A Book(s) Thread

[AGBF]

My mom dropped some books off while I am recuperating. First one I might start reading is
"The Thief of Auschwitz" by Jon Clinch.

I didn't know you were recuperating, missy. What is going on? (I am wondering in what thread you posted about this. Obviously I am either not reading the thread at all or am reading it only in bits and pieces. Please give me a pointer.)

Hugs,
Deb

 

[missy]

I didn't know you were recuperating, missy. What is going on? (I am wondering in what thread you posted about this. Obviously I am either not reading the thread at all or am reading it only in bits and pieces. Please give me a pointer.)

Hugs,
Deb

Hi @AGBF I'm OK. Had surgery Thursday to remove a double ganglion cyst on my index finger. I had the growth for a few years but it was getting large. My doctors and I were monitoring it since hand surgery can be dicey with all the nerves running through the hand. But the cyst got too large and invasive and deformed the finger and nail and the hand surgeon said it had to come out. So it did. The pain in the neck (or shall I say pain in the finger lol) aspect of this is I must keep the hand elevated above my heart and the finger vertical 24/7 till my follow up appointment March 18th. Let's just say I am not being completely successful in this endeavor but I am doing my best.

And a few photos if I may. This is PS and we are visual creatures after all.

Pre surgery. They gave me a delicious blanket and heat was pumped into my gown. Amazing.


Post surgery. Thankfully as soon as I woke from the anesthesia they brought me coffee. Ahhh coffee.

Almost ready to go home and the contraption I am supposed to keep my hand and finger elevated in 24/7

I swear I am not giving you the finger.




And yesterday with the help of my dh my first day outside again. He retrofitted a sling to allow my hand to be elevated above my heart and vertical.




Thanks for caring Deb and (((hugs)))

to you and Hero. XO.

Back to books!

 

[AGBF]

Wow, missy, I am so sorry you had to (and I understand you had to) go through this. It seems like yesterday that you had that major orthopedic surgery on your leg! You are really a brave woman. I send healing dust by the bucket and wil pray for your full and speedy recovery, too!

Huge hugs,
(((missy)))
Deb

 

[Indylady]

Missy, sending you hugs and dust for a smooth recovery! I admire your positive spirit, and love your hat, scarf, and glove set!

 

[AGBF]

The last four books I read were, not in order:
Blue Heaven
Three Weeks To Say Goodbye
Shots Fired
and
To Be Where You Are.

The first three listed were all written by C.J.Box whose Joe Pickett series I loved. Of the three I liked Blue Heaven the most. It was action oriented and not frustrating. I found Three Weeks To Say Goodbye frustrating, a bit annoying, and sadder than Mr. Box' books usually are. Shots Fired was a collection of short stories, and while it gave me my needed C.J. Box fix, I felt cheated by some of the stories. I actually disliked some of the, which I would have thought was impossible before I read that anthology.

To Be Where You Are was the last book in Jan Karon's Mitford novel series. I had been holding on to it, not wanting to read it too quickly, because I know she may never write another book in the series. She had declared she was finished before she wrote the last two books, then relented and signed up to write them. I fear this may be it, and I have enjoyed them so much!

Who else has read these?

Deb

 

[LittleRed]

What a great thread! I will enjoy going through and reading all the posts. I’m sure my books to read list will grow quite a bit.

 

[jbake]

I just finished reading Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery trilogy. It was sweet and really made me want to bake some bread I got as far as stocking up on flour before life got in the way again, whoops!

Now I’m reading Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth. I really enjoyed the television series, so this has been on my to-read list for awhile. I’m enjoying it, but since it’s a memoir, it doesn’t flow quite like the novels I’m used to reading.

I’m also looking forward to going back to the beginning of this thread to start gathering recommendations!

 

[missy]

Lately I have continued to read...nothing. I am just not in the proper frame of mind. And in fact returned all the books my mom lent me when they visited.

