Hi, Skibby - welcome! I've read a lot of books from recommendations here that I probably wouldn't have chosen on my own.

Donna

Adding my welcome, Skibby. Hope you get some inspiration for more books from the forum. My list just grows and grows, and I have been exposed to books that I never would have picked up on my own. My favorites are murder mysteries. My husband used to claim to worry because I know so many ways to kill someone.

G'Day from the Land Downunder, Skibby. Like Carolyn, who encouraged me to join in here many years ago, I mainly read murder mysteries, cozy genre preferably. I occasionally read something more serious when recommended by an RP'er..

Thank you all very kindly. I'm very much looking forward to participating here. What a fun addition to my day.

Always late to the party. :-) Welcome Skibby. I've been participating in this forum for many years. Not always continuously or with the same user name, but faithfully when time allows. This is where I learned of cozy mysteries. I think Carolyn's reports may have led me in that direction. But, unfortunately, I've almost exhausted the genre so it's back to the editing room for me...looking for new authors. Heaven forbid I should not have a book in progress. :-) I doubt that I could get to sleep at night. I hope you enjoy Reader's Paradise as much as I have over the years.

Winter - Regarding "Heaven forbid I should not have a book in progress. :-) I doubt that I could get to sleep at night." - I know exactly what you mean! If I go a day without my next book decided upon and in hand, I feel a bit lost.

Oh Kathy. Me, too! Right now I'm less than patiently awaiting Karin Slaughter's new book...Pieces of Her. It should have been delivered yesterday so it's a day late...and I'm antsy. LOL I don't usually let myself get to the point where I don't have at least 3 or 4 books in reserve but it's been a very challenging summer and I've been remiss. The UPS man better show up this afternoon!!!

Welcome, Skibby! We enjoy to share our love of books with other readers here.

Does anyone in here remember when this book went on a journey across the US and back to me again ? What a fun adventure that was ! It returned to me stuffed with all the things you tucked into it.

I don't remember that, Yoyo. Tell us about it.

It was probably 8 years ago or more , after one of our annual bookmark exchanges. I happened to be in Oneonta NY and found an old bookshop and while browsing I met the owner. He told me he'd published a book about all the oddities he finds in old books that come through his shop. I bought the book , Forgotten Bookmarks , loved reading it and then got an idea.

Using the bookmark exchange list , I mailed the book off the the farthest destination , along with instructions to enjoy the book, then add your own insertion in it, take the top mailing label from the pad of labels I'd included and ship it off to the next person. I started it in CA and after a year of traveling it made it's way back East and one day showed up in my mailbox. It was filled with fun things that each RP gal had chosen to put in it before she sent it on it's journey. And the best part was no one knew it was coming to them until it was delivered to their door!

If I remember correctly I had also included a map so that each gal could draw a line from her location to the next one where the book was going. It guess it's the teacher in me.....I think we all enjoyed it.

Great idea, Yoyo! I've never participated in the bookmark exchange, so I guess that's why I was unaware of it. Very cool!

Love the story of the book journey! How fun.

I finished Milk and Honey by Faye Kellerman yesterday. I really enjoyed it, but it was the third in a row, so time to take a break.

Reader, I checked my library’s website again, and it turns out they do have a good, old-fashioned paper copy of Postmark Bayou Chene so I ordered it. It should be here in a few days. I also downloaded Plantation Shudders which I’ll work on till then.

Donna

I'm about 3/4 through Bone on Bone, new in the Ackers Gap, WVA, series by Julia Keller. Her books are really well written, but the continuing story of the opioid and poverty problems of Appalachia are heart wrenching. The series needs to be read in order.

Donna,

That's good. Let me know what you think of it.

I looked up Plantation Shudders. You are in a Louisiana state of mind ... !

LOL, Reader! I thought I saw Plantation Shudders listed in this thread, but I didn't see it in a quick skim. Maybe it was last month.

Donna

Welcome, Skibby!

Winter, I wonder what name you were using previously?

Carolyn, it is perfectly acceptable (with me, at any rate) for you to go on indulging in pineapple sherbet/Sprite floats long as you like even though you don't need to. Glad you're better again.

