Monthly Archives: October 2010

My mailbox settled down a bit this week.  This is good, since my reading has been slow this month as well.
I had one book arrive from Europa Editions.  The cool thing about these books are that they are completely different from what I usually read, but I’m always intrigued by them.  That’s true with this one as well:

Heliopolis by James Scudamore

Summary from EuropaEditions.com:

Born in a São Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation from one side of the city’s impermeable social divide to the other. Rescued and raised by a plutocrat, Zeno Generoso, Ludo finds himself entrenched in the gated, guarded community of the super-rich.

Now twenty-seven, Ludo works for a vacuous “communications company” that markets unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born and from which he escaped. To make matters more complicated, he has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend.

Ludo’s involvement in an ill-conceived supermarket launch aimed at the favela’s desperately poor population risks embroiling him in a world of violence and brutality. By turns darkly humorous and poignant, James Scudamore’s Booker Prize-nominated novel is a highly original, surprising take on the rags-to-riches story.

I mentioned here a while back that my friend Ruth won a year of books for our book club. (We’ve already read and discussed one!) She received and distributed another one this week, and so I came home with:

Good Enough to Eat by Stacey Ballis

Summary via Goodreads.com:

Melanie Hoffman has accomplished three things in life she is truly proud of: first, she found Andrew, a man who loved her despite her size. Second, she left her cushy job as a lawyer to open a cafe specializing in delicious food that is also healthy. And finally, Mel lost half her body weight through dieting and exercise. She’s finally happy, healthy, and becoming content with life.

It’s an under-the-belt blow, then, when Andrew announces he’s leaving Melanie – for a woman twice her size. She’s also struggling financially while she’s trying to make the cafe a success. Trying to rebuild, Mel turns to her fellow employees and they help her realize who she really is and what family means.

I also bought some books from Audible (with credits).  Unless there’s a sale, I usually just buy them as I listen to them, but I couldn’t decide between these three!

All Clear by Connie Willis

I read the first half of this book (Blackout)on paper when it came out. I loved it, but was very unhappy as I approached the end and realized there was no way it was going to wrap up. Sure enough, there are another 600+ pages to go. I was eager to get this when it was released a couple of weeks ago, but there was no way I could get to it before this. I wasn’t sure about switching from print to audio, but I’ll have a much easier time working it in this way.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

I’m enjoying this series!

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

This author has repeatedly been recommended to me.

Mailbox Monday is a weekly post where I talk about the books that have arrived in my house over the last week.

Marcia at The Printed Page hosts the Mailbox Monday Blog Tour. This month’s host is Julie @ Knitting and Sundries

Leave a note here with what new reads came your way (and any thoughts about mine), then check out some other blogs!

Two weeks of fantastic books!

Last week’s Mailbox Monday featured the books that came home from Bouchercon with me.  This week, I’m listing the books that entered my home from all other sources in the last two weeks.

From Planned Television Arts Review Rewards:

Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider by Amir D. Aczel

I hope this book is a readable accounting of the history and science of the LHC, because the author has a number of other titles that really appeal to the nerd in me!

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing protons at record energy levels never created by scientists before, and it will reach even higher levels by 2013.
…
In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated experiment in the history of science, Amir D. Aczel takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC—and with the same clarity and depth of knowledge he demonstrated in the bestselling Fermat’s Last Theorem—Aczel enriches all of us with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will need to appreciate the discoveries that will almost certainly spring forth when the full power of this great machine is finally unleashed.

Lydia’s Charm by Wanda E. Brunstetter

Widowed and jobless, Lydia King moves her son and herself to Charm, Ohio, to be close to her mother and help with her grandfather. Menno Troyer, a furniture store owner, is also recently widowed and the father of four energetic boys. Levi Stutzman, another newcomer to the area, is the only one in his family not handicapped by dwarfism and has dedicated his life to caring for them. As fall colors the countryside, will anonymous gifts left for Lydia bring her hope for a new life and romance, or will another tragedy flood her with infinite despair?

