littlegreycloud's books do furnish many a room

I have been traveling a lot this year so am woefully behind in posting my books. For once, the stack of books that have come in is about the same height as the one of the books that I have read -- mainly because I've been traveling in places without bookstores and/or books in languages I can read. So I can't really take any credit for it but I've decided to see it as a good omen for 2014.

Book 1 in 2014: The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny (bought 06/13)

I always try to have a least one Penny "in waiting" for long flights -- kind of a deal with myself: "This is going to be annoying but at least I get to read about Three Pines". This volume, however, does not take us to Three Pines but to a remote monastery in the Canadian province of Quebec. Outsiders usually are not welcome here, but when the monastery's choir director is found murdered within its walls, Gamache and Beauvoir gain admittance.

Other than the case at hand, the book drives the background plot of the last few volumes in the series -- Gamache's fight against the dark forces within the force and Beauvoir's far from solid state -- forward a great deal, so I would not recommend it to people new to the series. And everyone else probably does not need my recommendation.:)

Further fate: Back on the shelf, to await a reread with its brothers and sisters.

I'm not familiar with Louise Penny, but you have bumped her on to my investigate list :)

>3 imyril:: I think you'll like her but do read the books in order as they build on one another. They also get somewhat darker as the series progresses.

Book 2 in 2014: Mittelreich, by Josef Bierbichler (2011), bought 01/13, read 01/14

Josef Bierbichler is a German actor who plays strongly Bavarian characters so it's not surprising that his first novel is also firmly set in Bavaria, with very Bavarian characters. The surprise is how good it is. His tale of several generations of a family running a lakeside inn spans a hundred years of German history, both in the big events (people going off to wars, refugees coming from the east etc.) and in the small ones (ordinary people being able to take vacations, the first TV coming to the village).

While much of this is familiar to me, I enjoyed the distinctly Bavarian flavour of the book, with its southern Catholicism and village atmosphere -- quite foreign for someone having grown up in a big city in the protestant north/atheist east of the country.

Further fate: Back on the shelves.

5> okay, I'm sold. I've been wanting to do some reading in German and Dutch this year, and Mittelreich sounds lovely.

>6 imyril:: I hope your German is good -- I can't check right now but I seem to recall dialogues in dialect, both Bavarian but also Silesian. One book I would recommend wholeheartedly for someone interested in contemporary German fiction is Alle sterben, auch die Löffelstöre. It takes place in the East, both before and after the wall fell (a territory much more familiar to me than Catholic Bavarians, truth be told;) but it's really about friendship and childhood, love and loss and coping with it. I've already given a copy to everyone who would hold still long enough, it's that good. Check out the reviews on amazon.DE. Don't be confused by the cover, it's not a children's book -- and Löffelstöre are paddlefish.;)

Book 3 in 2014: Geim, by Anders de la Motte (2010), acquired 09/13, read 01/14

This one came from and was warmly recommended by a friend whose taste I usually share. It's the story of HP, a somewhat shiftless petty criminal who happens to find an expensive-looking mobile phone on the train. He snags it, of course, and this is how "the game" begins -- he is sent messages and asked to perform small (and later larger) acts of daring, for which he receives both money and praise. All is well in HP's world until one of his actions endangers someone close to him, and he decides to find out who is behind the game and try to shut it down.

The problem with the book is that the conspiracy behind the game is not very interesting, and that the book is not all that well written. It's supposedly a page-turner but I really had to make myself finish the second half (after being quite intrigued initially), and had I known that the whole thing does not get resolved in any way but gets drawn out to the next volumes, I would not have bothered.

On the plus side, I learnt a whole lot of Swedish slang, and you never know what that's good for.:)

Further fate: Will list it on the swap site for someone to enjoy it more.

7> ah, fair warning. I'm probably too rusty to cope with lots of dialect (my Mum lives in Bavaria, so I have some idea what I'd be letting myself in for ;)

Maybe I'll go hang out with the paddlefish instead!

Definitely go with the paddlefish -- and maybe read Mittelreich on a trip to visit your Mum.:) That way, you can always ask someone.

