Books Brought Home May/June 2017

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie
The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley
Dead Certain by Adam Mitzner

Two books by Meg Elison:

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
The Book of Etta

I was at Value Village yesterday to find an inexpensive purse (found one in brown leather, perfect condition, for $7.99), and discovered that they sell books! Picked up:

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Ahef Cutting For Stone is excellent!

Curious Minds by Janet Evanovich and Phoef Sutton

>3 ahef1963: >4 momom248:
Second the excellence of "Cutting"!

For my Kindle, two Japanese novels:
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa about an aphasic retired professor of mathematics and a single mother of a 10-year old boy who during the periods of 80 minutes of the professor's available short memory build a richer life together than they possessed alone. (Translation)
The Great Passage by Shion Miura about a lexicographer and his female linguistics partner who complete a heroic compendium of the Japanese language. (Translation)

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eleven edited by Jonathan Strahan

The Bone Doll's Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo

Picked up 14 Agatha Christie books from amazon.com including A Murder is Announced.

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
South and West by Joan Didion

West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

Picked up The Prime Minister's Secret Agent for $1 at the FOL.

Can't Help Myself. . .

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt His The Sisters Brothers was a unique noir western.
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey The "best murder mystery ever," according to the NYT
The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain I enjoyed the President's Hat as a delightful fable.
Out of Sorts by Aurelie Valognes Another contemporary French novel I'll be reading in translation.

Arrived today:

Open City by Teju Cole
Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For by David McCullough
A Place in the Country by W. G. Sebald

Arrived today:

Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz
Down Below by Leonora Carrington
The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer
Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
Vertigo by W. G. Sebald
Sam Shepard: A Life by John J. Winters
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
House of Names by Colm Toibin

Gifts from a friend:

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures by The Library of Congress
Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores by Bob Eckstein

>17 mollygrace: I'm deeply impressed by the sheer quantity, the variety and the quality.

The Price of Valor by Django Wexler

Deadmen Walking by Sherrilyn Kenyon - Usually I listen to the audio version, but I did not want to wait for this one. Pirates! who doesn't love a good pirate book. :)

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
Even This I Get to Experience by Norman Lear

>18 lansingsexton: Thank you for your comment. When four of my favorites write new books -- Strout, Toibin, McCullough, and Murakami -- and all four books arrive at once, I'm left with the tough but also very lovely choice of which one to put on the very top of the tbr pile (Strout won but the others are close at hand). Recently I've become aware of so many "new" writers (new to me anyway) -- Babitz, Matar, Moss -- and I'm looking forward to reading more of their work. And I've re-discovered W. G. Sebald -- not sure how I ever lost him in the first place, but I will not make that mistake again. And there are always those books you read about and for some reason just know they are destined for a place on your shelves -- artist Leonora Carrington's memoir, Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer's book about her family farm (on that one I think I was also influenced by the evocative Wolf Kahn painting on the cover), and Richard Ford's book about his parents. I've been a fan of Sam Shepard's plays for so long -- and of course there's that nice photo of him on the cover. And all this at a time when I'm slowing down somewhat in my reading . . . maybe I simply need new glasses, but I have a feeling the dying off of brain cells has something to do with it -- this getting old stuff is -- well, it's getting old. Darn. So many books, so little time.

>16 mollygrace:

I really enjoyed Anatomy of a Disappearance, a serenely told tale of a young man with many mothers and no father. The writing is first rate and the plot original. Promised myself to read Matar's The Country of Men, which suggests it is a story of the other side of the coin about the roles of men and women in a Moslem country.

Would like to be reading over your shoulder as you're plunging into books by and about some of my favorite writers!

Received three books for review:

The Flight: Charles Lindbergh's Daring and Immortal 1927 Transatlantic Crossing by Dan Hampton
Saving Charlotte: A Mother and the Power of Intuition by Pia de Jong
A Purely Private Matter by Darcie Wilde

>23 Limelite: Matar's The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between is the true story of his return to Libya to search for the truth about what happened to his father. I learned so much about Libya from that book and was so impressed by the beauty of his writing. I'm eager to read more by this author.

