MONDAY MEMES: MAILBOX MONDAY & WHAT ARE YOU READING? — JAN. 31

MY READING WEEK

Good morning!  Welcome to our Monday Memes, in which we celebrate the books we’ve received in the mail or bought, as well as the books we’re reading.

Mailbox Monday is hosted this month by Rose City Reader, while What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Journey.

MAILBOX MONDAY:

 

This week, I received one book for review from Amazon Vine, and bought three books on Amazon.

1.  The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain (Amazon Vine) has been on my wish list.

“Told in the voice of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, is a richly imagined portrait of bohemian 1920s Paris, and of America literature’s original bad boy.” —Town & Country

2.  The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman

The lush and haunted wildlands of Massachusetts provide fertile ground for Hoffman’s endlessly flowering imagination. Like The Probable Future (2003) and Blackbird House (2004), The Red Garden, a sequence of beguiling, linked stories, is rooted in colonial times and reaches into the present.

3.  All the Available Light:  A Marilyn Monroe Reader, by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Journalist and editor McDonough (The Barbie Chronicles) takes on an ambitious project: collecting thoughts about a woman whose every nuance has been so exhaustively discussed that nothing new, it seems, could possibly be said. Happily, McDonough pulls it off, delivering new insight into a star who absorbed all the available light and made it her own….

4.  The Enchanted Barn, by Grace Livingston Hill (e-book) – A Blast from the Past

The story of a poor family displaced by economic hard times; and how, with the kindness of strangers, they turn an old barn into a home.

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WHAT ARE YOU READING?

This has been a busy week, in terms of reading, blogging, and writing.  Here are some of my posts.

Accidental Choices:  Reading, Etc.

Spreading Their Wings (An Excerpt)

A Journey Into the Depths

Weekend Potpourri

I Scream for Ice Cream

Row 80 Update – 1/30

Books Read & Reviewed – Click Titles for Reviews:

1.  Child of Silence, by Abigail Padgett

2.  My Mother’s Daughter, by Rona Maynard

3.  The Girl in the Green Raincoat, by Laura Lippman (e-book)

4.  I Remember Nothing, by Nora Ephron

What’s Up Next?

1.  A Ticket to Ride, by Paula McLain (Graduate of the TBR Piles!)

The summer of 1973 in Moline, Ill., is enlivened and permanently marked for 15-year-old Jamie by the arrival of her charismatic, seen-it-all cousin, Fawn Delacorte, in McLain’s sure-handed if familiar debut novel (after the memoir Like Family). Abandoned by her parents as a baby, Jamie is a lonely, naïve teenager from Bakersfield, Calif., sent to live with her uncle Raymond after her grandmother falls sick. She falls under Dawn’s spell and embraces the dissolute life of layabout teenagers, brushing ever closer to the inevitable tragedy to come….

2.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson – e-book (For my Awesome Authors Challenge)

Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family’s remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden’s dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker….

3.  Wild Child:  Girlhoods in the Counterculture, by Chelsea Cain (Graduate of My TBR Stacks)

Tofu casseroles, communes, clothing-optional kindergarten, antiwar protests – these are just a few of the hallmarks of a counterculture childhood. What became of kids who had been denied meat, exposed to free love, and given nouns for names?

4.  Where Angels Fear, by Sunny Frazier

Set in the Central Valley of California, author Sunny Frazier once again explores the rich agricultural region, rural law enforcement and crimes shrouded by Tule fog in this sequel to FOOLS RUSH IN. Amateur astrologer Christy Bristol finds herself on the fringes of Kearny society and a members-only sex club as she reluctantly takes on a missing person case. A prominent business man has disappeared and his wife cannot go to the authorities. Armed with only a prescription bottle and matchbook as clues, the young woman must face the Knights of Sensani and her own sexual limitations….

So that’s it for this week.  What was your week like?  What’s up next for you?  Hope you’ll stop by….