But, I want to next read "The Lost Wife" by Alyssa Richman. We met her a few weeks ago in person at a gala affair we were attending and I had the privilege of chatting with her for the better part of an hour. She is delightful. Looking forward to getting to know her as an author. My sister is familiar with her books and thinks I will enjoy them.

 

[AGBF]

My wonderful brother, who came down to take care of my daughter and Hero while I spent the past week in Virginia, left me with a book to read.

I have mentioned my brother on Pricescope before. He is just a great guy in every way. Not only is he a helpful and loving brother (and a great father to his girls, a wonderful son-in-law to his mother-in-law. etc) but he has a social conscience. He has been coaching the high school robotics team at the high school his daughters attended since they on the team and one of them is almost 30! And since he retired from HUD he has been on the Town's Board of Ed and chair of its Finance Committee (all volunteer, although elected, of course. At any rate, I am digressing. When i got home from Virginia he and I had time to talk and he told me about an interesting book he was reading. (Unlike me, he reads non-fiction.)

He had already read it, so when I expressed interest in it he ran out to his car and got a copy for me to read. It is entitled Waking Up White and is written by Debby Irving.

Rather than tell you what my brother told me, I will let you look it up yourself. Or, alternatively, you can wait until I read it. After I do, I will post more about it. I suspect it will be a good read.

 

[missy]

I just finished reading Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery trilogy. It was sweet and really made me want to bake some bread I got as far as stocking up on flour before life got in the way again, whoops!

Now I’m reading Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth. I really enjoyed the television series, so this has been on my to-read list for awhile. I’m enjoying it, but since it’s a memoir, it doesn’t flow quite like the novels I’m used to reading.

I’m also looking forward to going back to the beginning of this thread to start gathering recommendations!

Loved "Call the Midwife" and also enjoyed (what we watched as we did not finish watching the series for some reason) the television series. Really a wonderful book.

 

[december-fire]

Hello @AGBF and other book lovers!

I just finished If You Knew Her by Emily Elgar and really enjoyed it!
One of the main characters in this book is a nurse who's patients are in comas; two of these patients are also main characters of the book.

If You Knew Her, published in 2018, is Emily Elgar's first novel. Hopefully, she'll be writing more books.

 

[AGBF]

I'm so glad to have more suggestions for future reading, missy and december-fire! As I have said before, this thread is a major source of reading material for me and there has not been enough posting to it lately to keep me in reading material. Luckily I have a huge stack of books piled up in my bedroom so I am not in imminent danger of book deprivation!

I just finished I Hear The Sirens In The Street by Adrian McKinty. It is the second in the Sean Duffy detective series about the Troubles in northern Ireland. I am hooked and planning to read the third one. (I also read one out of order which I mentioned above. They are all good.) Then I read The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell. I found it interesting, but a bit depressing. I kept wanting to return to the book to continue reading it, but when i thought about the life of the protagonist, it really seemed pretty terrible! Nonetheless, it was a good read.

 

[jbake]

Hello @AGBF and other book lovers!

I just finished If You Knew Her by Emily Elgar and really enjoyed it!
One of the main characters in this book is a nurse who's patients are in comas; two of these patients are also main characters of the book.

If You Knew Her, published in 2018, is Emily Elgar's first novel. Hopefully, she'll be writing more books.

Thanks for this recommendation! I just finished it this morning. It made me question almost every character and was satisfied with the ending.

I just finished I Hear The Sirens In The Street by Adrian McKinty. It is the second in the Sean Duffy detective series about the Troubles in northern Ireland. I am hooked and planning to read the third one. (I also read one out of order which I mentioned above. They are all good.) Then I read The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell. I found it interesting, but a bit depressing. I kept wanting to return to the book to continue reading it, but when i thought about the life of the protagonist, it really seemed pretty terrible! Nonetheless, it was a good read.

I looked up Adrian McKinty and think I would love to read that series. Unfortunately my library doesn’t have them available as ebooks. Hopefully I‘ll be able to put in a request for them.
Have you read Tana French? She has a series, Dublin Murder Squad, that I’ve really enjoyed reading. The first one wasn’t my favorite, but I thought the next three were much better. There’s a new one I haven’t read yet, but have on hold.

