What I’m reading

The book list starts off a Michael Connelly book, Nine Dragons  In my very limited opinion, he’s one of  the best crime writer today.  Add to the list John Grisham books, The Summons  and The Broker, Nelson DeMille’s Spencerville and John Sandford’s Buried Prey. Tom and I listened to them on some recent travels. Best of the bunch, the Michael Connelly or Grisham books.

The book I’ve been reading for the past two months is America Aflame, How the Civil War Created a Nation. It was fascinating reading, but over 500 pages. It read more like a textbook than other non-fiction books I’ve read lately. If you think political squabbles, ineffective legislators, greed, financial collapse are something new to our era, this account will change that perception. The relevance to today’s events was uncanny.

Two quick reads were A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff and I married you for Happiness by Lily Tuck. Vintage Affair was about a young woman who resigns from Sotheby's auction house to open a Vintage clothing boutique. It is filled with descriptions of the clothing and the designers who made them. The plot however is more serious. If you enjoyed Russian Winter, you would like this book.

I Married you for Happiness is a slim book that is spare, but very powerful. On the first page you learn that the narrator's husband has died and the rest of the book is remembrances of their lives together. Sounds maudlin, but it's not. Lots of mathematics and probability references. I'm not a mathematician, but I found them very interesting. It is a post-modern book, so the does not move in a straight line, and often dreams are mixed with the present as well as the past. Not an easy book to read, but compelling. It will make the best of the bunch list for 2011.