I'm afraid you'd be frustrated as you tried to read over my shoulder. You'd certainly be welcome to try, but I have a feeling the pages wouldn't turn quickly enough for you. I've never been a particularly fast reader -- I often stop to savor certain passages, reading them again and again -- but in recent months I find myself taking several days to read a book that a year ago would have taken several hours. I need to cut down on my book-buying, but how in the world do you do that?

I've been doing good, but I stopped at a Goodwill in the nice part of town the other day and came away with

How to be Good by Nick Hornby
Different Seasons by Stephen King
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman
Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz
The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich (on my wishlist for forever)

all for $10!

The End of the Day by Claire North
My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall

>25 mollygrace:

You are asking the wrong person about how to quit buying books! I'm not a speed reader unless the story lacks certain aesthetic requirements I seem to have in order to enjoy it. Then I skim through.

Hope you enjoy "wallowing" in all your great new selections!

Received an ARC of Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom by Bradley W. Schenck.

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel
Times Three - poetry by Phyllis McGinley I have longed to own this book for many years and finally found a good copy at a used book store

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

so far...

Room with a View by E M Forster
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
Austerlitz by W G Sebald
Underworld by Don DeLillo

....a clear case of book greed.

>32 floremolla: Oh, but who could resist such treasures?

>33 mollygrace: exactly ;)

The Guns of Empire by Django Wexler

After hearing him speak twice I got The Power of a Teacher by Adam L. Saenz.

Devoted fan of Robert Hicks that I am, I downloaded his latest, The Orphan Mother for Kindle. This novel is a related follow-up to The Widow of the South but of a different subject. Instead of a Civil War Hospital, it centers on a former slave of "The Widow" whose son is murdered post-war.

Hicks' story telling is superb, his prose sublime, and his historicity the best. A Separate County by him is a highly original masterpiece.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
The Vanishing Velazquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece by Laura Cumming
This Census-Taker by China Mieville
There's a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott

Thanks to some birthday gift cards I went on a book buying binge:

From Amazon:
A Monster Calls-Patrick Ness
The Girl Who Drank The Moon-Kelly Barnhill

From Barnes and Noble:
House of Names-Colm Toibin
The Leavers- Lisa Ko
The Shadowland-Elizabeth Kostova
The Witchfinders Sister-Beth Underdown
In The Water-Paula Hawkins

I just discovered Pulp! The Classics and had to order The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even though I've already read it, because it has an angry chihuahua on the cover.

I picked up The Witch Hunter, When I Found You, Chronicles of Nick Instinct, Ashley Bell.. hmm and a few others that I picked up at our library sale in Sebago. A good weekend for books! Yay!

Just bought David Sedaris's new one, Theft by Finding, a collection of diary entries, at a reading of his tonight.

Accidentally bought The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector along with a new vacuum cleaner - didn't realise it was lurking in my Amazon basket... :)

The Man of Legends by Kenneth Johnson

>44 framboise: That is on my list. How did you like his reading? We saw him a couple of years ago and had a great time!

>47 JulieLill: The reading was so much fun. He read and then answered questions for almost an hour. He began signing books beforehand and continued after--everyone who wanted to meet him got a chance. He is so generous with his time. Plus, it was extra fun getting to sit next to him behind the table during the reading, getting a different vantage point from everyone else.

I got The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece by Laura Cumming for the local art museum's book club, and Othello (Pulp! The Classics) by William Shakespeare because I just read New Boy by Tracy Chevalier.

From the library:
The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve; and
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

Mao II by Don DeLillo and The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishigu were purchased. Veronika Decides to Die and The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink were picked up in a charity shop earlier in the week. The Reader was a quick and engaging read and I've already finished it.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice by Colum McCann

I just discovered the Penguin Ink covers and ordered Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.

Among others (*sigh*) three nonfiction works by Mario Livio on the history of mathematics and science:

Is God a Mathematician?
Brilliant Blunders: from Darwin to Einstein
The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved

Two by Sean McMullen,

Ghosts of Engines Past and
Souls in the Great Machine

After seeing an excellent Frida and Diego exhibit I got The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait by Carlos Fuentes and plan to read it for Frida's birthday.

Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition by Czeslaw Milosz
Where the Line is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine by Raja Shehadeh

Borrowed Death Spiral by Leena Lehtolainen.

