What to Read? … What to Read?

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“St. Cristóbal’s Church in Spanish Harlem knelt quietly between a bodega and a pawnshop. It boasted a small gray steeple and was innocent of the graffiti that tagged its near-neighbors. Inside, it smelled of candles, flowers, and furniture polish. Like a nice, suburban home might smell.

At least it struck Lieutenant Eve Dallas that way as she strode down the aisle formed by rows of pews. In the front, a man in black shirt, black pants, and white collar sat with his head bowed and his hands folded.

She wasn’t sure if he was praying or just waiting, but he wasn’t her priority. She skirted around the glossy casket all but buried in red and white carnations. The dead guy inside wasn’t her priority either.”

I have started my list of what to read for November; and this one is at the top of my list. Salvation in Death written by J.D. Robb is released November 4, 2008.

As the priest at a Catholic funeral mass brings the chalice to his lips—and falls over dead. Detective Lieutenant Eve Dallas confirms that the consecrated wine contained potassium cyanide, she’s determined to solve the murder of Father Miguel Flores, despite her discomfort with her surroundings. It’s not the bodegas and pawnshops of East Harlem that bother her, though the neighborhood is a long way from the stone mansion she shares with her billionaire husband, Roarke. It’s all that holiness flying around at St. Christobal’s that makes her uneasy.

A search of the victim’s sparsely furnished room reveals little— except for a carefully hidden religious medal with a mysterious inscription, and a couple of underlined Bible passages. The autopsy reveals more: faint scars of knife wounds, a removed tattoo—and evidence of plastic surgery, suggesting that “Father Flores” may not have been the man his parishioners had thought. Now, as Eve pieces together clues that hint at gang connections and a deeply personal act of revenge, she believes she’s making progress on the case. Until a second murder—in front of an even larger crowd of worshippers—knocks the whole investigation sideways. And Eve is left to figure out who committed these unholy acts—and why.

Will this one be as good as the rest of Robb’s books? Only one way to find out; don’t forget to check out your local bookstore or public Library for this new read.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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“I went on board a ship bound for London. Never any young adventurer’s misfortunes, I believe, began sooner, or continued longer than mine.”

It looks like there will be a new T.V. series will be airing on NBC starting on October 17, 2008. What might this do with books? Very simple; the program is simply called Crusoe. The tie in with books is it’s based on Daniel Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe’s seafaring adventures are abruptly ended when he is shipwrecked, the solitary survivor on a deserted island. He gradually creates a life for himself, building in English literature. Land and making a companion from the native whose life he saves.

Daniel Defoe is generally credited with being one of the first novel writers in the English language. His book is appropriately billed as an adventure story. This is the way adventure stories are supposed to be, not what they are today glorified reality T.V.  This is a great read, if a bit long winded in some description. It’s a perfect book for sharing. I’m hoping the new series will be as good as the book.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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“Chester explained that when he looked out the window, he saw Professor Mickelwhite, our next door neighbor, playing the violin in his living room. He listened for a few moments to the haunting melody and sighed with relief. I’ve really got to stop reading these horror stories late at night, he thought, it’s beginning to affect my mind. He yawned and turned to go back to his chair and get some sleep. As he turned, however, he was startled by what he saw.”

Wow I found a great and amusing book for sharing with the little ghost and ghouls in your life. Why not try Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allen Crow written by James Howe and illustrated by Eric Fortune.

The Monroe house is going mad with excitement. Pete has just won a contest, and the prize is a school visit from none other than M. T. Graves, Pete’s idol and the bestselling author of the Flesh Crawlers series. He’s even going to stay with the Monroe’s while he’s visiting! Harold and Howie are thrilled, but Chester the cat is suspicious. Why does Graves dress all in black? Why doesn’t the beady-eyed crow perched on his shoulder say anything? Why has a threatening flock of crows invaded the backyard? And most worrisome of all: In each of the Flesh Crawlers books, why does something bad always happen to the pets? Suddenly, Graves’s interest in all of the animals — especially Bunnicula — looks far from innocent. It’s up to Chester, Harold, and Howie to find out if M. T. Graves and Edgar Allan Crow are really devising a plot to make their beloved bunny. . . NEVERMORE.

