MONDAY FROM THE INTERIOR: WHAT ARE YOU READING? — JUNE 17

 

Welcome to our weekly bookish place where we share our adventures in reading.  Come along and join us as we explore other blogs and feel a community spirit.

This week, I’m posting my Monday Reading, hosted by Book Journey, back at this blog.

Click the link to find my Mailbox Monday post.

ON THE BLOGS:

Musing About a Delicious Read:  W is for Wasted

Tuesday Potpourri:  Intros/Teasers – The Glass Wives

The Journey Continues:  An Excerpt

Book Hoarding:  A Plan to Curb Those Impulses

Serendipitous Wednesdays:  Dark Witch

Friday Potpourri:  More Book Purging

Friday Sparks:  Book Beginnings/56 – Innocent Little Crimes

Sweet Saturday Sample:  Homeward Bound

Last Week’s Reading: (Click Titles for Reviews)

Flora, by Gail Godwin

Coming Clean:  A Memoir, by Kimberly Rae Miller

44 Charles Street, by Danielle Steel (From Mt. TBR)

No Child of Mine (e-book), by Susan Lewis

Stay, by Deb Caletti

What’s Up Next?

Innocent Little Crimes, by C. J. Lakin (Review Book)

 

Six naïve guests plus revenge served cold equals a recipe for disaster…

Lila Carmichael may be a rich and famous comedienne, but she’s hidden her greatest talent from her adoring fans–her ability to simmer, spice and serve a carefully constructed tour de force at a cozy reunion on her private island in the Pacific Northwest.

Six unsuspecting guests have forgotten the innocent little crimes they committed against poor, gullible Lila fifteen years ago in college. All are teetering on the brink of ruin, hoping the famous Lila will come to their rescue. But their desperation plays them right into her hand.

One by one, Lila’s guests are figuratively killed off in a vicious parlor game called Wolves. And revenge turns bittersweet when the weekend is over…and one guest is dead for real.

 

A Widow’s Story:  A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates (From Mt. TBR)

On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, even as Joyce was preparing for his discharge, Ray died from a virulent hospital-acquired infection, and Joyce was suddenly faced—totally unprepared—with the stunning reality of widowhood.

A Widow’s Story illuminates one woman’s struggle to comprehend a life without the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. As never before, Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of “death-duties,” and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief—the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous “pools” of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Here is a frank acknowledgment of the widow’s desperation—only gradually yielding to the recognition that “this is my life now.”

Enlivened by the piercing vision, acute perception, and mordant humor that are the hallmarks of the work of Joyce Carol Oates, this moving tale of life and death, love and grief, offers a candid, never-before-glimpsed view of the acclaimed author and fiercely private woman.

 

The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman (From Mt. TBR)

The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives.
In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters’ lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.
From the town’s founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.
At the center of everyone’s life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.
Beautifully crafted, shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving.

***

And that’s my week.  I have some other books to add to my list if I finish these.  What does your week look like?