Since my last post, I’ve read the Clash of Kingdom’s series by Erin Summerhill. They were quick reads, but I thought there wasn’t enough world building for me to truly understand all the magic “rules.”

The Bookshop on the Corner and Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe, by Jenny Colgan. I enjoyed them both, very cozy. The first one ended a bit abruptly, but there’s something about her books I seem to crave. Lots of community, personal empowerment, and a happily ever after

The Lost for Words Bookshop was a touching book. I went into it blind, and it put me a bit on edge. There was a feeling that something bad had happened/ was about to happen that I couldn’t shake. There was a domestic violence theme that proved my feeling right. It all turned out okay in the end though.

 

[AGBF]

I have almost finished reading In The Morning I'll be Gone by Adrian McKinty. It is the third book in what was going to be a trilogy about Sean Duffy, a police detective in northern Ireland during the Troubles. I believe that what happened was that it was such a successful series that was that it was expanded. I have already shared in this thread that I started out reading a Sean Duffy novel that came far later in the series than the first three books. Even though I lived through that period, I find that I am learning a lot about it. First of all, northern Ireland is not covered in great detail here in the US and second of all, I am not the most acute observer of northern Ireland. I still remember some of the events recounted in in the the book as background, however. I even found myself making notes on which Irish groups were which so that I could stay better attuned to the politics, although it absolutely was not necessary to do so in order to enjoy the story. The author is very erudite and entertaining. I highly recommend the books!

 

[VRBeauty]

So... I just finished the first novel I’ve read on my cell phone! I’ve never been much interested in reading books on a Kindle or iPad, let alone on my cell phone, but I’m big on borrowing books from the library, which isn’t an option right now because of the coronavirus lock-down. My local library has an e-book option so I decided to explore that. It helped, by the way, that my partner has been using the e-book option for quite a while.

To cut to the chase, once I got started, I loved it! It really wasn’t that different from reading a physical book - other than the tactile feel of holding the book and turning the pages, of course. My local library uses in app called “Libby“ for its e-books. It’s an easy interface with the library’s catalog and check-out system. More importantly, though, the program allows me to do something that I often do when reading a physical book, namely, page back to sections I’ve already read when I want to check out some detail, or something. The experience really isn’t any different from Aging back through a physical book. I suppose I could use the search function somehow, but I really haven’t explored that. I think the app would also allow me to do things I can’t do when reading a physical book, such as checking the definition of new-to-me-word. Plus it allows a couple of different screen options so I can pick the letter and background combination that’s most comfortable for me. Are used a white screen with black lettering for reading during daylight hours, and a black screen with white lettering for reading at night. (I have an iPhone 8plus, by the way, which has a fairly large screen.)

I only saw one real downside. Normally when I finish a book, I’ll hang onto it for a day or two and maybe go back to reread some sections that particularly struck me or that were integral to how the story unfolded. This time I was eager to see what the next step was, and found that there was one other person waiting to read that book, so I turned it in right away - thereby depriving myself of the chance to re-read those key parts. I’d have to check the book out again to retrieve it, and as I mentioned before someone else was waiting for it so that wouldn’t happen right away.

Oh well. Live and learn!

The book, by the way, was “A Bitter Feast,” the latest installment of the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James mystery novels by Deborah Crombie. It’s a generally well written series and I look forward to each new installment. The author has taken a liking to the “flashback“storytelling tool, which I’m not too fond of, but she doesn’t use it too much in this book. I’d definitely recommend this series to any Anglophiles out there - there’s a cuppa or two in pretty much every chapter!

 

[jbake]

So... I just finished the first novel I’ve read on my cell phone! I’ve never been much interested in reading books on a Kindle or iPad, let alone on my cell phone, but I’m big on borrowing books from the library, which isn’t an option right now because of the coronavirus lock-down. My local library has an e-book option so I decided to explore that. It helped, by the way, that my partner has been using the e-book option for quite a while.

