All Thing Books And Reading Thread 2020

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Mia6

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jcat jcat How was the Chris Watts book?

I only have about 30 pages left of One by One by Ruth Ware

Prince Philip Revealed and The Jamestown Experience are waiting for me at the library.
 

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jcat jcat How was the Chris Watts book?
I liked it. It differed from many true crime books in that the main emphasis wasn't on the investigation and legal wranglings, but on the perpetrator's psyche. There have been so many cases of pregnant women being murdered by their intimate partners, e.g., Laci Peterson, Carol Stuart. This murder was especially chilling because not only did Watts murder his wife and the child she was carrying, but also their two little girls.
 
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Mia6

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This murder was especially chilling because not only did Watts murder his wife and the child she was carrying, but also their two little girls.
Yeah, did he just snap? I didn't read how the girls were killed, just couldn't do it.After learning of how he disposed
of their bodies, I had to skip over the article I was reading after the autopsies were finished.
 

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Still reading the books from that cozy mystery set in Canada, and still getting irked by the lack of Canadian knowledge. Like last night I was reading, and the grandmother was talking about gambling with her friends using pennies, and changing dollar bills into into pennies. Well, Canada fazed out pennies in 2012/2013. And we haven't had a dollar bill since 1989. :rolleyes3: Glad I'm borrowing these books for free, and not buying them.
 
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Mia6

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Well, I just got Disloyal, Prince Philip Revealed and the Jamestown Experiment so I have
a lot to read.
 

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The e-book I started last night is a bit older (2009):
A Question of Murder: Compelling Cases from a Famed Forensic Pathologist by Cyril H. Wecht.
I've read a few of his other books and found them interesting, but had skipped this one because I wasn't too interested in reading more about Anna Nicole Smith. It made the cut this time because it was on sale.
 

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I finished the 2 I spoke about previously. One was Ghost Month by Ed Lin which I didn't like very much. If the author wasn't married, I would've suspected he's never spoken to a real woman before in his life. He went through a lot of effort to make the lead guy (don't even want to call him a protagonist) into a "regular chump" but then EVERY. SINGLE. WOMAN. in the story is somehow madly in love with him. Gross. I eyerolled so hard. The best characters were the cooks at the night market stall the main character ran.

The other book was Earthlings by Sayaka Murata...also didn't like it. Started off ok and then quickly careened off the tracks into bizarro land. Sometimes that's okay but this was just...WTF. I don't know what it is about eastern "feminist" literature, but it tends to take characters who don't want to fit the "norm" and twists them into extreme mental illness territory by the end (The Vegetarian by Han Kang is another example) On one hand, it's a commentary on how mental illness goes untreated, on the other hand it sort of re-enforces the notion that deviants from the norm are just "not right in the head" and need to be fixed. IDK, it's a tricky territory. It's all sort of feeding off of classics like "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Rebecca.

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On the positive side, I also started reading the Crown Colony series by Ovidia Yu. Some good light mysteries in the same vein as the Indian mysteries I recommended a few months ago. These books take place in the 1930s in Singapore with a Straits-born Chinese woman who was educated by missionaries and aspires to be a globetrotting reporter but mostly gets into trouble and solves mysteries while trying to navigate racism and class tensions first between locals and the British colonizers and then the Japanese after they invade.

I also read Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda which is a collection of loosely intertwined short stories that take old Japanese folktales about ghosts and turn them into modern stories with feminist leanings (no one went too insane, one lady did turn into a hair monster though, but she was pretty chill about it). I enjoyed it a lot, but kind of wish it had been one actual novel. It really set up a really compelling world but didn't give me nearly enough detail!
 
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Mia6

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finished the 2 I spoke about previously. One was Ghost Month by Ed Lin which I didn't like very much. If the author wasn't married, I would've suspected he's never spoken to a real woman before in his life. He went through a lot of effort to make the lead guy (don't even want to call him a protagonist) into a "regular chump" but then EVERY. SINGLE. WOMAN. in the story is somehow madly in love with him. Gross. I eyerolled so hard. The best characters were the cooks at the night market stall the main character ran.
ha!!!!!
 
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Mia6

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I just put a hold on the newly published Nicci French book, House of Correction and I'm the
only hold. I also reserved the hard copy of A Question of Murder, the book jcat jcat is reading.
 

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I just finished Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. It's about an ultra-orthodox Jewish boy with a gift that isn't accepted by his faith. It's a quick read and raises a lot of interesting issues/topics. My friends and I read it together. While not everyone liked the book, it generated some really good discussions about familial relationships, individuality vs community, etc.
 

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I’m almost finished with Carl Hiaasen’s new book, Squeeze Me. He wrote it so recently that it makes reference to the pandemic. And he clearly doesn’t like the current White House occupant! Fun stuff. :)

He dedicated the book to his brother, Rob, a journalist at the Capital Gazette in Maryland who was killed in the mass shooting at the newspaper in 2018.
 

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So limiting my TV time has really boosted my reading time. I just finished Frances Cha's If I Had Your Face. It's set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four women and their struggles living in a society with impossible beauty standards, repressive patriarchy culture, and strict social hierarchy. Not necessarily a light read but informative.
 

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Still reading "Rage," and will be for some time. It's not an easy read. I'm far fonder of General Mattis than I was. Not "fond," but "far fonder." And have a whole new perspective on Rex Tillerson. Not better, but different, and more in-depth.
 

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I had a hair appointment and needed something to read while my colour was processing, so I started Sisters First, by Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush. It's pretty interesting, so I'll probably finish it. Then I'll start Where The Crawdads Sing.
 
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