Book 4 in 2014: Wenn die Wale an Land gehen, by Kathrin Aehnlich (bought 12/13, read 01/14)

This one was a bit of a disappointment, but it almost had to be one. As mentioned above, I really adored Aehnlich's Alle sterben, auch die Löffelstöre, which was the author's only novel to date. She's written stories and children's books and radio features and the like, and there is also a book called Wenn ich groß bin, flieg ich zu den Sternen but that's really just a sort of preliminary study für "Alle sterben ...", published ten years earlier.

So "Wenn die Wale" is her second novel, and you know how it goes with second novels if you loved the first one, right? I was apprehensive, but still liked the premise -- middle-aged, newly divorced woman goes off to New York to try and locate the man she loved in her youth but who just couldn't deal with life in East Germany -- enough to get this as my birthday present to myself.

The book follows two plot lines -- on one hand we have Roswitha/Rose walking through NYC where she meets all kinds of people who know Mick, while the man himself remains curiously elusive, on the other hand we get the back story of what happened in the 1980s, why she fell for Mick and why she ended up marrying someone else.

It's a good book and it definitely provides food for thought -- it's just not another "Alle sterben ..." :)

Still working on the backlog.

Book 5 in 2014: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré

This one was a reread -- I first read it over twenty years ago but I'm currently making my way through the Smiley novels again. Spy is a good as I remembered it but even more cynical than in my recollection.

Book 6 in 2014: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

I think I may have made a big mistake in that one of the first books by Dickens I have read (other than the Christmas books, Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby) was Bleak House. I adore Bleak House. I realize it's a big lumbering mess of a book but I guess I just have a thing for big lumbering messes of books. Great Expectations, by contrast, is a lot more straightforward, and could be summed up as "boy from humble beginnings comes into money and gets too big for his britches, until life takes him down a peg or two and he realizes who his real friends are". Obviously, there are Dickens' trademark memorable characters and insights into human nature -- but Bleak House it is not, so perhaps my expectations were just too great.:)

Book 7 in 2014: The Good House, by Ann Leary

I thought I was done with my January reads but just discovered one more. The Good House tells the story of Hildy Good, a real-estate agent in a small town in Massachusetts, who has taken "just a little" too much of a liking to the no-longer-occasional glass of alcohol. Hildy thinks she has things under control -- but as she gets involved with the life of a new neighbour, she gets ample opportunity to examine her own.

I loved this book. It manages to be both thoughtful and uplifting at the same time -- you despair of Hildy as she passes out in her own basement but you still never cease to root for her. After all, many of the little lies she tells herself (and, by extension, the reader) are not so unlike the ones you may have told yourself at some point or another.

My audiobook included an interview with the author in which she explained that Hildy was never meant to be the main character of the book but just ended up stealing the show, and I have no trouble believing that. Speaking of which, I strongly recommend the audiobook version of this novel -- the narrator, Mary Beth Hurt, really makes Hildy come to life.

Book 8 in 2014: Rechnung offen, by Inger-Maria Mahlke

This 2013 novel deals with the inhabitants of an apartment buildings in Berlin's once grimy but now up-and-coming Neukölln district. The title is a play on words and can mean both a bill yet unpaid and a score yet to be settled. The literal meaning certainly applies to Claas, the owner of the building, whose addiction to buying stuff has led to many unpaid bills and his wife's both taking a lover and kicking him out. So he moves into his building (bought as an investment), where his overweight daughter already lives -- a daughter so paralyzed by life that she fakes completing an education she has long since abandoned and has been living among yet-to-be-unpacked moving boxes for months. What little energy she has, she expends into blackmailing the African dope dealers downstairs into giving her free dope once a week. The tenants also include an old lady descending into dementia and a single mom who works as a dominatrix before taking off altogether, leaving her son behind. Their stories and those of a couple of additional characters are told in bits and pieces and from multiple perspectives.

