SaintsManiac
Wait for it.
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2014
28/30--Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Beautiful stories. I can see why it won the Pulitzer.
Beautiful stories. I can see why it won the Pulitzer.
Annual Reading Challenge--2020
- Thread starter willowsnn3
- Start date
drwitz
Living the dream in Florida!
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2008
It was! And added some dimensions of race and sexual orientation which were implied in the novel but made much clearer in the series. Riveting show and well-worth a watch!
willowsnn3
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2009
#38 What Happens in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand
A year ago, Irene Steele had the shock of her life: her loving husband, father to their grown sons and successful businessman, was killed in a helicopter crash. But that wasn't Irene's only shattering news: he'd also been leading a double life on the island of St. John, where another woman loved him, too.
Now Irene and her sons are back on St. John, determined to learn the truth about the mysterious life -- and death -- of a man they thought they knew. Along the way, they're about to learn some surprising truths about their own lives, and their futures.
Second book in the Paradise series. I thought it was pretty good. Looking forward to #3 in the series.
A year ago, Irene Steele had the shock of her life: her loving husband, father to their grown sons and successful businessman, was killed in a helicopter crash. But that wasn't Irene's only shattering news: he'd also been leading a double life on the island of St. John, where another woman loved him, too.
Now Irene and her sons are back on St. John, determined to learn the truth about the mysterious life -- and death -- of a man they thought they knew. Along the way, they're about to learn some surprising truths about their own lives, and their futures.
Second book in the Paradise series. I thought it was pretty good. Looking forward to #3 in the series.
OKW8297
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2017
49. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I am a huge fan of the Netflix series and was curious about the novel it was based on. Characters are very different but the atmosphere Of the book was captured in the series. I absolutely loved this and my only complaint is that it was too short.
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She has a second book: Olive, Again
SaintsManiac
Wait for it.
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2014
mmouse37
DCL Diva!!
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2001
The Stand is one of my all time favorite books in any genre. I really want to reread it. The Uncut Edition sound wonderful!!
MJ
drwitz
Living the dream in Florida!
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2008
King often quotes this book and author as one of his inspirations.
OKW8297
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2017
Their writing style is similar.
melk
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2000
26/25 Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand
Irene Steele thinks her husband is on another business trip. Then she gets the call that he’s been killed in a crash in the Virgin Islands. She and her sons fly down there and find nothing is what they thought.
Another light summer read by Hilderbrand. I was in the mood for another easy read. This is the first in a series though so I’m just waiting for the second.
I surpassed my goal of 25 with this book. I never would have thought I would read so much when I set my goal back in January! Love this thread, enjoy seeing what everyone else is reading and have a big list of my own now.
Irene Steele thinks her husband is on another business trip. Then she gets the call that he’s been killed in a crash in the Virgin Islands. She and her sons fly down there and find nothing is what they thought.
Another light summer read by Hilderbrand. I was in the mood for another easy read. This is the first in a series though so I’m just waiting for the second.
I surpassed my goal of 25 with this book. I never would have thought I would read so much when I set my goal back in January! Love this thread, enjoy seeing what everyone else is reading and have a big list of my own now.
mmouse37
DCL Diva!!
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2001
18/40 - The Sandman, Lars Kepler -
Late one night, outside Stockholm, Mikael Kohler-Frost is found wandering. Thirteen years earlier, he went missing along with his younger sister. They were long thought to have been victims of Sweden's most notorious serial killer, Jurek Walter, now serving a life sentence in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Now Mikael tells the police that his sister is still alive and being held by someone he knows only as the Sandman. Years ago, Detective Inspector Joona Linna made an excruciating personal sacrifice to ensure Jurek's capture. He is keenly aware of what this killer is capable of, and now he is certain that Jurek has an accomplice. He knows that any chance of rescuing Mikael's sister depends on getting Jurek to talk, and that the only agent capable of this is Inspector Saga Bauer, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy. She will have to go under deep cover in the psychiatric ward where Jurek is imprisoned, and she will have to find a way to get to the psychopath before it's too late--and before he gets inside her head.
19/40 - Positive - David Wellington -
Anyone can be positive . . .
The tattooed plus sign on Finnegan's hand marks him as a Positive. At any time, the zombie virus could explode in his body, turning him from a rational human into a ravenous monster. His only chance of a normal life is to survive the last two years of the potential incubation period. If he reaches his twenty-first birthday without an incident, he'll be cleared.
