Sunday, December 29, 2013

Happy New Year

Attached is my column for January for the newspaper.  I think I have bored all my readers away with only posting my column on this site for several months now.  My New Years Resolution (besides drinking more water) is to write more for both my blogs and if no one reads them, then thats OK too.


HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I still haven't read the Hobbit, but it is on top of my to read stack so perhaps I will get to it this month. I have been making a lot of lint at my book store this past month, catching up on sewing “rag” strips, to make into rag balls, to weave into rugs. Mostly working with denim, so it creates a lot of lint.
I now have 7 huge balls to weave into rugs and the sewing machine is put away for awhile. The store has been vacuumed up now and I can weave smaller items on my smaller rigid heddle loom here at the store. Anyone wanting a demonstration feel free to stop in and I will show you how it works.

A book I have had on my read list for some time is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. When I was in the library recently I found part 1 and part 2 of the movie version. Temptation made me check them out and watch them. I am now even more determined to read the book. I will wait till I have read the book version to do a report. Now here are a couple books I did read.

Skin
by
Ted Dekker

I have read several books by Dekker and find him difficult to place in a specific genre. His books are a mix of mystery, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, and religious, in a good verses evil way. In this book, 5 people from various backgrounds find themselves in a little town in Nevada with a tornado boring down on them. Murder rides in with the storm and they find themselves pitted against a man known as Sterling Red. As this unlikely group band together we see they each have their own weakness that Sterling exploits, and he is trying to force them to kill the ugliest of the group. They also eventually find they do have something in common. They all suffered a special kind of epilepsy as teenagers and underwent an experimental procedure that cured them but also put them under control of the lab to make them believe they are in this game and they don't know what is real and what isn't. It is a really exciting read that I couldn't put down and the ending was not what was expected at all. Think I will look for some more books by Dekker.

Fear the Worst
by
Linwood Barclay


My first time to read this author and I really like her writing. Ordinary Tim Blake sends his teenage daughter off to work and she vanishes. The hotel where she claimed to be work says they never heard of her. Tim sets out to find his daughter and finds some very scary people are looking for her also. The detective in charge seems to spend more time dealing with her own daughter and the ex-wife is not much help. Tim has had his share of disappointments in life but he loves his daughter and risks everything to get her back. He uncovers that the hotel is involved in human trafficking, so how is his daughter mixed up in this? This was a really well done mystery and I am ready to read 2 more of her books that are waiting for me in my must read pile.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

December column for paper


I have a confession to make. I have never read The Hobbit. It has now moved up on my long list of “must” read books for this winter. I have several books by John Irving on hand and many of them have been made into movies such as The Cider House Rules, and The World According to Garp, but I chose this one to read this month.


Until I Find You
by
John Irving

820 pages that drags you along in the life of Jack Burns. I am not sure it is worth the time spent reading it but you get caught up in a sort of voyeurism that you need to keep reading to see how things turn out. It starts out with Jack as a boy of 4 on a pilgrimage to norther Europe with his mother to find his womanizing father. They never find him but his tattoo artist mother indulges in some prostitution along the way. This all takes up about 100 pages. She returns home to Toronto and puts Jack in an all girls school so that he will be “safe” since he is such a pretty little boy. Of course this backfires and he is abused by the older girls and later by older women, which sets up his life of unfulfilled romances. Funny, but had he been a little girl we would have been more incensed by this large part of the book. Later on he becomes a famous Screen Write and finds out that his father has been following his life from a distance all along and in the end they find each other but under weird circumstances. So if you want a long long read that is not all that satisfying then you might like it. As for me I am sending it to my niece in Oregon who has run a tattoo/piercing business for years and I actually think she will like it.

The Marks of Cain
by
Tom Knox
This book takes you to Spain and France as two strangers, American David and Englishman Simon become involved in two apparently unconnected strands of what's revealed as one conspiracy. Through his grandfather's will and secret map David is urged to learn his true family history. It will lead him to the heart of Basque country, where he meets a woman who gets caught up in his quest.
Quinn is an investigative journalist and is working on two violent murders of elderly people. He finds that both had been in a top secret Nazi camp and there is a tie in with the same Basque area and a possible curse on a race of people found there. The story takes you on a journey from Arizona, to the Spanish countryside, to the heart of Southern Africa. In the end they try to supply a rational basis for the Nazi genocide. I found this to be a good read and would recommend it to others. I found myself going to my computer to search for facts about the area and people involved so it was quite educational as well.

Devious
by
Lisa Jackson

If you like authors who carry their main characters along from one book to another, you will like this 7th Rick Bentz/Reuben Montoya novel.
A murder of Sister Camille, an old high-school friend takes them to St. Marguerite's cathedral. Sister Camille's sister gets involved along with her estranged husband who just happens to show up the same day of the murder. This old Nunnery is the site of more murders and the connections with certain Priests and an older nun makes for a great who done it book.
Dorothy Cliff is the owner of Read Again Books in Granby.