What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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Don Winslow has a noirish and sometimes funny collection of crime shorts compiled in Broken. An enjoyable escape.
 
Beneath a Scarlet Sky
All the Flowers in Paris
(yeah I have a thing for WW2)

If you haven't read Small Great Things by Jodi Piccoult, I consider it a must read for EVERYONE.
 
A while back, someone mentioned reading Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier by Peter Stark.

I got it from my library and am about 2/3rds of the way through it. It has been excellent.
 
Read “The Sparrow “ by Mary Doria Russell. Space exploration but from a culture clash, spiritual turmoil perspective instead of the more common space cowboy genre. I’m not catholic but it was an interesting perspective on Jesuits in space.
 
I'm just received the John le Carré's trilogy, "The Quest for Karla" which includes the complete books - "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Honorable Schoolboy", and "Smiley's People". Three spy novels set during the Cold War. It deals with British Intelligence officer George Smiley and his long battle with Russian spymaster Karla.


I've seen the TTSS movie but never read his books. I love espionage stories.
 
The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel. Well written, and like all books on that subject, quite moving.
 
Pretty good, would recommend

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803037-red-sparrow

Red Sparrow (Book 1 of a trilogy)

Packed with insider detail and written with brio, this tour-de-force novel brims with Matthews’s life experience, including his knowledge of espionage, counterintelligence, surveillance tradecraft, spy recruitment, cyber-warfare, the Russian use of “spy dust,” and covert communications. Brilliantly composed and elegantly constructed, Red Sparrow is a masterful spy tale lifted from the dossiers of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Authentic, tense, and entertaining, this novel introduces Jason Matthews as a major new American talent.
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/253398/rogue-heroes-by-ben-macintyre/

Reading Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre, a non fiction history of the SAS.....how a bunch of misfits and nonconformists changed warfare:

Britain’s Special Air Service—or SAS—was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II’s African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel’s desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS’s remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow.
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I got into mysteries for the first time in my life during the pandemic lockdown. I'm working through all of P.D.James' Adam Dagliesh mysteries and thoroughly enjoying them. Anyone else a fan?
 
What have you read recently?

I’ve finally gotten a clue about borrowing audiobooks from my library and like it. The library uses OverDrive which offers a nice free app called Libby.

I can now enjoy books while driving to and from locations that require I dress as a bank robber.
 
Recent reads were Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, which has been on the shelf for years and I finally got around to reading, quite fun, and The Calculating Stars which is also a great read. On to Marie Robinette Kowall's The Fated Sky now (second book of the story, following up The Calculating Stars).
 
Marita40 said:
I got into mysteries for the first time in my life during the pandemic lockdown. I'm working through all of P.D.James' Adam Dagliesh mysteries and thoroughly enjoying them. Anyone else a fan?
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That was an excellent series.
If you like those, you might enjoy a similar detective, Commissario Brunetti, who lives in Venice. The first book in the series is Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon. Many libraries carry it.
 
braumeister said:
That was an excellent series.
If you like those, you might enjoy a similar detective, Commissario Brunetti, who lives in Venice. The first book in the series is Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon. Many libraries carry it.
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I enjoyed Death at la Fenice and by also saw it covered in the Brunetti series on Mhz or some such addon channel to Amazon Prime that I am running a 30 day free trial of. The Brunetti series has dozens of episodes based on Donna Leon's books. They are OK, not great, but the videography is to die for if you love Venice or have never been and want to see what it is all about. Oddly, the series is in German, with English subtitles. I love Italian and find the German distracting.
 
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What have you read recently?

donheff said:
I enjoyed Death at la Fenice and by also saw it covered in the Brunetti series on Mhz or some such addon channel to Amazon Prime that I am running a 30 day free trial of. The Brunetti series has dozens of episodes based on Donna Leon's books. They are OK, not great, but the videography is to die for if you love Venice or have never been and want to see what it is all about. Oddly, the series is in German, with English subtitles. I love Italian and find the German distracting.
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+1. Hearing an Italian policeman shout Actung! Halt! instead of Attenzione, Aspetta Per Favore is hard on the ears.

The TV versions of the Aurelio Zenn books are are well done in British English and thus easier to watch. Zenn is the Forest Gump of Italian detectives.
 
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I read and enjoyed the 4th novel in "The Girl ..." series, titled "The Girl in the Spider's Web": https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Spiders-Web-continuing-Millennium-ebook/dp/B00TCI0P3I/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QYTI71PZ5VAH&dchild=1&keywords=girl+in+the+spiders+web+book&qid=1593039987&s=digital-text&sprefix=girl+in+the+spi%2Cdigital-text%2C225&sr=1-1

The author took over this series with an OK from the original author's family after his untimely death. Lagercrantz (Swedish author) has done a great job to complement Stig Larson's original Millennium Series.

A genius hacker who has always been an outsider. A journalist with a penchant for danger. She is Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. He is Mikael Blomkvist, crusading editor of Millennium. One night, Blomkvist receives a call from a source who claims to have been given information vital to the United States by a young female hacker. Blomkvist, always on the lookout for a story, reaches out to Salander for help. She, as usual, has plans of her own. Together they are drawn into a ruthless underworld of spies, cybercriminals, and government operatives—some willing to kill to protect their secrets.
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Lsbcal said:
I read and enjoyed the 4th novel in "The Girl ..." series, titled "The Girl in the Spider's Web": https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Spiders-Web-continuing-Millennium-ebook/dp/B00TCI0P3I/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QYTI71PZ5VAH&dchild=1&keywords=girl+in+the+spiders+web+book&qid=1593039987&s=digital-text&sprefix=girl+in+the+spi%2Cdigital-text%2C225&sr=1-1

The author took over this series with an OK from the original author's family after his untimely death. Lagercrantz (Swedish author) has done a great job to complement Stig Larson's original Millennium Series.
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+1. I liked it too. I just downloaded The Girl Who Lived Twice from the library but I have a few others to finish first.
 
Just finished, 'Destiny of the Republic' by Candice Millard. Very interesting. I must admit a blindspot to American politics in the years after the Civil War until Theodore Roosevelt. I didn't really know the story of President Garfield, other than he was assassinated or of Chester Arthur, other than he was the Collector of the Port of New York prior to becoming Vice-President, thanks to Die Hard 3. It was interesting to read of the involvement of Alexander Graham Bell and Joseph Lister in the story.
 
I just finished "56" by Kostya Kennedy, a book about the 56-game hitting streak of baseball star Joe DiMaggio back in 1941. Kennedy writes not only about DiMaggio and those directly involved with his Yankees and his opponents, but he writes about the reactions of his friends and relatives (including his pregnant wife, Dorothy) from his hometown of San Francisco, various friends and fans in New York City, and some friends in Newark, New Jersey. There were many twists and turns in his hitting streak I was not aware of.
 
Just read “Station Eleven” by a Emily St. John Mandel. I saw the title mentioned in this thread, decided to give it a try, and am happy I did.
 
Empire of the Summer Moon. History of Qaunah Parker. Incredible book. Also Country Music, companion book to Ken Burns PBS series.
 
'Rocketmen' by Robert Kurson. The story of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, and the Apollo 8 mission that gave America some hope after one of the worst years in its history. Very good. I look forward to the movie as a prequel to First Man and Apollo 13 and a follow on of The Right Stuff. I will now try to read Jeffrey Kluger's book on the same topic.
 
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