It's Monday! What Are You Reading This Week?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading This Week? This is a weekly event to list the books completed last week, the books currently being read, and the books to be finished this week. It is hosted this week by Book Journey.

Books completed last week:
Timeless Desire by Gwyn Cready
Broken Harbor by Tana French
The Playdate by Louise Millar



Books currently being read:
Disgrace (aka The Absent One) by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer
The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner

Books to finish this week:
And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman
A Fistful of Collars ( A Chet and Bernie Mystery) by Spencer Quinn

I review the Lippman book for a tour on Aug. 16, and then go on to Following Atticus by Tom Ryan for another tour later this month.

What do you plan this week?

Sunday Salon: Spring Reading

Welcome to the Sunday Salon.

A robin has been building a nest for weeks outside my window.
April winds shake the small tree, her bits of twigs and grass blow away.
Has she lost her ability to make a nest? It keeps falling, bits and pieces.
Perhaps she will triumph today, before the new winds blow.

On my spring reading list:
The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davis, a haunted house thriller.

Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Scandinavian thriller

The Wild Wood Enquiry by Ann Purser, cozy mystery

Murder Buys a T-Shirt , thanks to Kaye, Pudgy Penquin Perusal

The Concubine Saga by Lloyd Lofthouse, historical fiction

An Unexpected Guest by Anne Korkeakivi, re a British diplomat's wife in Paris

The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins, thriller

Under Oath by Margaret McLean, legal thriller

The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan, thriller set in Thailand

I'm reading these two memoirs for TLC book tours this month and next:

Lucky Child by Loung Ung, a Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, memoir

Lulu in the Sky by Loung Ung, a Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness, memoir

And for lighter reading, I have two library books: Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl and Remember Me?

Whew! Would you believe I'm also doing some writing of my own? What have you been up to and what are you reading?

Book ARCs on My Shelves

The guilt factor is at work this morning. I look at my list of ARCs to be read and I find the stack facing me creeping up faster than I have time to read these days. The cool weather this past week should be good for reading, but my thoughts are turning elsewhere. What's a reader to do?

Here are some new ARCs.

Struck by Jennifer Bosworth - A girl struck by lightning hundreds of times holds the fate of the world in her hands.
The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks - Reporter Carter Ross investigates an unusual obituary.
Sacrilege by S. J. Parris, historical mystery
As the Crow Flies by Craig Johnson, mystery
Trail of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz,  mystery
The Watchers by Jon Steele, thriller
Gypsy Boy: My Life in the Secret World of the Romany Gypsies by Mikey Walsh, memoir
The Technologists: A Novel by Matthew Pearl, literary and historical fiction
The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen by Thomas Caplan, thriller

Do you have a system of what books you read first, apart from the publication date?

It's Monday: What Are You Reading?

“It’s Monday! What are you reading?” is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila at Bookjourney.  

Books reviewed last week:
Other Waters by Eleni N. Gage
The Hope Vendetta by Scott Mariani

This week, on my reading list:


The Probability of Murder: A Professor Sophie Knowles Mystery by Ada Madison; Berkley Prime Crime



Before the Poison by Peter Robinson;
William Morrow



Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers;
William Morrow



The Real Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Andrew Marr; Henry Holt


I've got a lot of reading to do.... Are any of these on your reading list? What are you reading this week?

Thanksgiving Reads

graphic courtesy of Dover Publications

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy the day and the weekend!

I've decided to armchair travel for my Thanksgiving reading, in between enjoying turkey and other goodies.

Title: River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh, on a ship on the Bay of Bengal heading to Canton, China. Historical novel, 19 discs audio.

Title: Song of the Silk Road by Mingmei Yip, heading along the Silk Road in China. Contemporary novel, paperback.

Title: Skeleton Letters (A Scrapbooking Mystery) by Laura Childs, in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Which of the three trips would you take this holiday? And what will you be reading, if anything, over the busy Thanksgiving weekend?

Books are a Must-Have, even in Sluggish Economy: Poll

A news article printed yesterday by Reuters says what most of us readers, writers, and book bloggers can agree with.

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – During tough economic times when U.S. consumers are trying to cut back, the indulgence they can't seem to live without is books.

Three-quarters of adults questioned in an online poll said they would sacrifice holidays, dining out, going to the movies and even shopping sprees but they could not resist buying books.

Dining out came in a far second with only 11 percent of Americans naming it their top indulgence, followed by shopping at 7 percent, vacations at four and movies, which was chosen by only 3 percent of Americans.

"The recession highlighted the downside of greed, indulgence and giving in to temptation, but we noticed a shift back to life's simplest pleasures," said Michelle Renaud, a senior manager at Harlequin Enterprises Limited, which conducted the poll.

Okay, so the poll was done by a book publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, but it still has to be done scientifically and presumably accurately for it to make the news.

       I like the findings!

Booking Through Thursday: I Miss My Books

This week's Booking Through Thursday questions remind me of the books I sold or gave away years ago and now wish I had.

In response to the Booking Through Thursday questions, here are my answers:

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain? Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all?

I almost never get rid of books except older text books, magazines, and some paperbacks to the local library, which puts them up for sale. My better half has weeded down my library for me, throwing out and giving away books that he thought I didn't want. I soon put a stop to that practice by telling him about the libraries of old which kept every single scrap of print. (Read The Shadow of the Wind, I told him). He hasn't read the book, but he believed me.

And–when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) …what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore? SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

I have passed on books to friends and family and even entrusted some of my precious ones to my children, with a warning that I want to have them back after they have read them. (I didn't want to encourage them to throw them away or leave them around.)

So I'm a book pack rat. I'm only forming my own medieval-style library, keeping everything. There are books however, that I don't like at all and there are books that are too old to keep (paperbacks), and those get donated or given away. I have only once in my life thrown a book away.

My book pack rat status is a throw back to the days when I lived in a small town without a library and read the same books over and over again. My first Booking Through Thursday post ever, and it really got me going.

Why I Miss My Books:

When I moved from one continent to another some long time ago, I had a grand sale of books, including most of what I had collected through university. I sold many books I'd love to have today, including Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese classic by Tsao Hsueh-Chin in several volumes. I don't think I can find that today for the price I got them for. Now the novel is available at a reasonable price, but abridged and in paperback.

Before coming back to the U.S., I sold another set of books I had carted around with me, including a condensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary, about 20 volumes squeezed into two thick volumes, complete with accompanying magnifying glass. I don't know if the condensed version is still available. If it is not, what would it be worth today?

Read more responses to Booking Through Thursday here.