What Fiction are you reading this week, March 3, 2019?

[hermetic]

I picked a heckuva book to start this month off: The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper. I wasn’t liking this at first and didn’t think I was going to stick with it. But then things started happening and I was in bed with a monster cold and didn’t feel like finding something else. So, here’s part of a review that now describes my take on it, halfway through…

very second-wave feminist and exhibits many of the problems one would expect from that description. It's also beautiful and sad and, while exclusionary, an otherwise excellent and enjoyable treatment of the issues that it did deal with.

Listening to One Perfect Lie by Lisa Scottoline. Follow along in the mind of a psycho as he plots a horrendous crime.

What are your selections this week?

[Ohiogal]

1. Sorry to hear you're under the weather, hermetic!

Feel better soon!

This week I am reading Maid by Stephanie Land.

Last weekend I started and finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.

(we lost internet and cable from the wind storm for about a day or so). 😁

[hermetic]

4. Thanks!

Yeah, a little better every day.

Being without internet AND cable must have been awful. I can relate


So, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

"More than any book in recent memory, Land nails the sheer terror that comes with being poor, the exhausting vigilance of knowing that any misstep or twist of fate will push you deeper into the hole."―The Boston Globe

And the Elegy, also a tale of surviving poverty.

Pretty heavy stuff and hope we can someday have a country where it's not like that anymore.

[Ohiogal]

9. Yeah, I guess I'm on the same theme with these two books.

But, as you say, we all long for a time when being poor won’t be considered a disease anymore ....

[TDale313]

2. I have two I'm reading right now...

Henry James The Turn of the Screw, and a newly released book called The Company of Death by Elisa Hansen. Company of Death is an interesting one... essentially zombie apocalypse, but well written. Also, vampires are part of this universe (the author has a YouTube channel called Maven of the Eventide where she reviews and discusses vampire movies, lit, series, games... just discovered it when I saw a review of the book and enjoying both the book and YouTube channel very much 🙂 ) So, Yeah... kinda a Gothic week for me 😉 Flashbacks to my 17-year-old, Anne Rice discovering self 😊

[hermetic]

5. Ahh, good times

I really loved Anne Rice books myself. Thanks for the info.

The Turn of the Screw is also an excellent, ancient, tale.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Just finished The Rule of One

by Ashley Saunders and Leslie Saunders. Some time in the future, the United States has effectively cut itself off from the rest of the world. Global warming has gotten really bad, and 75 years before the start of the book a One Child policy was put into effect and ruthlessly enforced. As you might anticipate, the book revolves around 18 year old identical twins, only one of whom is official. They take turns going to school and so on. So far they've gotten away with it, but that's about to change. Oh, and the highly ironical part is that their father is the head of the Texas Family Planning Division.

What I actually had a lot of trouble with is that apparently 75 years of a one child policy hasn't made a dent in the overpopulation problem, which simply wasn't believable for me.

Oh, and Ashley and Leslie are themselves identical twins.

I expect there will be a sequel.

[hermetic]

7. Yeah, I agree

unless they were only enforcing that in Texas. Or the US. Then it really wouldn't make much of a dent.

Interesting, though, twins writing about twins. Be worth reading just for that experience.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. At first I thought it was just Texas,

but it turns out it's the entire country. So the continued overpopulation was simply not believable.

If there is a sequel I doubt I'll bother to read it.

[Bayard]

6. Some interesting sounding reads here

I'm reading, "Haunted", a James Patterson collaboration. Another Mike Bennett novel.

[hermetic]

8. Yes, this is a great place

to check every week if you're looking for something new to read. We cover a pretty wide range. Thanks for your input. Sounds good.

[Squinch]

10. The Witch Elm by Tana French. So far, not my favorite of hers, but I'm only a quarter through.

But hey! Feel better!

[hermetic]

11. Hey!

Thanks. I'm working on it.

[shenmue]

12. Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice

[hermetic]

14. Sounds good

A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice
With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.

[pscot]

15. I'm reading Jericho's Road by Elmer Kelton

Westerns are a guilty pleasure. i've probably read hundreds of them. They're generally simple morality plays celebrating manly strength and womanly virtue. The good guys win. The hero gets the girl. After 2 weeks with Russell and Wittgenstein i was ready for something completely different.

Hope your feeling better soon, Hermetic. Take your vitamin e and drink lots of rosehip tea. Keep warm. Take care.

[hermetic]

16. Thank you!

Never considered rosehip tea. I do know it's got a lot of vit C.

I know what you mean. My guilty pleasure is Longmire Westerns. I am so fond of Craig Johnson's characters and it may be the only series in which I have read every book. Excited to see there will be a new one later this year. He's usually sheriffing in Wyoming but the last one took him down to Mexico to confront a dangerous drug lord.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

17. Now I'm on to The Town House by Norah Lofts.

She's one of my all time favorite writers, but since she died back in 1983, and her many novels have gone in and out of print over the years, she's not well known any more. I recently purchased these three books in new editions, because the ones I've owned for probably 40 years are falling apart and cannot be read any longer.

The Town House is the first of her House Trilogy. The other two books are The House at Old Vine and The House at Sunset. It starts in about 1400, and tells the story of a peasant who runs away from the manor he'd been born to, and eventually winds up owning a house and some land outside the fictional village of Baildon and founding a family there that persists through generations. But it's mainly the story of the house itself, and the story of that house is carried through to the present day of when the series was written, which was in the mid-1950s I believe.

What I like best is her narrative technique. Each section is narrated by someone else, and the sections are linked by interludes which connect the one before to the one after. That way she is able to move the story through time effectively. What's also very interesting is that because of the different narrators, you can get very different views of the same person. One especially interesting one is where a young girl narrates events, then later someone who knew her when she was an old lady has a completely different take on what happened back then.

Many of her other novels are also narrated this way. She created a rich and detailed history of that fictitious part of England, and you get to know the families and the life over a period of nearly a thousand years.

Another pair of her books I especially like are Gad's Hall and the Haunting of Gad's Hall, which I originally read out of order, and it actually makes more sense to me that way, even though usually to read in the wrong order makes things confusing. I might repurchase those books, and some others of hers as they get reprinted.

Anyway, for anyone who likes historical fiction, anything and everything Norah Lofts has written is worth reading. Her characters are not modern people dressed in old clothes, which is all too often what you found in historical fiction (and I'm looking at YOU, Philippa Gregory), but real people of whatever era she's writing about.

[hermetic]

21. You sold me

Will keep an eye out for her books.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

22. Do. It's possible your library will have them.

Otherwise, a reasonable number of her books, specifically the Town House books, are available. A lot of them are available on Kindle unlimited.

[mainstreetonce]

18. The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Very compelling

[Cuthbert Allgood]

19. Just got that book for my wife. Right in her wheelhouse.

Reviews seemed great.

[hermetic]

20. A must-read

Author is Heather Morris (for you note-takers).

From the review: "I find it hard to imagine anyone who would not be drawn in, confronted and moved. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone, whether they'd read a hundred Holocaust stories or none."