you read the last book you finished.
With me it was GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn and I read it because the reviews were terrific and I liked her first book.
Good reviews may be the number one reason, I chose a book or movie.
Why did you choose the last book you read? Reviews, you liked other books by the author, it sounded good on the jacket, the topic interested you, the setting, a friend recommended it, FFB?
What was the book and why did you read it?
31 comments:
Ahah. I knew I would get a chance to give a boost to CODE NAME VERITY, by Elizabeth Wein.
I have mentioned working as a cataloger at the Newark Public Library. I don't have to go looking for new books. They come to me.
VERITY is a Young Adult novel that bears out the point made in many online discussions--YA fiction is some of the best new stuff out there. At to why I finished it, I couldn't do anything else. It hooked me from the first page.
It's about two young British women, an air pilot and a spy, in WWII. Saying more would spoil it.
I'll have to check out VERITY...
Lately, I've been tossing aside many thrillers before finishing them, though I think a lot of it is me. I don't have as much time to read, so the story loses momentum more because of my schedule than the writing.
I read DOUBLE FUDGE by Judy Blume with my youngest :-) She loves it.
Loved reading them to my kids. And a big thrill for Megan is getting to know Judy via email. And also Lois Duncan.
That's a new name for me, Al. Thanks.
Haven't read VERITY yet but I did read a review of it a month or two back in the NYT Book Review that sounded good.
Last book finished: THE SHAPE OF THINGS, an old sf paperback from the '60s edited by Damon Knight. I was just looking for short story collections on PaperbackSwap.com because we had a lot of credits and found a couple Knight edited. This one had stories by Kuttner, Blish, Leinster, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Kornbluth, de Camp, Boucher and John D. MacDonald.
Also reading Bernard Malamud's THE MAGIC BARREL at Patti's recommendation and Steven F. Havill's ONE PERFECT SHOT because I've read the entire series to date and this is the latest.
Jeff M.
BURNING PRECINCT PUERTO RICO by Steven Torres. As is often the case, I'm late to the party. BURNING is the third in a series that I really like; Torres tells a darn good story. I'll be reading the next book in the series sometime in the next two weeks, and I have several of his books ready for me on
Kindle.
Until the fog clears from my Lortab addled brain, I've been listening to audiobooks. A couple issues ago in MYSTERY SCENE, there was a positive review of the audiobook series starring Bill Nighy as Charles Paris in dramatizations of Simon Brett's humorous mysteries. I bought the entire set and spend many pleasant hours in REHAB listening to Bill Nighy solve murders. Great stuff!
I just finished (as in yesterday) Robert Barnard's A STRANGER IN THE FAMILY, a British suspense/mystery which was published in 2010, but like so many books, I didn't get around to reading until now. I chose the book because I'm a big Barnard fan.
A STRANGER IN THE FAMILY is about a young man who discovers that he was abducted from a family holiday in Italy when he was three years old and raised by another family. He goes searching for his birth family and answers. There are some vague references to the similar Madelyn McCann case which burned up the English presses a few years ago (Google it), but there are also some awfully convenient (I almost want to say, contrived) plot elements like newly-discovered diaries and people who remember with crystal clear recall a conversation they overheard 25 years ago. All in all, I'd say it wasn't up to Barnard's best. I have higher hopes for Barnard's latest A CHARITABLE BODY which I'm reading now and features one of Barnard's recurring characters, police Inspector Charlie Peace.
One more comment: On the non-fiction side, I just finished a wonderful book by Arika Okrent called IN THE LAND OF INVENTED LANGUAGES, which I had seen favorably mentioned on a book blog and went in search of. It does what I want non-fiction to do for me: Expose me to a subject I knew nothing about in an entertaining and informative way. ITLOIL is about the hundreds of attempts there have been made to invent and universal language and why (with the limited exceptions of Esperanto and Klingon) all of them have failed. Great stuff!
Just finished the DRUNK ON THE MOON anthology. I loved the idea of a werewolf P.I and I loved the concept of having episodic stories written by different authors. I have to say, it held up to its promises.
I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie after I heard it recommended on the Writing Excuses podcast.
Current read is DEVIL'S OWN RAG DOLL. It had good reviews on release. The real reason I grabbed it is because I own the copy I weeded from my library and felt I should read some of the things I own.
Bradley, be glad you chuck aside the stuff you cannot get into. I hate quitting on a book and will sometimes set it aside and refuse to read another rather than quit.
I read Georges Simenon's THE YELLOW DOG because someone I know on the internet is hosting a Friday's Forgotten Books focusing on Georges Simenon.
The book I just finished, or will in a day or two, I picked because the subject interested me: it's a biography of a person I'm interested in. The other book recently finished was because I like the author. Before that it was one because of a review on Friday Forgotten Books. So I guess I'm all over the place with my answer. Perhaps "All of the Above" would be accurate, except blurbs on jackets rarely if ever influence me.
Jerry, you probably know it already but if not, Torres has a book of 10 Precinct Puerto Rico stories also available on Kindle: THE PRECINCT PUERTO RICO FILES.
I must admit I haven't started them yet.
Jeff M.
Gerard-Mitch Bartoy is a friend of mine or was before he disappeared. A nice first novel, wasn't it?
George-I am on that one. Love Nighy.
Steven is a gifted writer. I have only read one of his books (Concrete Maze, I think) but it was terrific.
Adored Barnard. He had the gift.
Glad you alerted me, John. I will post a link on Friday.
I am sorry to say Flavia didn't charm me as much as everyone else. That's a blog topic. What did everyone like but you?
I am all over the place too, Rick. But mainly with me it is reviews or word of mouth.
I have read a few DRUNK ON THE MOON stories. This is a new problem with KINDLE. I put stories/books on there and forget about them as I madly download more.
Me, too, Deb. I will look for it.
I read so much that I never have real reasons for reading. I just pick one up in the many piles laying around the house or pick one off the shelf and sink my teeth into it. But I will mention this one odd reason: I recently read LUCKY BASTARD by S. G. Browne, a book published in April of this year. Never heard of the author or the book until I came across it in an ad in my email. I read the plot blurb and it sounded enticing. I'll soon be reading ZOOBIQUITY (a nonficiton book about the collaboration between physicians and veterinarians in tryign to map out & understand commonalities of disease processes in people & animals) solely because of an author interview on the Chicago PBS station.
That must have been some interview, John. Sounds like a difficult book.
I just read PUSHOVER (1957), an Orrie Hitt effort from the heart of the paperback-on-spinning-stand-in-the-drugstore era. I had read a James Reasoner review of it and I'd been meaning to read an Orrie Hitt novel for some time. So I got PUSHOVER. It's a classic noir tale of a small-time grifter who goes from town to town writing histories of each community, then self-publishing them and selling them back to the town's residents. (!!!)
I will definitely be reading more of Orrie Hitt. There's plenty of his material out there.
The last book I read was sent to me by a friend of mine so I could write a blurb for it. It was excellent, by the way, and when it comes out I'll have a review of it on my blog. The next one I'm reading is because I'm writing an intro for it. (It's actually a reread, but it's been at least 30 years.)
Mike Dennis, PUSHOVER was the first Hitt novel I read, too. It's a fine introduction to his work and one of the best of his novels I've read so far.
Okay, I am going to look for PUSHOVER online right now.
It's just all to easy now, isn't it. I must have one hundred books on that KINDLE I haven't read. I am one sick old lady.
Patti, I wondered if you might have known Bartoy. His webpage was last updated in 2006.
He published a second book which didn't get much attention. Then he lost both his agent and publisher. Then he dropped off the earth as far as I know. He worked on the first book for ten years (we took workshops together) and he had to finish the second one in a year. Too fast, I think. You should do it for forgotten books.
I'm *almost* done with Al Green's aurobiography, Take Me to the River. Ordered it online about the time I knew I'd see him in concert a 2nd time, after about 25 years. So, personal whim/interest.
I rarely care if a book is new or "old" -- the "latest anything" is usually not that compelling a reason to buy something.
I rarely pick up a book because of a blurb, but I bought Wiley Cash's A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME because I saw that Clyde Edgerton blurbed it. I liked the book every bit as much I had expected, maybe even more.
That's persuaded me more than once.
The Shape of Things is also notable as an anthology drawn exclusively from the magazines STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES, the sf magazines edited by Sam Merwin, Jr and then by Samuel Mines for their best years of the latter '40s and early '50s.
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