I stumbled upon this series purely by accident and I’m glad I did. It’s not a hard read or a long one, but it is a good one. What is more funny then a vampire Bunny? Not much, this is a great book for sharing and fits in with Halloween which is fast approaching.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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I dug out an old favorite of mine the other day; The List of Seven written by Mark Frost.

Occult forces of evil gather in Victorian England to scheme for world dominion in this lively but unconvincing period thriller by Twin Peaks co-creator Frost. The novel opens in London of 1884, where protagonist Arthur Conan Doyle, a moderately successful young doctor, unpublished author and part-time student of the supernatural, attends a seance at the request of an anonymous lady in distress. When the evening erupts into gruesome violence and murder, Doyle finds himself on the run, engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a cadre of ruthless satanists bent on incarnating the spirit of evil. He finds an ally in the mysterious, resourceful and supremely capable Jack Sparks, on secret assignment to the Queen. Sparks’s own brother is the mastermind of the “Dark Brotherhood” they oppose, and his character will, much later, supply Doyle with the inspiration for his Sherlock Holmes. Despite the appreciable wit and inventive flourishes with which Frost invests his tale, there is too much in this fast-paced plot that simply does not make sense. Frost creates mystery through an unseemly vagueness of description, perhaps awaiting the special effects of the screen to flesh out elements of his narrative. In the novel, however, his characters never become more than clever conceits, and the prevailing attitude toward the spiritualism at its center is frustratingly wishy-washy. The much-ballyhooed shocker ending seems a tepid afterthought.

Have you ever read Arthur Conan Doyle? Well if you have you will find it parallels his novels of Sherlock Holmes. Now don’t worry if you haven’t you will still like this book. It’s a book that you will devour and wonder if there really was someone like Jack Sparks who inspired Doyle to create his world famous detective.  All I can tell you is find a copy and read it.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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“Sometimes when Maryam Yazdan looked at her new little granddaughter she had an eerie, lightheaded feeling, as if she had stepped into some sort of alternate universe. Everything about the child was impossibly perfect. Her skin was a flawless ivory, and her hair was almost too soft to register on Maryam’s fingertips. Her eyes were the shape of watermelon seeds, very black and cut very precisely into her small, solemn face. She weighed so little that Maryam often lifted her too high by mistake when she picked her up. And her hands! Tiny hands, with curling fingers. The wrinkles on her knuckles were halvah-colored (so amusing, that a baby had wrinkles!), and her nails were no bigger than dots.

Susan, they called her. They chose a name that resembled the name she had come with, Sooki, and also it was a comfortable sound for Iranians to pronounce.”

I have had a super busy week so far and it only just started; time for a break.  A much deserved break, how about reading Digging to America written by Anne Tyler.

Anne Tyler’s richest, most deeply searching novel–a story about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan, who, after 35 years in this country, must finally come to terms with her “outsiderness.”

Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport – the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the instant babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate: an “arrival party” that from then on is repeated every year as the two families become more and more deeply intertwined. Even Maryam is drawn in – up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by Bitsy Donaldson’s recently widowed father, all the values she cherishes – her traditions, her privacy, her otherness–are suddenly threatened.

As I have stated before families are complex and Anne Tyler has shown us just how complex families can get. What she has done is put in cultural differences just to give it a layered effect. The plot is slow in some places; however it is riddled with wonderfully human characters with flaws and opinions. I enjoyed this book simply because it tells the story from the other side. Is this a hit? Well for me it was, but for you…we won’t know until you read it. Off you go and get your copy.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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Can you believe we are into October already? I can’t wait for Halloween and what a better way to start off this spooky month then with a little bit of horror. Why not try Poe’s Children: The New Horror: An Anthology written by Peter Straub.