All good and well, except that I found myself unable to care about any of them, with the possible exception of the old lady and the abandoned boy. There are very touching moments -- such as the old lady's encountering her deceased friend's furniture on the pavement before a second-hand store -- but these are too few and far between. And some bits are just a bit too off -- such as the Spanish artist whose art consists in taking pictures of her menstruation and who then communicates her pregnancy to her partner by photographing clean toilets. Interesting as an idea, perhaps, but not enough to make me care about the would-be-father's inept response.

Acquired 11/13, read 02/14, back onto the swap site whence it came.:)

Book 9 in 2014: Die Stunde des Reglers, by Max Landorff

I don't often read German crime novels or thrillers because most of them are pretty bad. There is a reason Scandinavian crime was popular in Germany a couple of decades before it was popular anywhere else (Scandinavia included) and that's that we were in dire need of those murderous Swedes et al.

Max Landorff's Regler books are an exception. I picked up the first one -- simply called Der Regler ("The Fixer") sometime last fall in a bookshop at the train station (I basically went in there to buy a chocolate bar since I had a book on me -- but then I had time to browse and we all know how that goes). I basically read the book in one go but don't seem to have written about it in last year's thread for some reason.

Anyway, Gabriel Tretjak, a man of somewhat murky origins that are gradually revealed in the books, fixes lives. If you messed up your life or someone else did, and you have a sufficient amount of cash and are prepared not to question Tretjak's methods, Tretjak will make your problems go away. Except that by the time we meet Tretjak in Der Regler (published in English as "Tretjak" -- not a very inspired choice of title, if you ask me), things have started to go ever so slightly awry, and people are dying, and all the clues seem to be pointing to Tretjak himself. In the second volume, the hits are getting even closer -- more people are dying and they all have one thing in common: they're all called Gabriel Tretjak.

Acquired 12/2013, read 02/2014, looking forward to the third installment due in May.

Book 10 in 2014: Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio

This one should have been right up my alley as I love courtroom drama, and Involuntary Witness is all about an Italian lawyer's struggle to prove the innocence -- or rather, raise sufficient doubt about the guilt -- of his client in the murder of a young boy. The story was interesting, the setting was good (I don't know much about Italy, much less its legal system, so this was a nice change) but something about this book rubbed me the wrong way -- possibly just the impression that the protagonist and/or the author is rather full of himself. But lots of other people loved the book, so it's probably just me.:)

Audiobook acquired in 12/2013, read/heard in 02/2014, won't be pursuing the series any further.

Book 11 in 2014: This is where I leave you, by Jonathan Tropper

I've had this book unread on my shelves for three years and it would have remained there even longer if the husband and I had not happened to be watching an episode of Orange is the New Black, in which the character Red is seen lying on her cot reading. "I have that book", I said to the husband. "Of course you do."

So I pulled it out that evening and took it to bed with me and it's been one of my reading highlights so far this year -- being both funny and insightful at the same time. Judd Foxman does not exactly have the time of his life. His father has just died and -- to the surprise of his not overly religious family -- left instructions for everyone to sit shiva, in other words, spend seven days and nights together under the same roof, which is plenty of time for old resentments and new grievances to be given an airing. Moreover, Judd has had to head home without his wife, whom he recently discovered in bed with his obnoxious boss. This sounds like a complete nightmare -- and it both is and isn't. But it's definitely fun to be along for the ride.

Acquired 01/2011, read 02/2014, going back on my shelves. Will check out Tropper's other books.

Keep reading... Tropper is great!

>19 Yells:: Thanks, I will! I put The Book of Joe on my to-buy list because the premise sounds good.

Book 12 in 2014: How the Light Gets In, by Louise Penny. As with book 1, an excellent way to get through a long flight. In this volume, we're back in Three Pines and also with several of the conflicts that have been developing over the last few instalments of the series. A lot of threads come to their end while Gamache and his colleagues are investigating the disappearance of one of Myrna's friends, who turns out to have been one of the famous Ouellet quintuplets, as well as what initially looks like a suicide off one of the bridges leading into Montréal.

I don't want to give too much away, except to say that I'm really curious about the next Three Pines book as it will have to be a departure in many ways. (If you haven't been following the series, do not start here.)