The other day, got a Mother's Day gift from my son (he paid for two-day shipping and it took three weeks to get here): The Thirst, the latest in Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series.

Today, for $6 I picked up The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet by Bernie Su. I really enjoy Pride and Prejudice fanfic.

I needed just one more Frida book, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: From the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection by Nicholas Chambers.

I took some books for trade-in at my local independent bookstores and brought back

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould
Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances by Ellen Cooney
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Breed by Chase Novak

Captains and the Kings by Taylor Caldwell. How'd I miss this classic?

Kraken by China Miéville
The Damned Trilogy: A Call to Arms, The False Mirror, and The Spoils of War by Alan Dean Foster

Paladin Of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

Crime And Poetry by Amanda Flower

These two books came from my favorite Library that I go to which is 15 minutes away from me.

Hi Seitherin

Do you buy this Magazine or do you get it on your Kindle or Nook? I buy this whenever I go to Barnes and Nobles which is not very often. I do love this Magazine. Hope that you enjoy this edition of the Magazine. Happy Reading :-)

>67 lindalovestoread: I have a subscription thru Amazon for my Kindle app. I read an issue a story at a time whenever I get bored with reading so I usually have an issue or two waiting for me. I've only read the first two stories in this issue and I've liked both of them.

Mrs. Dumpty - poetry by Chana Bloch (her recent death reminded me how much I loved the title poem and I decided I needed to read more by her)
Mink River by Brian Doyle
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
Selected Poems 1988-2013: Seamus Heaney
Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
Relations by Jane Miller (I loved her son's memoir, Fathers, and wanted to read more about their family)
Doubles Studies in Literary History by Karl Miller (Jane's husband)
Rebecca's Vest - a memoir by Karl Miller
Lost Houston by William Dylan Powell (I've lived in the Houston area most of my life; this is a look back at some places that once meant a lot to me but are, alas, no more)
Pierre: A Cautionary Tale by Maurice Sendak
I Knew the Bride - poetry by Hugo Williams

Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

You Belong to Me - a novel by Colin Harrison
Matisse in the Studio - the catalog for a new exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Do Not Become Alarmed - a novel by Maile Meloy
Dark Horses: Karl Miller - a memoir
The Pleasure Ground: Richard Murphy - poems 1952-2012
Texas Almanac: 2016-2017 - a publication of the Texas State Historical Association

I went to Los Angeles last week and visited 2 bookstores.

I got To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck from Small World Books in Venice Beach.

From The Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood I got Losing Battles by Eudora Welty, Granta 67: Women and Children First, and Office Girl and The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno.

The Witchwood Crown by Tad Williams

A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley

Mother Land by Paul Theroux

For my own pleasure: Gerald's Game by Stephen King

For review: Missing Mona by Joe Klingler; Tune Up (no touchstone) by Joe Klingler; Bodies on the Potomac by Daniel O'Neil; The Legend of Coco Palms Resort by Rita D'Orazio; Expect Deception and Expect Trouble by JoAnn Smith Ainsworth; The Seed Apple by Sheldon Greene; Shades of Africa by Toko Loshe; Surviving Mental Illness by Linda Naomi Katz; Pearl MD by Marie Bartlett; and A Portrait in Time, The Vale of Years, and Under the Forgotten Oak, all by Charles J. Schneider. I have my work cut out for me!

In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle
Unbreakable by Will McIntosh

The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
NW by Zadie Smith
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks
The Hours by Michael Cunningham

All in tiptop condition from Oxfam for less than a fiver total. I'll be back.

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

>78 floremolla:

I read Fowler's novel a couple years ago and found it completely original and thematically profound -- what constitutes family; what does how we treat other species say about our own?

Hope you enjoy it. It's rather strange and a bit weird, yet poignant and moving.

>80 Limelite: thanks for that endorsement - I can do strange/weird, I think! I'd heard the name before so thought I'd take a punt on it at 99p :)

NEW THREAD - https://www.librarything.com/topic/260785

Adding these here because I got them in June:

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
Diego Velázquez: Life and Work by Dieter Beaujean
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Roadwork by Stephen King
The Long Walk by Stephen King
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne - super cool 1956 version for $4!