Monday, May 12, 2014

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Well, I finally finished The Cemetery of Swallows this weekend. Oh my. I will write a full review soon but, well, I just don't know. All. Over. The. Place.

I also finished Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman, on audio. I enjoyed it a lot. Memoirs are personal and idiosyncratic and I understand the reviewers who didn't like it, mostly because I think they didn't like her, but I liked the book. More soon.

I also read the new book by Antonio Skarmeta, A Distant Father. Skarmeta wrote Il Postino; this new one comes out in the fall and it's about a young man searching for the father who abandoned him and his mother, supposedly moving to France. But it turns out he's closer than the son ever expected and what comes next will amaze everyone.

All of this leaves me with some gaps in my reading so of course I'm moving to fill them up. There are so many things I'm dying to get to right now but I have to choose, so anyway here goes.

I started Lawrence Osborne's new book, The Ballad of a Small Player. Osborne is a travel writer whose last novel, The Forgiven, was a favorite of mine for its moody writing and page-turning plot, about a British couple who kill a Moroccan boy on their way to a fancy party in the desert. This new one shifts the scene to the Far East and a British gambler playing and losing his ways through the casinos of Macau. I'm not sure where the plot is heading but I'm loving Osborne's writing once again.


And then I have a few others from which I'm choosing right now. Jeff Vandermeer's Authority, the sequel to Annihilation, is out; I also want to read Molly Fox's Birthday by the wonderful Deirdre Madden and I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck. Have you read any of these? Do you have another suggestion for me?

I need a suggestion for a non-fiction audiobook too. What's your favorite history or sociology on audio?

Have a great week! More at BookJourney.wordpress.com.

4 comments:

bermudaonion said...

I love memoir so would probably like Orange is the New Black as well.

Sandy Nawrot said...

Would I want to hang out with Piper Kerman? No probably not, but I really did like the book. And I watched the whole first season already. You were right, totally different, and I like THAT Piper even less but I couldn't stop watching. And I haven't even read Annihilation yet...trying to get the audio. I'm excited about that one. And as far as non-fiction on audio, I just listened to Pilgrim's Wilderness, a story about a crazy, deluded, incestuous, narcissistic dad and his 15 kids and wife who homestead in Alaska and it is just a huge hot mess. It makes you feel like your head will explode but it is good.

JoAnn said...

Glad you liked Orange is the New Black. I thought the audio was great!

Carin Siegfried said...

My favorite audiobook is history but it's a small local history. It's The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan. I also loved Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard.