What are you reading this week of March 20, 2016?

[hermetic]

Halfway through Uniform Justice by Donna Leon. I like this book. 2003, Venice, a young boy at a military academy commits suicide. Or did he? Good mystery with lots of politics, likeable characters, humor, food and the beauty of Venice.

I just listened to Relic by Preston/Child. What a fun book to listen to. Super creepy. "He heard a sound that made him feel his sanity slipping away." (or words to that effect.)

Plus I watched another PBS production of Tony Hillerman's Coyote Waits. I loved that. Cried! Beautiful.

What's blooming on your bookshelf now?

[TexasProgresive]

1. "Blood Test" an Alex Delaware novel by Jonathan Kellerman

I really enjoyed The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell and will post my thoughts on it later.
Thanks for starting the thread, hermetic.

[jaysunb]

2. Ghost Gifts, by, Laura Spinella.

I don't usually like "girl " books, but this one had just enough sex and violence to help me get through to the predictable end.

[Enthusiast]

3. Hello, everyone! Thank you for the thread, hermetic.

I finished The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I felt this was certainly worth my time. There are a number of relevant similarities to today's social and political issues. I felt attached to the various characters.

Now I'm reading Runaway by Peter May. I just have a small start.

Mrs. Enthusiast finished Black and Blue by Ian Rankin. Black and Blue came together for her toward the end. Then she read The Lewis Man by Peter May. She was very involved with The Lewis Man characters as I was.

Now she is reading The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood. Hell, she's halfway through. I'm having a time keeping this woman in books.

[Enthusiast]

4. We will look into the Tony Hillerman episodes on PBS, hermetic. Thanks for telling us.

I had no idea.

[Enthusiast]

5. I can only imagine "listening" to Relic!

[Number9Dream]

6. "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara & "A Thief of Time" by Tony Hillerman

More than half way through "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara. It's a fictional, but accurate, account of the Battle of Gettysburg. It's probably the best historical novel I've read. He makes Lee and Longstreet and Chamberlain and Buford, etc. come alive. Not at all dry.

Watched a DVD of "A Thief of Time" by Tony Hillerman. Adam Beach was good as Jim Chee. Though I wouldn't have pictured Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn, his acting was good. Very good supporting cast. The scenery was gorgeous. On the negative, it left several unanswered questions.

[hermetic]

7. I love Wes as Leaphorn

I grew up in N. Mex and Ariz, worked for the BIA for several years, and he really nails that stoic, aloof yet observant characteristic one finds in Native men who haven't been destroyed by alcohol. He's even better in Coyote Waits. Up next on my watch list is Skinwalkers.

I had to watch A Thief of Time twice because I hadn't read the story about the young boy and all that, which came from another book. On the second watching it became more clear. I think Hillerman wrote things into all his stories that he then fleshed out in later ones, if you know what I mean.

[Number9Dream]

8. Hermetic, thanks for fleshing things out a bit more (spoiler alert)

Like you, I hadn't read the story about the young boy (Peter Fonda's son), but that sort of eventually self-explained. I don't think it was ever explained what happened to the two guys who Chee found dead by the backhoe (their eyes all white, and faces discolored??). Were we to assume that was a real "spirit" that Chee and the woman saw? Why was Peter Fonda's character stalked and shot (he didn't seem to know more than he'd already told Leaphorn)? Maybe you caught some things that we missed? Maybe one has to read the book?

[hermetic]

9. That was Peter Fonda

I thought he looked familiar. (I never pay attention to movie credits anymore.) Here is a whole explanation of what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thief_of_Time in the Plot summary.

After some research I do not find the story of the Houk's in any of Tony's other books. But, Anne Hillerman's Spider Woman's Daughter is a sequel to A Thief of Time and supposedly wraps up the loose ends. I look forward to reading that. I think I'll even get it tomorrow instead of what I'd originally planned. Stay tuned...

[japple]

10. Finished reading Thomas Savage's The Sheep Queen, which I liked very

much. Then I downloaded another book from the library but after reading about 20 pages, I decided to move on to something else. I downloaded Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen and it promises to be an engrossing read. Someone on amazon criticized the author for using too many $10.00 words, and I must admit that I've had to look up quite a few. I guess I should keep a list of those $10.00 words. Here is a blurb about it in case others are interested.

An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection

A "bleak and brilliant" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) debut novel ,"one of the finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory, a book that stands alongside Richard Ford's Rock Springs, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James Welch's Fools Crow." (William Kittredge)

Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful, Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen is a new classic in the literature of the American West.
At the center of this searing, fever dream of a novel are two men—a killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy—sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together two haunted souls by the secrets they share, and by the rugged country that keeps them.

[LuckyLib]

11. I'm in the middle of The Signature of All Things. Not sure I'll finish it, but my

Book Group liked it.