Until then, Finn must go to a special facility for positives, segregated from society to keep the healthy population safe. But when the military caravan transporting him is attacked, Finn becomes separated. To make it to safety, he must embark on a perilous cross-country journey across an America transformed—a dark and dangerous land populated with heroes, villains, madmen, and hordes of zombies. And though the zombies are everywhere, Finn discovers that the real danger may be his fellow humans.
20/40 - The Doll Factory - Elizabeth Macneal -
In 1850s London, the Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and, among the crowd watching the dazzling spectacle, two people meet by happenstance. For Iris, an arrestingly attractive aspiring artist, it is a brief and forgettable moment but for Silas, a curiosity collector enchanted by all things strange and beautiful, the meeting marks a new beginning.
When Iris is asked to model for Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint. Suddenly, her world begins to expand beyond her wildest dreams—but she has no idea that evil is waiting in the shadows. Silas has only thought of one thing since that chance meeting, and his obsession is darkening by the day.
21/40 - Vanished - Mary MacGarry Morris -
Aubrey Wallace is the kind of man no one notices. Dotty Johnson is the kind of woman no one can ignore. One afternoon, they both disappear from the small Vermont town where they live. The next day, two hundred miles away, a toddler is kidnapped from her Massachusetts home.
For the next five years, Aubrey, Dotty, and the kidnapped child—united by a mix of strange love, desperate need, and the crime that brought them together—are trapped in a nomadic existence governed by their constant fear of discovery. Canny, the little girl, becomes Aubrey’s entire existence. But Dotty wants out. She is tired of being saddled with this fearful man, and when she meets a brutal ex-convict, the wheels of Canny’s return to her natural parents are wrenched fatally into motion.
22/40 - Larger than Life - Jodi Picoult -
A researcher studying memory in elephants, Alice is fascinated by the bonds between mother and calf—the mother’s powerful protective instincts and her newborn’s unwavering loyalty. Living on a game reserve in Botswana, Alice is able to view the animals in their natural habitat—while following an important rule: She must only observe and never interfere. Then she finds an orphaned young elephant in the bush and cannot bear to leave the helpless baby behind. Thinking back on her own childhood, and on her shifting relationship with her mother, Alice risks her career to care for the calf. Yet what she comes to understand is the depth of a parent’s love.
23/40 - Leaving Time - Jodi Picoult (Larger than Life is a novella prequel to Leaving Time)
For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.
Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who’d originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.
As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish.
24/40 - The Last of the Moon Girls - Barbara Davis
Lizzy Moon never wanted Moon Girl Farm. Eight years ago, she left the land that nine generations of gifted healers had tended, determined to distance herself from the whispers about her family’s strange legacy. But when her beloved grandmother Althea dies, Lizzy must return and face the tragedy still hanging over the farm’s withered lavender fields: the unsolved murders of two young girls, and the cruel accusations that followed Althea to her grave.
Lizzy wants nothing more than to sell the farm and return to her life in New York, until she discovers a journal Althea left for her—a Book of Remembrances meant to help Lizzy embrace her own special gifts. When she reconnects with Andrew Greyson, one of the few in town who believed in Althea’s innocence, she resolves to clear her grandmother’s name.
But to do so, she’ll have to decide if she can accept her legacy and whether to follow in the footsteps of all the Moon women who came before her.
I enjoyed all of these but my favorite of this batch was definitely Leaving Time and the Novella Larger Than Life. Such a beautiful story.
I also really liked Positive...it was not your normal Zombie story and I really felt for the main character.
MJ
Late one night, outside Stockholm, Mikael Kohler-Frost is found wandering. Thirteen years earlier, he went missing along with his younger sister. They were long thought to have been victims of Sweden's most notorious serial killer, Jurek Walter, now serving a life sentence in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Now Mikael tells the police that his sister is still alive and being held by someone he knows only as the Sandman. Years ago, Detective Inspector Joona Linna made an excruciating personal sacrifice to ensure Jurek's capture. He is keenly aware of what this killer is capable of, and now he is certain that Jurek has an accomplice. He knows that any chance of rescuing Mikael's sister depends on getting Jurek to talk, and that the only agent capable of this is Inspector Saga Bauer, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy. She will have to go under deep cover in the psychiatric ward where Jurek is imprisoned, and she will have to find a way to get to the psychopath before it's too late--and before he gets inside her head.
