Super-quick post for a Satrday night...

I haven’t posted in a while, but it’s been very busy and there’s been no time.  It’s nearly 9pm on a Saturday night and I’m just finishing off a cup of homemade butternut squash soup as my very late supper, but I wanted to get this written before I got too busy tomorrow and ran out of time.  I’ve read and listened to a few books since my last post. 

The first is an audiobook that I finished, Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders.  Set in the mid-1970s, this book explores the Apollo 18 Mission to the moon, which was supposed to be an exploratory mission. But this mission is plagued with unexpected, sometimes deadly, occurrences. When Russian activity is detected, the agenda changes and the astronauts are expected to follow the new directives.  Before they even leave earth, a tragedy strikes and plans must again change, and once they reach the first destination of their journey, there is yet another unexpected development and the astronauts must work to stay on top of these events and complete as much of their mission as possible while keeping the crew safe from outer space… and each other.  This was a real page-turner, a plot-driven book that also contained a lot of scientific and astronomy facts, a “Canadian Tire” book with a scientific twist! 

The next book I want to tell you about is one that I received as a Christmas gift more than a year ago, but never found time to read until a couple of weeks ago.  Set in the US in the near future, The Future by Naomi Alderman asks the question:  what would you do if you knew the world was going to end and you had access to a “golden ticket”, a way to save yourself, but you can’t bring anyone with you and you can’t choose the company you’ll keep?  This post-apocalyptic novel explores what three high-tech giants are planning to do when they receive notification that the end of the world is likely to occur very soon.  There’s also a few wild cards in the mix, the loyal PA of one tech giant and a reporter who appears to be the target of someone out to get her for some undefined reason.  This was also a roller-coaster ride of a novel, a bleak look at what could happen to our world if we don’t do something drastic right now that was incredibly dismal, but very well-written, with an ending that made the read worthwhile even though I wanted to cry while reading about some of these very grim yet very real scenarios. 

And I just finished reading a new standalone novel by Kelley Armstrong (written under the pseudonym K L Armstrong) which was also a page-turner.  Known to the Victim is told from the point of view of Amy Gibson, a woman in her mid-twenties who is working on her PhD while recording sessions for her moderately successful podcast “Known to the Victim”, which explores murders committed against women by their partners.  She knows more than most about this subject, as her mother was murdered by a man she was dating nearly a decade earlier.  Amy managed to get through that experience with the help of her half-brother Oliver, but when someone at one of her appearances suggests that he is not as wonderful as he may seem, Amy can’t bury her head in the sand and ignore it.  While digging into Oliver’s past, events spiral out of control and Amy must search for the truth while keeping herself and those she cares about safe, a task made more difficult when she’s not sure who she can trust.  This was an excellent book, with the voice and character of Amy very much resembling Casey Duncan in the “Rockton” series.  I wanted to keep reading until I reached a satisfying conclusion.  Will this be the beginning of a new series for her?  Is there a new “Haven’s Rock” book on the horizon?  Whatever is coming next, I’m sure it’ll be amazing. 

That’s all for tonight.  Sorry for the brief descriptions and commentary for each book, but I’m feeling very tired and my eyes are threatening to close.  Happy Fall!!  The perfect season to pick up a good book!

Bye for now... Julie

Prisoners of the Castle post...

It’s Sunday evening, and I finally have a chance to tell you about the book I finished this weekend.  My book club met yesterday to discuss Prisoners of the Castle by Ben Macintyre, and it was one of the best discussions we’ve ever had.  This book presents details of the prisoners who were held as POWs in the “elite” prison of Colditz Castle between 1940 and 1945, along with their many escape attempts, some successful, others decidedly not.  I’ve always enjoyed Macintyre’s books, which for me have mainly been stories of espionage, spies and double-agents, and at first, this one seemed to not much more than a catalogue of escape attempts, but as the book went on, the prisoners became real as we learned about them, their backgrounds, their many skills before and during their imprisonment, and their relationships and interactions with other prisoners and officials and guards.  These characters, too, became not just two-dimensional stereotypes of German prison officials and guards but real people who had difficult jobs to do during extremely difficult times.  There were eight of us at the meeting, probably the first time we’ve all been able to make it out to a meeting in… maybe a year or more.  We all loved the way that Macintyre was able to infuse so much humour into this anything-but-humourous story, and we were astounded at the way he could take so much information about so many people and historical events and mesh it all together to make one coherent story that flowed seamlessly into an unputdownable book that was both entertaining and educational.  We were beyond impressed with the ingenuity of the prisoners and the various schemes they came up with to try to escape.  We learned so much about this prison and these characters, these people who endured years there as both guards and prisoners, officials and orderlies.  One of my group members was reluctant to read this because she was a young girl in Holland during WWII and she worried that it much be too difficult to read, and others also expressed their initial reluctance to read it due to the seriousness of the topic, but they were all glad they read it, and some are planning to share their books with other family members and friends.  We also talked about some new words that we learned, "escapologist" (one who studies escape techniques) and deutschfeindlich ("German-unfriendly"). All in all, it was a most successful discussion, and I would highly recommend this or any other book by Ben Macintyre if you’re looking for a well-written non-fiction selection. 

Not finished the Chris Hadfield audiobook yet, but over halfway there, so maybe next week… 

That’s all for today.  Take care and keep reading! 

Bye for now…

Julie

A brief "no book" post...

I wanted to start the "new year" off right by posting, even though I don't have much to tell you.  It's Labour Day afternoon at 4pm, and while I've been back to work for a week already, and September has some lovely warm weather, this feels like truly the end of summer.  We did all the things this weekend that you do on the last long weekend of summer, like go to the beach, go to several farmers markets (where I discovered "black garlic"!  tastes sweet, and you can eat it raw right out of the bulb!), did yard work, hung all the beach laundry outside to dry, and took long walks.  What I did not do this weekend is read, but I'm going to do that right after I finish this short post.  Because I was back to work last week, and we have a new cat that is causing our existing cat to feel very territorial, and there was a rally to fight for farmland that I attended on Wednesday, and we went to a very strange movie last night, I'm not very far into the book club selection for Saturday, Prisoners of the Castle:  an epic story of survival and escape from Colditz by Ben MacIntyre.  I'll be able to tell you more about this book next week, as well as hopefully tell you about The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield, which I'm listening to right now.  

That's all for today.  Happy Back to School! and Happy September!  

Bye for now...
Julie