Book 13 in 2014: Vila i frid, by Sofie Sarenbrant

Still working on the backlog. Book 13 was a Swedish crime novel that I picked up in Egypt to read between dives. The action takes place in an expensive Japanese-styled spa in Stockholm, where first an actress is found unconscious and later an elderly couple is found murdered. I read it in short spurts (basically enough time to have a tea and wait for my surface interval to pass) and it held my interest at the time, but I found the resolution unsatisfactory. I left it behind for another diver to pass the time.

Book 14 in 2014: The Reversal, by Michael Connelly

I have "read" the previous Lincoln Lawyer books as audiobooks but this instalment wasn't available to me (the US audible has some annoying thing where some books aren't available to non-US residents), so I bought the paperback a couple of years ago since I do want to pursue the series (I love courtroom drama) and as I was out of Louise Pennys, I took it along for the flight.

In Reversal, we encounter the familiar Lincoln Lawyer universe -- Mickey Haller, his ex-wife the office manager, his other ex-wife the prosecutor, and his half-brother Harry Bosch (known to Connelly readers from the longstanding series) -- but this time, the tables are turned as Mickey actually works for the prosecution in an attempt to reverse the release of a convicted child murderer. His new role also requires Mickey to get an actual office as opposed to working out his car, but other than that, we get what we came for -- solid entertainment with enough twists and turns to make a boring flight pass.

Acquired 11/2011, read 03/2014, going back on my shelves.

Big gap, big backlog ...

Book 15 in 2014: Bloom county: The complete library, vol. 2

I finished this in March but had been reading it over several months -- it was my coffee table book, ready to be picked up for a few minutes here and there. I liked this one even more than the first volume -- not sure if it is because the characters have grown on me or Breathed has found his stride or a combination of the two. This volume covered 1982 through 1984 and I have already ordered the next one.

Acquired 05/13, read 03/14, going back on my shelves.

Book 16 in 2014: The Feud in the Chalet School

I had dental surgery in March and spent a day in bed, having my jaw throb away and feeling sorry for myself. Too numb from the painkiller to read anything remotely challenging, and so it was time for another adventure of the Chalet School girls.

In this installment, the school is joined by another school whose building burnt down. Due to the bad attitude of one of the teachers (of the other school, of course!), conflicts arise between the students. All ends well, of course, and a couple of cats are involved as well. And my teeth are fine now, too.

Acquired 09/12, read 03/14, going back on my shelves.

Book 17 in 2014: Worth Dying For, by Lee Child

I may have said this before, but as far as escapism is concerned, you can't go wrong with Jack Reacher. I would not want to read them one after the other, but every few months or so, I feel like listening to another one (always read really well by Dick Hill).

I was thinking about how to sum this one up but just stumbled on this excellent description by SunnySD:

"Small town Nebraska, where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone knows everyone else's business, too. Like most small towns, there's a ruling class. Unfortunately for them, the youngest has a penchant for wife-beating and Reacher just happens to stumble over it. Unfortunately for them, they decide to do something about him. Unfortunately for them, they have a secret they'll kill to protect. And unfortunately for them, they picked the wrong guy to mess with."

Acquired in 10/2011, listened to 03/2014; keeping it in my audiobook archive. And I got the next installment from audible so it's there for the next time I get the "Reacher urge".:)

Book 18 in 2014: Death and the Lit Chick by G. M. Malliet

I read Death of a Cozy Writer, the first volume in this literary-themed mystery series five years ago and, at the time, made a note to get and read another one to see whether it was worth pursuing the series.

Time passed, more time passed, but this spring I finally got around to Death and the Lit Chick. The premise seemed promising enough -- a bunch of writers has been invited by their publisher to spend a weekend at a lovely old (and, of course, remote!) castle. It's my favourite type of mystery: a limited number of characters, each of whom with grudges and petty jealousies to hold against any number of the others, and sure enough, the most unlikeable person (an upstart chicklit writer in this case) ends up dead early on. It all seemed very promising but somehow fell flat, not sure why.

Acquired 09/2012, will be listing it and its predecessor on the swap site for someone else to enjoy more.