 Horror writing is usually associated with formulaic gore, but New Wave horror writers have more in common with the wildly inventive, evocative spookiness of Edgar Allan Poe than with the sometimes-predictable hallmarks of their peers. Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.

Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.

Now I’m not a fan of horror usually, I find that it is too formulated, but give me writers like Poe, Hitchcock and I am in heaven. This is a wonderful collection of short stories that bring back the ideas of what horror is supposed to be like. Down with formulas; all read new wave horror! Go grab a blanket, maybe a flashlight; lock your doors and windows and let your imagination soar.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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Oh look what is hitting book stores near you on October 14, 2008. Gregory Maguire’s newest book (book 3) in the Wicked series A Lion Among Men.

Since Wicked was first published in 1995, millions of readers have discovered Gregory Maguire’s fantastically encyclopedic Oz, a world filled with characters both familiar and new, darkly conceived and daringly reimagined. In the much-anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion—the once tiny cub defended by Elphaba in Wicked.

While civil war looms in Oz, a tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before her final hour, an enigmatic figure known as Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—arrives searching for information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. As payment, Yackle, who hovered on the sidelines of Elphaba’s life, demands some answers of her own.

Brrr surrenders his story to the ailing maunt: Abandoned as a cub, his earliest memories are gluey hazes, and his path from infancy in the Great Gillikin Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he trudges through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, and falls in love with a forbidding Cat princess. In the wake of laws that oppress talking Animals, he avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the war-mongering Emperor of Oz.

A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City’s approaching armies. What does the Lion know of the whereabouts of the Witch’s boy, Liir? What can Yackle reveal about the auguries of the Clock of the Time Dragon? And what of the Grimmerie, the magic book that vanished as quickly as Elphaba? Is destiny ever arbitrary? Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets—cowardly, wicked, brainless, criminally earnest—to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they’re skinned alive?

At once a portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpse of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire’s new novel is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics.

I am extremely looking forward to this one as I have enjoyed his Wicked series and other books. I hope this one is as good as the rest. Will I see you at the book store?

Happy Reading

Sarah

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Marlon Brando!? What more can I say I have always enjoyed watching Brando and now I found a book that is actually from the mind of Brando and it is co-written by Donald Cammell. Oh the title might help right, Fan-Tan.

Starred Review. In 1979, Brando proposed to film director Cammell (Performance) that they collaborate on a China Seas pirate story. Brando improvised scenes and Cammell wrote a 165-page treatment; in 1982, Cammell worked the same material into an incomplete novel. Brando dropped the project, but Cammell’s widow revived it after Brando’s death, and Knopf’s Sonny Mehta hired Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film) to gather the extant materials and finish the book. The stylish result will delight readers who love movies, Marlon Brando, sea stories, Chinese pirates or adventure tales. It’s 1927, and 51-year-old Brando-esque sea captain Anatole “Annie” Doultry is serving a six-month stretch in a Hong Kong prison, during which he saves the life of another prisoner. After finishing his sentence, Annie finds he’s gained the gratitude of that prisoner’s boss, the beautiful gangster Madame Lai Choi San. Madame Lai, aka Mountain of Wealth, proposes that Annie join her in the highjack robbery of the British-owned SS Chow Fa, which will be carrying a fortune in silver. Annie can’t resist either the money or Madam Lai, and soon enough he’s up to his gunwales in pirates and plunder. Throw in a typhoon, a double-cross, a scorching sex scene, hand-to-hand combat and a mad break for freedom.