19/40 - Positive - David Wellington -
Anyone can be positive . . .
The tattooed plus sign on Finnegan's hand marks him as a Positive. At any time, the zombie virus could explode in his body, turning him from a rational human into a ravenous monster. His only chance of a normal life is to survive the last two years of the potential incubation period. If he reaches his twenty-first birthday without an incident, he'll be cleared.
Until then, Finn must go to a special facility for positives, segregated from society to keep the healthy population safe. But when the military caravan transporting him is attacked, Finn becomes separated. To make it to safety, he must embark on a perilous cross-country journey across an America transformed—a dark and dangerous land populated with heroes, villains, madmen, and hordes of zombies. And though the zombies are everywhere, Finn discovers that the real danger may be his fellow humans.
20/40 - The Doll Factory - Elizabeth Macneal -
In 1850s London, the Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and, among the crowd watching the dazzling spectacle, two people meet by happenstance. For Iris, an arrestingly attractive aspiring artist, it is a brief and forgettable moment but for Silas, a curiosity collector enchanted by all things strange and beautiful, the meeting marks a new beginning.
When Iris is asked to model for Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint. Suddenly, her world begins to expand beyond her wildest dreams—but she has no idea that evil is waiting in the shadows. Silas has only thought of one thing since that chance meeting, and his obsession is darkening by the day.
21/40 - Vanished - Mary MacGarry Morris -
Aubrey Wallace is the kind of man no one notices. Dotty Johnson is the kind of woman no one can ignore. One afternoon, they both disappear from the small Vermont town where they live. The next day, two hundred miles away, a toddler is kidnapped from her Massachusetts home.
For the next five years, Aubrey, Dotty, and the kidnapped child—united by a mix of strange love, desperate need, and the crime that brought them together—are trapped in a nomadic existence governed by their constant fear of discovery. Canny, the little girl, becomes Aubrey’s entire existence. But Dotty wants out. She is tired of being saddled with this fearful man, and when she meets a brutal ex-convict, the wheels of Canny’s return to her natural parents are wrenched fatally into motion.
22/40 - Larger than Life - Jodi Picoult -
A researcher studying memory in elephants, Alice is fascinated by the bonds between mother and calf—the mother’s powerful protective instincts and her newborn’s unwavering loyalty. Living on a game reserve in Botswana, Alice is able to view the animals in their natural habitat—while following an important rule: She must only observe and never interfere. Then she finds an orphaned young elephant in the bush and cannot bear to leave the helpless baby behind. Thinking back on her own childhood, and on her shifting relationship with her mother, Alice risks her career to care for the calf. Yet what she comes to understand is the depth of a parent’s love.
23/40 - Leaving Time - Jodi Picoult (Larger than Life is a novella prequel to Leaving Time)
For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.
Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who’d originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.
As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish.
24/40 - The Last of the Moon Girls - Barbara Davis
Lizzy Moon never wanted Moon Girl Farm. Eight years ago, she left the land that nine generations of gifted healers had tended, determined to distance herself from the whispers about her family’s strange legacy. But when her beloved grandmother Althea dies, Lizzy must return and face the tragedy still hanging over the farm’s withered lavender fields: the unsolved murders of two young girls, and the cruel accusations that followed Althea to her grave.
Lizzy wants nothing more than to sell the farm and return to her life in New York, until she discovers a journal Althea left for her—a Book of Remembrances meant to help Lizzy embrace her own special gifts. When she reconnects with Andrew Greyson, one of the few in town who believed in Althea’s innocence, she resolves to clear her grandmother’s name.
But to do so, she’ll have to decide if she can accept her legacy and whether to follow in the footsteps of all the Moon women who came before her.
I enjoyed all of these but my favorite of this batch was definitely Leaving Time and the Novella Larger Than Life. Such a beautiful story.
I also really liked Positive...it was not your normal Zombie story and I really felt for the main character.
MJ
Swimnoid
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- May 28, 2003
Oh geez! I see that the last time I posted was March 15! With the pandemic I've got a lot of listing to catch up on. Here are the first few.
