my kindle. I mentioned I'd bought The Bone Clocks. I'd been on the fence about purchasing it ever since it came out....before, really. Last week we were in Barnes & Noble and I picked it up to leaf through it. I happened to open it to page 293... in the paperback version. That first paragraph is absolutely and stupendously hilarious. Venomous and just plain original. I have to quote it here. It's long, but oh, so worth it! Welsh rain gods p*ss onto the roofs, festival tents, and umbrellas of Hay-on-Wye and also on Crispin Hershey, as he strides along a gutter-noisy lane, into the Old Cinema Bookshop and makes his way down to its deepest bowel, where he rips this week's Piccadilly Review to confetti. Who on God's festering Earth does that six-foot-wide, corduroy-clad, pubic-bearded, rectal probe Richard Cheeseman think he is? I shut my eyes but the words of his review slide by like the breaking news: "I tried my utmost to find something, anything, in Crispin Hershey's long-awaited novel to dilute its trepanning godawfulness." How dare that inflatable semen-stained Bagpuss write that after cozying up to me at the Royal Society of Literature bashes? Of course, I had to buy it.

The Legacy of Heorot - Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes sounds terrific! excellent review, BB. EDIT: Just peeked at Amazon, and the first line of the Publisher's Weekly Review reads as follows..... Barnes has joined the co-authors of Footfall to produce an entertaining if uncomplicated SF version of Beowulfwith a Grendel courtesy of the Alien movies. Crikey, what's not to love there!?

Hurrah, Laura!! Great news, congratulations!

Sounds right up my alley! Thanks for a great review! I did enjoy The Girl on the Train. The Lupton you refer to, is it Rosamund Lupton? I've read two of her books and really, really enjoyed them a lot!

I'm happy to hear it was so good! I've had it for a couple of years, unread..... Now I know I have to get to it! Although I don't remember the details by now, I do recall being surprised.....and thinking , I should have known it!! I hated it. Didn't finish. /yawn/ bleech Finally broke down and bought The Bone Clocks, will start very soon. Still reading The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert and the latest Louise Penny.....name escapes me at the moment. I do like it, but she is a tad melodramatic.

Great reviews, Noll. Even though not particularly my genre, you have truly interested me in reading them both, particularly the first one.

I'm reading The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert and Burglars Cant' Be Choosers by Lawrence Block. It's the first in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series.

In the U.S. the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states we are protected from "self-incrimination". So, regarding the above quote, I plead the 5th. *note, the fifth, not a fifth........

On one hand, that is a lot of books. OTOH, considering there are, what?, about 7 billion people on the planet....give or take a few so.....not so many, yeah?

We watched a one season, sort of mini series called The Assets. It's the story of Aldrich Ames the American CIA agent that was a mole in the CIA for the Russians back in the 1980's. It's based on the book by the main agent that was finally able to nail him. A woman, I might add, two women actually. Absolutely nerve wracking and fascinating. An explanatory link for who Ames was..... https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Aldrich_Ames And a link to the TV show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assets We're also watching CSI: Miami and CSI: NYC.

Thanks, Gaia, me too!

His First, His Second by A.D. Davis 4/5 Edgy and twisty, this is a police procedural that is far from typical. I have to say the characters surprised me several times with their non-typical courses of action they chose to pursue. This is definitely not a boilerplate detective story. Interestingly the main protagonist does not appear right off the bat, and appears for the first time on page 15 (loc 206). The story is told by an omniscient narrator from at least 6 or 7 points of view. Granted some of the POV are brief, but there are 4 main points of view to follow. It is not confusing in the least, and makes the story even more interesting. I don't think I'm giving anything away in mentioning that there are two serial killers on the loose, and their intersection is something I haven't seen before. **Added in Edit: Something else that recommends this story is the location of Leeds, England and the manner in which the author writes about it. I see by the bio here on Amazon, that he is from Leeds. Now, some authors that write about the places they live are *too* local and mention places and things that are obscure to the reader not from that area, or use local expressions that an American would not understand. This is definitely NOT the case here. Davis writes intimately, but not obscurely of the area.....IOW, I could follow it well. That was appreciated. The pace is fast, the story twisty. Highly recommended.

Thanks, it has, at least until I twist the wrong way, or automatically pick something up that I shouldn't. Ice is absolute magic! Ice and Tylenol. LOL on the Family Museum.....nah, unfortunately the stuff isn't museum worthy, otherwise, I'd sell it. Still struggling with pic. Since I took the pic with my iPad, I sent it to myself, and for some idiotic reason when I right click on it within the email it won't save properly. Finally I got it to "Photos", not the regular picture file. /sigh/ Now I can't find it. /sigh / Sometimes I really hate Windows 8 !! I've seen those carts, and yes, they're lovely. Love the snoozing emoticon! Thanks, as mentioned above, thankfully, t's improved already.