Pirates, a high seas chase and Marlon Brando what could be better. How about a book that wouldn’t be better off as a movie; there was just a few things that you couldn’t ignore, for example the book is supposed to take place in 1927 however the character uses an M-1 Garand rifle which wasn’t invented for another decade. The plot never went anywhere; was there even a plot? Unfortunately if you are a Brando fan you may be disappointed in this one. Maybe that’s why I found it in the bargain books.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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“Years before my own breasts even started to develop; my mom and aunts would tell stories and pass down wisdom from their own experiences. Once my aunt Alice told my cousin Lena, eight, and me, ten, that when she was my age, she felt a bump in her breast. Worried that it might be breast cancer, Alice ran downstairs to tell her mother. Her mom—my grandmother—assured a panicked Alice that it was not breast cancer at all, but that her breast buds were starting to grow!”

Surprise; surprise I was in the book store. I happened to be walking out when a wonderful title caught my eye Taking Care of your “Girls” written by Marisa C. Weiss and Isabel Friedman. How could I not stop with a title like that and I must say I was very pleased that I did.

The real facts about your “girls” and how to take care of them

“Well, all my friends think they will never have breasts—and it’s not funny—because a lot of girls feel this way.”
—Elena, 13“I went up two sizes over summer break! I started seventh grade with a ‘C’ cup. Then my breasts got weird pink stripes on the side. What happened?”
—Veronica, 12

Girls are as anxious and confused about their breasts as ever. That’s why Marisa Weiss, M.D., an oncologist and breast health specialist, and her teenage daughter, Isabel, decided to create Taking Care of Your “Girls.” Together, they polled more than three thousand girls and their moms and came up with a surprisingly huge list of worries and misconceptions. Based on their research, you’ll get answers to questions like:

• How do I know when I need to get my first bra—and what kind should I get?
• Do big breasts have a higher risk of breast cancer than small ones?
• How do I get rid of stretch marks?
• When will my breasts stop growing?
• How do I examine my own breasts?
• Will the size of my breasts even out?
• Do tanning, antiperspirants, wearing a bra at night, and talking on a cell phone cause breast cancer?

A groundbreaking book for both mothers and daughters, Taking Care of Your “Girls” is a practical guide to breast care and a girl-to-girl conversation about the feelings and emotions that come with the territory.

This is something I wish I had at that awkward stage; it wasn’t like it is now where it’s cool to talk about your “girls” health. This book is wonderfully written, it’s easy, honest, down to earth answers are great for both mothers and daughters who are looking for advice or confirmation that they are perfect just the way they are. This is a must have for that girl in your life.

Happy Reading

Sarah

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Fall is upon us and what does that mean? Copious amounts of tea and or coffee, sweaters to feel cozy in and on cold blustery days when you have nothing to do a good light read. Why not try Heart and Soul written by Maeve Binchy.

Clara Casey has more than enough on her plate. Her daughters Adi and Linda were no problem during the usually turbulent teens. Now Adi is always fighting for or against something: the environment or the whale or battery farming; while Linda lurches from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next. As if this wasn’t enough, Clara, a senior cardiac specialist, has a new job to cope with and now her ex-husband wants something from her…

Declan is looking forward to joining the clinic – but what should have been a straightforward six-month posting brings him far more than he expected. Then there’s Father Brian Flynn, whose life is turned upside down when his reputation is threatened. And the beautiful, cheerful nurse Fiona, who can’t leave her troubled past behind…

For Ania, meeting Clara Casey is a miracle. She never intended to leave Poland – but perhaps a new job in a new country will mend her broken heart?

As I am not normally a fan I was pleasantly surprised by this one. Binchy has once again given us a story filled with warmth, compassion and humor that we have all grown to expect from this talented author. She has weaved a story of family, friends, patients and even staff from a heart clinic with in a community that is caught between traditional and present day Ireland. If you are a fan of Binchy, love chic lit and love a good story teller then this is the one for you. If you are not a fan, run far away from anything remotely girly and can’t stand a good story then I suggest you go turn on the T.V. otherwise go and get a copy and enjoy.

Happy Reading

Sarah