From AuthorsOnTheWeb
Dewey’s Nine Lives: The Legacy of the Small-Town Library Cat Who Inspired Millions by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter

I’ve read (and enjoyed) a couple of dog stories recently, but I’m more of a cat person– how could I pass up the chance at this book?

The cat that captured America’s heart returns, with two new tales and seven more tails.

Via TLC Book Tours

A Secret Gift by Ted Gup

Shortly before Christmas 1933 in Depression-scarred Canton, Ohio, a small newspaper ad offered $10, no strings attached, to 75 families in distress. Interested readers were asked to submit letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdot. The author’s grandfather Sam Stone was inspired to place this ad and assist his fellow Cantonians as they prepared for the cruelest Christmas most of them would ever witness.

Moved by the tales of suffering and expressions of hope contained in the letters, which he discovered in a suitcase 75 years later, Ted Gup initially set out to unveil the lives behind them, searching for records and relatives all over the country who could help him flesh out the family sagas hinted at in those letters. From these sources, Gup has re-created the impact that Mr B. Virdot’s gift had on each family. Many people yearned for bread, coal, or other necessities, but many others received money from B. Virdot for more fanciful items-a toy horse, say, or a set of encyclopedias. As Gup’s investigations revealed, all these things had the power to turn people’s lives around- even to save them.

Unsolicited from Europa Editions

They have some amazingly interesting looking books, and I keep hoping to make time to read more of them!
The Art of Losing by Rebecca Connell

Haunted by childhood loss, 23-year-old Louise takes on her late mother’s name and sets out to find Nicholas, the man she has always held responsible for her death. Now a middle-aged lecturer, husband and father, Nicholas has nevertheless been unable to shake off the events of his past, when he and Louise-s mother, Lydia, had a clandestine, destructive and ultimately tragic affair. As Louise infiltrates his life and the lives of his family, she forms close and intimate relationships with both his son and his wife, but her true identity remains unknown to Nicholas himself. Tensions grow and outward appearances begin to crack, as Louise and Nicholas both discover painful truths about their own lives, each other, and the woman they both loved

Bought from Audible.com

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

Welcome back to Three Pines where the villagers are preparing for a traditional country Christmas…and murder.

When Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is called to investigate a woman’s death, it doesn’t take long for him to realize that no love was lost on Miss de Poitiers. But even if everyone hated her—her husband, lover, and daughter among them—how is it that no one saw her get electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake in the center of town?

A FATAL GRACE

Gamache digs beneath the surface of Three Pines to find where the real secrets are buried. But other troubles lie ahead for the detective. It seems he has some enemies of his own…and with the coming of the bitter winter winds, something far more chilling is in store.

Bought from Barnes & Noble for my Nook:

Drive by Daniel Pink

This has been recommended left and right at my daughter’s school, now I’ll be reading it to discuss with a group of parents and teachers.

We’ve been conditioned to think that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is through external rewards like money-the carrot-and-the-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in his transformative new book. The key to high performance and satisfaction is intrinsic, internal motivation: the desire to follow your own interests and understand the benefits in them for you. And Pink has discovered thirty years of scientific data that confirm these ideas and show an exciting way forward.

As he did in his groundbreaking bestseller A Whole New Mind, Pink lays out the hard science for these surprising insights, describes how people and corporations can embrace such ideas (some of them are already doing it), offers details about how we can master them, and provides concrete examples on how intrinsic motivation works on the job, at home, and in ourselves.

This is a book of big ideas that explains how each of us can find the surest pathway to high performance, creativity, and even health and well-being

Mailbox Monday is a weekly post where I talk about the books that have arrived in my house over the last week.

Marcia at The Printed Page hosts the Mailbox Monday Blog Tour. This month’s home is She Reads and Reads. Next month it moves to Julie @ Knitting and Sundries

Leave a note here with what new reads came your way (and any thoughts about mine), then check out some other blogs!