17. Lawyer For the Dog by Lee Robinson
Cute story of a lawyer who catches a dog custody case. Fun read
18. The House Next Door by James Patterson
Three novellas. Typical fast moving JP. OK
19. Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave
Georgia runs home to the family vineyard after finding something out about her soon to be husband. Interesting story that brings in different aspects of all the family.
20. Memory Man by David Baldacci
Amos Decker can't forget anything. During his job as a police detective his wife and daughter are murdered. His life spirals and he ends up at his lowest point when someone confesses to the crime and he is pulled back in. Good read
21. The One I Left Behind by Jennifer McMahon
Thirteen year old Reggie's mother was kidnapped and believed murdered although they never find a body. Twenty five years later her mother is found in a homeless shelter. The story alternates from her childhood to her adulthood filling in gaps to figure out what happened. Some good twists!
More to come!
17. Lawyer For the Dog by Lee Robinson
Cute story of a lawyer who catches a dog custody case. Fun read
18. The House Next Door by James Patterson
Three novellas. Typical fast moving JP. OK
19. Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave
Georgia runs home to the family vineyard after finding something out about her soon to be husband. Interesting story that brings in different aspects of all the family.
20. Memory Man by David Baldacci
Amos Decker can't forget anything. During his job as a police detective his wife and daughter are murdered. His life spirals and he ends up at his lowest point when someone confesses to the crime and he is pulled back in. Good read
21. The One I Left Behind by Jennifer McMahon
Thirteen year old Reggie's mother was kidnapped and believed murdered although they never find a body. Twenty five years later her mother is found in a homeless shelter. The story alternates from her childhood to her adulthood filling in gaps to figure out what happened. Some good twists!
More to come!
willowsnn3
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2009
I loved The Stand also. Heard there is supposed to be a miniseries (another one, lol) coming to CBS All Access next year.
willowsnn3
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2009
Just finished the second one in this series. It is really good also. There is a third one but my library doesn't have it yet.
willowsnn3
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2009
#39 W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton
Two seemingly unrelated deaths, one a murder, the other apparently of natural causes.
But as Kinsey digs deeper into the mystery of the John Doe, some very strange linkages begin to emerge. And before long at least one aspect is solved as Kinsey literally finds the key to his identity. “And just like that,” she says, “the lid to Pandora’s box flew open. It would take me another day before I understood how many imps had been freed, but for the moment, I was inordinately pleased with myself.”
Loved this one. Only two more of the alphabet series to go. Will hate for it to end.
Two seemingly unrelated deaths, one a murder, the other apparently of natural causes.
But as Kinsey digs deeper into the mystery of the John Doe, some very strange linkages begin to emerge. And before long at least one aspect is solved as Kinsey literally finds the key to his identity. “And just like that,” she says, “the lid to Pandora’s box flew open. It would take me another day before I understood how many imps had been freed, but for the moment, I was inordinately pleased with myself.”
Loved this one. Only two more of the alphabet series to go. Will hate for it to end.
monarchsfan16
<font color=green>Holy smokes, the DIS is a big pl
- Joined
- Nov 30, 2003
The 3rd one is being released in October. I'm looking forward to reading it.
BonnieF
Is it time for Food & Wine Yet??
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2010
Olive, Again is terrific!!Yes I plan to read it.
BonnieF
Is it time for Food & Wine Yet??
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2010
32./50 - Out of the Deep I Cry, Julia Fleming-Spencer. Book 3 in the Clare Fergusson/Russ VanAlstyne series - and the best so far!
33/50 - The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donaghue - oh my, this is a Must Read!!! The publisher rushed it to come out because of setting - the pandemic of 1918. It is such a timely story with rich, full characters who go through so much. We can all relate to much of what happens. Donaghue is a wonderful writer - I remember being so engrossed in Room, that I actually screamed at - well, you know where (no spoiler)! It's one of the best books I've read in a year of good books!
33/50 - The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donaghue - oh my, this is a Must Read!!! The publisher rushed it to come out because of setting - the pandemic of 1918. It is such a timely story with rich, full characters who go through so much. We can all relate to much of what happens. Donaghue is a wonderful writer - I remember being so engrossed in Room, that I actually screamed at - well, you know where (no spoiler)! It's one of the best books I've read in a year of good books!
willowsnn3
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2009
Well, I guess that's why they don't have it, lol.
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