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 by Book Journey.

The Voluntourist: A Six-Country Tale of Love, Loss, Fatherhood, Fate, and Singing Bon Jovi in Bethlehem by Ken Budd.

A travel memoir of the author's volunteer trips to New Orleans, Costa Rica, China, Ecuador, Palestine, and Kenya. I don't know how popular volunteer vacations are but they seem to be a growing trend.

The Book of Madness and Cures: A Novel by Regina O'Melveny is set in the Venice of 1590.

Gabriella Mondini helps her physician father with his work, The Book of Diseases, and must fend for herself when he disappears. She searches for him in Europe all the way to Morocco and discovers family secrets while developing her skills in healing.

Two different books, but they are taking me to different countries and back in history too. What are you reading this week?

Two Books: Judging a Book By Its Lover and Resurrection Express

Can't wait to read a book entitled Judging a Book By Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere as I want to see what the author, Lauren Leto, says about how books grab attention. I am curious to compare it to my own experiences as a reader. The book is a paperback to be released October 2, 2012 by Harper Perennial.

Resurrection Express: A Thriller by Stephen Romano involves a a high tech thief challenged with hacking into a complex security grid, unaware the stakes could mean the death of billions of people if the wrong people win. The expected publication date is September 18, 2012 by Gallery Books.

These two books were sent by the publishers.

Three Food Mystery Novels

Lots of new cozies with a food theme this summer. These three feature a food critic, a soup shop owner, and a cookie shop owner as the main characters/amateur sleuths in these cozies.

Death in Four Courses by Lucy Burdette is a Key West Food Critic Mystery Novel which includes five recipes and published September 4, 2012. A restaurant critic is found dead in a dipping pool at the Key West Loves Literature Seminar. Food critic Haley Snow, another attendee, plays amateur sleuth to make sure she is not the next victim.

A Spoonful of Murder is the first in A Soup Lover's Mystery by Connie Archer, published August 7, 2012. When a blond tourist is found frozen to death behind Lucky Jamieson's soup shop in Vermont, her soup chef is arrested by police. Lucky becomes a sleuth to save her shop and her chef. Recipes are included.

When the Cookie Crumbles by Virginia Lowell was published August 7, 2012, and is a Cookie Cutter Shop Mystery. The owner of a cookie shop, Olivia Grayson, investigates the history of the Chatterly Mansion and the sudden death of its heir, Payne.

Street Freak: A Memoir of Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers

Title: Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers
Author: Jared Dillian
Paperback, September 11, 2012
Genre: memoir

Opening sentences:"The market has its own intelligence. It has a sort of malignant omniscience that dictates that the market will do whatever fucks over the most people at any given moment in time. It knows your positions, and it knows your fears. You are a sinner in the hands of an angry God, and your positions are going to pay."

I am looking up words and acronyms while reading this memoir by Jared Dillian on his life as a trader for Lehman Brothers on Wall Street during the financial crisis starting 2001 through 2007. I have to find the true meaning of "hedge fund," "EFT trader," "volatility," "leverage," "asset classes," "binomial tree," "SPY," "predatory trading techniques," "program trader," and so on.

In the first chapter, Dillian lost $80,000 in a few minutes, but I haven't yet figured out how, though he described it in some detail. I think it will get easier as I read on. Sentences like "I might have been able to save $80,000, but I wasn't going to be able to save Lehman" keep me reading. So does the jacket book description:

"More than $1 trillion in wealth passed through his hands, yet the extreme highs and lows of the trading floor masked and exacerbated the symptoms of Dillian's undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorders, leading to a downward spiral that nearly ended his life."

The paperback of Street Freak was published by Touchstone. A review copy was sent to me by the publisher.

Desert Wives by Betty Webb; How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue

I rarely read eBooks except for a select few, but am glad I found Betty Webb's Desert Wives on Kindle, one of her Lena Jones mystery books set in Arizona.

The novel is about a polygamy sect that defies federal and state laws along the Arizona-Utah border by condoning child brides, underage pregnancies, and forced confinement of women and children. Evidently, this is not an uncommon situation in this area of the country, even today, some 9 years after the book was first published in hardcover.

In this mystery novel, a woman escapes with her young child from the compound when the elderly leader of the sect singles the child out to be his next wife. When his body is found in the desert with a fatal shotgun wound, the mother becomes a suspect.  Lena, a P.I., goes undercover as the new wife of one of the members in order to find the true murderer.

Can't wait to find out the who and the why... Desert Wives by Betty Webb is free on Kindle at the moment. This edition was published June 17, 2011.

I often read several books at a time, unfortunately. I do have to keep the plot lines separate. How to Eat a Cupcake is a different book from the others I'm reading. It's a contemporary YA novel about the relationship between two young women, Annie and Julia, who grew up together though their backgrounds are vastly different.

Annie is the privileged child in a household in which Julia's mother lives and works as a cook, one of the hired help. The two children are raised and schooled together, but conflicts and jealousies mar their relationship. They meet again later as adults and try to renew their friendship.

Don't know where this one is going, as I'm only on chapter 3 of the book, which is told from both Annie's and Julia's points of view. It looks like a promising read and is keeping my attention.

How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue is a paperback published March 13, 2012 by William Morrow. The ARC was sent to me by the publisher.

Mystery Novel: The Body in the Boudoir by Katherine Hall Page

I can't believe I haven't seen any of Katherine Hall Paige's mystery books before. The Body in the Boudoir is the twentieth in the Faith Fairchild award-winning series, which began with The Body in the Belfry, a book that received an Agatha Award for best first mystery.

The Body in the Boudoir was published in May 2012 but is set in 1990 when amateur sleuth Faith Fairchild is still a New Yorker, before she married and went to live in a small village in Massachusetts, the setting of the first book.

I think all the Faith Fairchild mysteries can be read separately from the others, so I'm starting with this latest one.

About the book: In spite of being overwhelmed by her decision to leave her home in the Big Apple and the multitude of tasks involved in "getting" married, Faith has no doubts about being married to her beloved Tom. But someone out there is dead set on making sure that she doesn't reach the altar. Before it's too late, she needs to figure out who is trying to sabotage the wedding--by eliminating the bride.(publisher's description).

The Body in the Boudoir: A Faith Fairchild Mystery by Katherine Hall Page is a hardcover publication of William Morrow, released May 1, 2012. I received a review copy from the publisher.

Book Review: Gold by Chris Cleave

Title: Gold by Chris Cleave
Hardcover, July 3, 2012; Simon and Schuster
Genre: fiction
Source: publisher

Just finished reading Gold and appreciated the author's intent to show what could drive Olympic athletes to win, both their healthy and unhealthy reasons.

Zoe has unhealthy reasons to win at all costs. Kate has more compassion for other people and her drive comes from her love of the sport. Jack's involvement in cycling for gold came from a push by his father when he was a young man. The novel takes you from their young selves - Zoe and Kate as nineteen-year-old rivals in the sport and as rivals over Jack - to their developing friendship and final time to fight for Olympic gold at age thirty-two.

I was disappointed in the twist in the plot half way into the book. I felt it was too contrived - it tied these three cyclists into a tighter knot than I was comfortable with. But it did make it easy for the book to achieve a neat ending.