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Lee Child continues his Jack Reacher series with Never Go Back in his usual suspenseful fashion. Here
Jack finds himself accused of manslaughter and slapped with a paternity suit
(neither of which things he remembers happening) and so must find out why this
is occurring. 
The Arroyo Book club will be reading On the Beach by Nevil Shute. This classic from the
cold war era tells the tale of a group of survivors of a WWIII nuclear
catastrophe awaiting their own death from drifting radioactive clouds. Pick up a copy at the library and find out
what happens.
Mist by Susan Krinard is an urban fantasy tale.
The heroine, Mist, is a Valkyrie living in contemporary San Francisco
when things start. We then embark on a traditional battle against the
gods. I will confess that I did not
finish this book. Our heroine’s
boyfriend turned out to be the villain of the piece (the God Loki) within the
first chapter & that whole scenario was way too “rapey” for my taste, so I
put the book down.
The premise of Project Cain by Geoffrey Girard is that the government has secretly raised clones of
notorious serial killers. Now some of
them have broken out the “facility” they were being held in and are on a
rampage. Our narrator is one such clone
(Jeffrey Dahmer) who was raised by the lead scientist on the project. He has just discovered the truth about his
origins and is co-opted by a government agent type to help find his missing
adoptive father and the other clones.
Before there was the TV show Dexter there was a
book series by Jeff Lindsay. In
Dexter’s Final Cut we follow our hero (anti-hero really) as actors studying for roles in a police
procedural type TV show shadow him. It’s difficult to say anything more about the plot without giving
away spoilers, suffice it to say that Dexter is his usual self & a lot of
things happen. If you’ve been following
the series you’ll want to pick this up.
If you haven’t, I would recommend starting at the beginning with Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
The Bat by Jo Nesbo is a mystery set in Australia, specifically Sydney and its
environs. In the book we follow Harry
Hole (pronounced Holy) a detective from Norway who is in Sydney to help the
local police solve the murder of a Norwegian woman. As the story progresses we learn that she was only the latest in
a string of murders & more people are killed.
In Far From the Tree Andrew Solomon explores the connection between parents & children when the
children in question differ in unexpected and drastic ways from the
parents. He explores questions of
defining identity in the children & parental love and determination in the
parents. In the course of this book he
examines deafness, dwarfism, Down Syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple
disabilities, prodigies, children of rape, criminals, and the transgendered.
The Rosenbergs and
Sobell were charged with conspiracy to commit wartime espionage. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death and
Sobell got 30 years. To quote the
source: The Rosenberg case, coming at the height of the anit-Communist hysteria in America produced the harshest possible result: the deaths of two defendants who, as U. S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter put it, “were tried for conspiracy and sentenced for treason.”
Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter takes a survey look (very broad with absolutely no depth) at
phenomenon that shape how people think, feel, and behave. He examines the
impact of color on emotion & behavior, the influence brought to bear by the
presence (or absence) of other people on our behavior, how our name can
influence our life outcomes and more.
The Story of English by Philip Gooden is essentially a history of the English language. It focuses on the people & places that
have had an impact on the development of the language. In terms of books we’ve discussed before it
is similar to The Story of Spanish by Nadeu & Barlow (a similarity that is
totally reflected in their near identical titles). The book was quite interesting but it is definitely a survey and it is definitely an historical overview.
It is not technical in any sense & does not delve into questions of
grammar or construction.
This week’s
question was what is peripeteia? To answer... In
Greek drama, the sudden and dramatic change of fortune for the protagonist is
peripeteia also called peripety.
If you like a good regency romance Mary Balogh is always
worth a try. In Slightly Scandalous she continues a series that focuses on a family of six brothers and sisters by
telling Freyja’s tale. Freyja is
headstrong and stubborn. She meets
Joshua Moore under unusual circumstances, becomes betrothed to him as a ruse,
and grows to love him (it is a romance after all). Of course there’s a lot of misunderstanding, pushy &
downright evil interference from relatives, & a generally satisfying
conclusion.
Deo was a young medical student in 1994 when ethnic tensions between Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi elevated to the level of massacres. He spent six months on the run from the Hutu militia, saved by a Hutu woman who claimed he was her son, and later he made his way to New York, saved by a former nun who helped him find housing and other assistance. In the first half of the book, Kidder recalls Deo's struggles as an illegal immigrant, working for poverty wages and sleeping in abandoned buildings, crack houses, and Central Park, all the while recovering from severe trauma and longing for a university setting. Through benefactors, Deo goes on to graduate from Columbia University and to attend medical school at Dartmouth. Eventually working with a nonprofit organization that provides health care in impoverished nations, Deo returned to Burundi to build a clinic. The second half of the book is Kidder's recollections of accompanying Deo on his return trip home, a frightening journey of remembrances. Kidder uses Deo's experiences to deliver a very personal and harrowing account of the ethnic genocide in East Central Africa