Hah I suppose though, that it's lucky for us that those people give away perfectly good books. Otherwise we wouldn't find them at Library Sales, Estate Sales, Book Fairs, second hand stores......./giggle/ The short answer is.....mostly. The room is 12 feet by 28 feet, and it's all clear, except for one corner that is about 3 by 4. Those boxes have to go in another room. Of course that room is stuffed to the gills with junque from the old house. After all only moved up here 20 years ago...../much sighing/ But! Eureka! Tomorrow the carpenter is coming to install a new exterior door on that stuffed room, and I'll be able to have a good old clear out. Finally. I'm not the pack rat. Really. My family is known far and wide for saving every blasted thing for the last 5 generations. I'm weeding it out, and in the words of a friend will "be brutal"! We haven't moved the 6 bookcases out into the mostly cleared room, yet. My back has been giving me trouble the last couple of weeks. But I'm some better, and will strap on the back brace, and get out the book cart to move said books. we bought this.....http://www.amazon.com/Raymond-V-Shaped-Resistant-Rubber-Wheels/dp/B004IARJDE/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1434641167&sr=8-14&keywords=bookcart&pebp=1434641169167&perid=1QDK231S2SNKFJTP3TTB We've used it for a lot of stuff, besides books already. Charles is great! He is reading up a storm, and working on some of his projects. The cats are just as nutty as ever. I've taken pics of them with the ipad, but have trouble transferring them to the desktop to post here. Will work on solution. Thanks, Gaia. Yup, the book I'm reading is a very good and twisty police procedural. Good stuff! That's right! BOOKS ARE NOT CLUTTER!!

LOL I hate it when that happens! Reading along, and it's like a bonk on the head. I used to read the endings of books, sometimes....occasionally. Not any more though. I do check the number of pages though. lol Oh, darn! I bought that ages ago on account of the great title. Haven't gotten to it...../sigh/ heh Glad to hear I haven't missed much. Have you seen the film of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? Kevin Spacy was perfection itself in the role, and all I can say is WOW about Jude Law playing the "victim". I've read a couple of Gaines's books, and really loved them. Not Miss Pittman yet though. After abandoning The Buried Giant, I finally picked up one of my kindle acquisitions. One I'd actually forgotten about, His First, His Second by A.D. Davies. It's the first of a series featuring a female Detective Sergeant Alicia Friend, a criminal analyst based in Leeds. It. Is. Very. Good. Especially for a 'first of the series' book. Usually a "first" is loaded down with background details that slow the progress of a police procedural. Not this one, it has just enough detail worked into the story itself to more than satisfy. I'm a bit more than halfway through (didn't have any opportunity to read yesterday) and a couple of the twists are so unusual that I've not seen them before.

I haven't read any of the Russell/Holmes books in quite a while. I think the last one I bought was the Pirate thing....started it, didn't like it. Didn't finish it. The link you posted though sounds interesting. I'd have to read the Japanese one mentioned in the synopsis to understand it though. That series started out so very promising, but finally there was none, or hardly any, of HOLMES, you know, the reason I was reading the darned things to begin with! Oh well, to ponder at a later date. Thanks for the link. I'll keep an eye out. Sounds very interesting. I really liked the one or two Brunetti books I've read.

I've been a bit stalled the last week or so in my reading. I began The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. And, as much as I hate to say it, it's boring. At least I have found it to be so. Yes. The writing is excellent, but extremely flat and yada, yada, yada. The blandness is just too bland, and the dialogue too low key. This is unusual for me, as I usually find books that many others boring to be wonderfully poetic and almost musical in their essence. This book, ain't that. Not IMO at any rate. Of course, I'll pick it up again in a year or so and may LOVE it. Who knows? So, then I turned to my iPad/kindle app and found that I'd started a book a while back called The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. /sigh/ I think there is the real making of a very sweet and probably interesting story there. But there are too many disconnects for me and I'm finding it extremely difficult to follow the characters. So, again, I put it aside. Now. Last night I read the bulk of the life-changing magic of tidying up, the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing by Marie Kondo. Very sorry, although I did read lots more, she really lost me with her section on Storing books, page 86. Get rid of books?? Really?? I really hate to tell the lady, but books are not clutter. But I suppose it's all in the eye of the beholder. And, yes. There are really reasons to get rid of books and those reasons are as varied as the people that own them. HOWEVER. To just rid oneself of read or unread books seems such a waste, and downright mean. I did really like her take on reasons for giving away/getting rid of things......and it is that if an object does not 'give you joy', ditch it. I suppose that is the real disconnect regarding books. They give me joy. I loved the article on clutter that Little Pixie posted on her thread, it sums up my feelings beautifully. And is very anti-'getting rid of'! Hurrah!

Thanks, Gaia. It's an easy read, although a few parts are difficult to take. But they are written in an almost......softening style that is easier to take. It is! Thanks! Yes, me too!! Glad to see ya! I'm glad you've enjoyed the tv show....I think if I hadn't read the book, I'd have liked it more. Although my husband didn't care for the turn of events either. So, it all boils down to the fact that we all like different things. VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE !! Thanks. No, I haven't seen the film, although I will definitely in the future. From the little I've heard as to comparisons to the book, I understand it is quite close.

Great article, I especially love this quote from the article. Unfortunately, both are true. Well, maybe not unfortunate..... Just one of those Facts of Life.

Love the sound of Timebound! I grew tired of the Kathy Reich books quite a while back. Finally, they were the same old thing, and my interest in the character just left the building. The same thing happened to me with the Sue Grafton "alphabet" books. Just too much of the same thing. Hah. Somehow, I doubt that very much.

Great reviews, and thumbnails! I did love I Feel Bad About My Neck.....I laughed my way through it! Love your quotes, brings back memories.