To cut to the chase, once I got started, I loved it! It really wasn’t that different from reading a physical book - other than the tactile feel of holding the book and turning the pages, of course. My local library uses in app called “Libby“ for its e-books. It’s an easy interface with the library’s catalog and check-out system. More importantly, though, the program allows me to do something that I often do when reading a physical book, namely, page back to sections I’ve already read when I want to check out some detail, or something. The experience really isn’t any different from Aging back through a physical book. I suppose I could use the search function somehow, but I really haven’t explored that. I think the app would also allow me to do things I can’t do when reading a physical book, such as checking the definition of new-to-me-word. Plus it allows a couple of different screen options so I can pick the letter and background combination that’s most comfortable for me. Are used a white screen with black lettering for reading during daylight hours, and a black screen with white lettering for reading at night. (I have an iPhone 8plus, by the way, which has a fairly large screen.)

I only saw one real downside. Normally when I finish a book, I’ll hang onto it for a day or two and maybe go back to reread some sections that particularly struck me or that were integral to how the story unfolded. This time I was eager to see what the next step was, and found that there was one other person waiting to read that book, so I turned it in right away - thereby depriving myself of the chance to re-read those key parts. I’d have to check the book out again to retrieve it, and as I mentioned before someone else was waiting for it so that wouldn’t happen right away.

Oh well. Live and learn!

The book, by the way, was “A Bitter Feast,” the latest installment of the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James mystery novels by Deborah Crombie. It’s a generally well written series and I look forward to each new installment. The author has taken a liking to the “flashback“storytelling tool, which I’m not too fond of, but she doesn’t use it too much in this book. I’d definitely recommend this series to any Anglophiles out there - there’s a cuppa or two in pretty much every chapter!

I’ve been using Libby pretty extensively this quarantine, too! I started using it when my son was younger so I could read on my phone while rocking him to sleep for naps and bedtime. It’s definitely convenient.

It’s great for reading books that are entertaining but that I wouldn’t necessarily want to have a physical copy to reread at some point. I just finished the Stephanie Plum series using Libby. Quick, easy reads that kept me entertained, but would take up a considerable amount of shelf space if I had physical copies of all 26.

 

[VRBeauty]

II used to be a voracious reader, but I’ve been reading very little in the past few years - real life interfering snd all that. “Real life” being not just disruptive life events (of which there have been a few) but also life choices. First choice: I’m spending way more time on my phone and the internet, which affects both my time and my concentration. Second choice: my hubby, who is less a reader and more a connoisseur of television and movies. He does, however, enjoy reading out loud to me, and we’ve finished several books in nightly installments!

But I am starting to carve out time for reading again!

I just finished and really enjoyed “The Gown,” by Jennifer Robson. It’s a book of historical fiction set mostly in post-WWII England. It follows three young women: two friends who work in the embroidery studio of a famous English fashion designer and find themselves working on the wedding gown that will be worn by then-princess Elizabeth, and, decades later, the granddaughter of one of the young women. I was struck by how well the book was written - I was drawn into the narratives and rarely sensed the author at work, if that makes sense, especially in the stories of the two young embroiderers.

I also have to mention “The Best of James Herriot, Favourite memories of a country vet.” It’s one of the books my husband and I read out loud, a chapter at a time before falling asleep. James Herriot was a wonderful writer and his stories often had us laughing out loud!

 

[AGBF]

Well, I'm going to mention a little thread that missy started in which I participated during the worst of the covid-19 pandemic when we were all quarantined. I am linking the thread because I read and reviewed two books in the thread that I do not want to have to review again. Yet I believe they bear metion. In my opinion, they are both great books.

They are Handling Sin and A Confederacy of Dunces.

Here is the link to missy's covid-19 thread:

The Covid-19 Book thread edition

I mentioned above that I am in a "quarantine book club" because I received a chain letter meant to entertain readers during this time when many of us are isolated and locked down. I received another recommendation via e-mail since I posted the names of books above, so I thought I'd post it here...

www.pricescope.com