Community Chat

[walkingal]

On 3/8/2015 Epicurean said:

On 3/7/2015 Troop_Angel said:

I tend to read certain genres for a while which recently brought me to Of Mice and Men. I was mesmerized. I had never read Steinbeck before. Now, I am reading The Grapes of Wrath. A must-read. I only regret not having read Steinbeck decades ago.

He is my altimeter favorite. I don't mean to be rude,but how old are you???? I never meet anyone who never read his books. You must read East OF Eden,it's his best. I re-read every so often. It's the only book I've ever read more than once,,

I'm a senior. I guess I just never got around to reading him. Most of my life, I was busy reading the classics, Dickens being my favorite. Then after I retired, I had more time to read, and that is when I started reading from the best sellers' lists and more contemporary authors.

[Lilysmom]

Just finished The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. I liked it but wasn't over the moon about it. LM

[lolakimono]

I just finished this one-

Two little girls, frozen in black and white. One picture worth killing for.

The Civil Rights Movement is less than a distant memory to Lisa Waldren--it is someone else's memory altogether, passed on to her through the pages of history. Her life as a federal prosecutor in Boston feels utterly remote from the marches in the South that changed her father's generation--and the entire nation--forever.

But the truth is, she was there.

When a photograph surfaces showing a blond, four-year-old Lisa playing with an African-American girl at a civil rights march in Fort Worth, Lisa is faced with a jarring revelation: the girls may have been the only witnesses who observed the killer of civil rights leader Benjamin Gray . . . and therefore the only ones who can exonerate the death row inmate falsely accused of the murder.

Soon, Lisa finds herself in the dangerous world her father had shielded her from as a child. After some searching, the Waldrens find the other little girl from the photo and, in the process, uncover conspiracy mere steps away from the likes of Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Based on real events and a photograph snapped by author Lis Wiehl's own G-man father, "Snapshot" is a remarkably original marriage of mystery and history.

[lolakimono]

I'm working on this one now-

"If I'd blinked, I would have missed it. But I didn't, and I saw something fall from the rear deck of the opposite ferry: a small, wide-eyed human face, in one tiny frozen moment, as it plummeted toward the water."

When she witnesses a small child tumbling from a ferry into Lake Champlain, Troy Chance dives in without thinking. Harrowing moments later, she bobs to the surface, pulling a terrified little boy with her. As the ferry disappears into the distance, she begins a bone-chilling swim nearly a mile to shore towing a tiny passenger.

Surprisingly, he speaks only French. He'll acknowledge that his name is Paul; otherwise, he's resolutely mute.

Troy assumes that Paul's frantic parents will be in touch with the police or the press. But what follows is a shocking and deafening silence. And Troy, a freelance writer, finds herself as fiercely determined to protect Paul as she is to find out what happened to him. She'll need skill and courage to survive and protect her charge and herself.

Sara J. Henry's powerful and compelling Learning to Swim will move and disturb readers right up to its shattering conclusion.

[lainey1]

I finished Mean Streak by Sandra Brown in 2 days. It's the story of a doctor who goes jogging and wakes up to find herself with a concussion in a cabin in the woods with a strange man. There are several twists throughout the book which made it hard for me to put down!

Now I'm starting Missing You by Harlan Coben.

[lolakimono]

I finished this one this morning-

Even a perfect family has its secrets.

Sixteen-year-old Julia Whitmire appeared to have everything: a famous father, a luxurious Manhattan town house, a coveted spot at the elite Casden prep school. When she is found dead in her bathtub, a handwritten suicide note left on her bed, her parents insist that their daughter would never take her own life. But Julia's enviable world was more complicated than it seemed. The pressure to excel at Casden was enormous. Abuse of prescription drugs ran rampant among students. And a search of Julia's computer reveals that she'd been engaged in a dangerous game of cyberbullying against an unlikely victim.

NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher is convinced the case is a suicide, but she knows from personal experience that a loving family can be the last to accept the truth. As she is pressured to pursue a case she doesn't believe in, she is pulled into Julia's inner circle—an eclectic mix of precocious teenagers from Manhattan's most privileged families as well as street kids from Greenwich Village. But when the target of Julia's harassment continues to receive death threats, Ellie is forced to acknowledge that Julia may have learned the hard way that some secrets should never be told.

[lolakimono]

I read this one today- (not something I normally would have read, and a bit "sci-fi" for me.)

Three years after her husband Max's death, Shelley feels no more adjusted to being a widow than she did that first terrible day. That is, until the doorbell rings. Standing on her front step is a young man who looks so much like Max–same smile, same eyes, same age, same adorable bump in his nose–he could be Max's long-lost relation. He introduces himself as Paolo, an Italian editor of American coffee table books, and shows Shelley some childhood photos. Paolo tells her that the man in the photos, the bearded man who Paolo says is his grandfather though he never seems to age, is Max. Her Max. And he is alive and well.

As outrageous as Paolo's claims seem–how could her husband be alive? And if he is, why hasn't he looked her up? – Shelley desperately wants to know the truth. She and Paolo jet across the globe to track Max down–if it is really Max– and along the way, Shelley recounts the European package tour where they had met. As she relives Max's stories of bloody Parisian barricades, medieval Austrian kitchens, and buried Roman boathouses, Shelley begins to piece together the story of who her husband was and what these new revelations mean for her "happily ever after." And as she and Paolo get closer to the truth, Shelley discovers that not all stories end where they are supposed to.

[smoky22]

I'm still reading A Sudden Light. It's totally different from The Art of Racing in the Rain, but I really like it so far.

Two other books just became available on my kindle (The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel) I've been waiting a long time for both of those books. I'd better hurry up and finish my current book.

[Judaline]

smoky, I hated The Blackhouse. I pulled the bookmark on it quite early.

[lolakimono]

I just started this one-

The Sunday morning starts like any other, aside from the slight hangover. Dani Keller wakes up on her Seattle houseboat, a headache building behind her eyes from the wine she drank at a party the night before. But on this particular Sunday morning, she’s surprised to see that her husband, Ian, is not home. As the hours pass, Dani fills her day with small things. But still, Ian does not return. Irritation shifts to worry, worry slides almost imperceptibly into panic. And then, like a relentless blackness, the terrible realization hits Dani: He’s gone.

As the police work methodically through all the logical explanations—he’s hurt, he’s run off, he’s been killed—Dani searches frantically for a clue as to whether Ian is in fact dead or alive. And, slowly, she unpacks their relationship, holding each moment up to the light: from its intense, adulterous beginning, to the grandeur of their new love, to the difficulties of forever. She examines all the sins she can—and cannot—remember. As the days pass, Dani will plumb the depths of her conscience, turning over and revealing the darkest of her secrets in order to discover the hard truth—about herself, her husband, and their lives together