As for it being Too Hot to Read, I'm happy to report that temperatures in California will be in the 70's (F) all week. It makes up in part for the smoky skies. Even those are starting to clear up a bit.

And since this is a reading thread, I just finished Bellewether by Susannah Kearsley. It's one of those two-time-stream novels, one set in the mid 1700's and one in the present, only intermingled by the presence of an occasionally present ghost. Readers who generally enjoy Kearsley will like this one as well.

Rosefolly...Is there a reason you want to know? It's not information I'm willing to provide considering that the reason I now use "Winter" is that I was the innocent victim of a voracious stalker and I don't wish to be preyed upon again. If my user name makes a difference in my participation here, I shall just withdraw altogether. It doesn't seem to bother members of other GW forums or perhaps they're just not "curious" enough to ask.

Winter, I'm sure Rosefolly was just interested in 'who' you might have been, probably for no other reason than so many folk come and go . . . often the latter, from this site and I think we all miss old friends. The stalking must have been horrible; thank goodness it has never happened to me.

Thank you, Vee. As for the stalking...my retiring my old user name was the last resort to rid myself of the attacks. It was a most disconcerting experience and not one I wish to revisit on any level...at any time. I've been a member of these forums for over 17 years and never experienced anything like it. I come to share in knowledge, humor and help when I'm able. Not to be perpetrated upon. I'm sure I lost some old friends in the transition but it couldn't be helped. With a little time, perhaps they'll become new old friends. I would welcome that.

Winter, Vee has it right. I was only trying to connect you to whoever you were in the past. However it sounds to me that you have an excellent reason for not saying, and I withdraw my query. Stalking sounds horrible, and I'm glad you were able to shake him/her off. I have another friend who is going through the process right now, and I know how much she is enduring.

I'm looking forward to becoming one of the new old friends.

Winter, I can assure you that no one on this particular forum would be interested in stalking anyone. Most of us have been here for many years and we have come to know each other through annual book exchanges and the like. That means we had to exchange addresses. Sometimes, we have even met one another in our travels. Sometimes we even send each other books (thanks lemonhead and vee!). Rosefolly is one of our long-standing members, and Vee is correct.

Thank you, Rosefolly. I appreciate your explaining. I don't mean to be touchy...but it's been a very long haul to get to peace and quiet where I could participate again without fear. I actually had to resign my GW membership altogether. Then explain why I wanted to return to get approval for a new membership. I didn't post for months until I was quite sure that I had accomplished anonymity. I've never been involved in [and to this day don't belong to] any social media venues...with GW being the only place I felt secure enough to post. I'm delighted to have you as a new old friend. And I feel for your friend. It's a terrible experience.

Woodnymph2...I wasn't making accusations. I know who my stalker was. And believe it or not...there's really not much redress one has in a situation like this. So I did what I could do...by resigning my membership...because I had control over that. I know how lovely the members here are. That's why I'm back among those posting. This is a very enjoyable haven for me. I love to read. I thrive on good, intelligent conversation...and I love the wonderful humor that rises here from time-to-time. None of you can imagine how much I missed RP.

Thank you for understanding.

Rosefolly, thanks for permission but I'm afraid I don't need any nudging toward sweets! Thanks, also, for mentioning the new Susanna Kearsley. I hadn't known there was one and have requested it from the library.

Winter, what a shame you had to go through all that.

I finished Bone on Bone, and it actually ended on an up-note. Started looking at Pioneer Girl about Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's a coffee table type book so I won't be reading it straight through, but I do love the Little House books and would like to go see her museum home in the Ozarks sometime.

I don't want to dwell on Winter's experiences but think we all need to be careful with email and similar exchanges. A few years ago someone on RP contacted me (I think she had my info. because of the Xmas bookmark thing we did) asking for the email address of someone here. I said I wasn't in a position to give it and the enquirer became quite 'difficult' and soon after she left the site. I never felt threatened but these situations can get out of hand.

You're right, Vee. Caution is the word today. Most of us older, more trusting souls had little to no preparation for what the internet held when we ventured into its realm years ago. We enjoyed an extension to our social lives and, particularly for me, a vast treasure chest of news and information that could be tapped at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, the anonymity that the internet offers is a weapon in the hands of unscrupulous people and they're rarely, if ever, easily identifiable.

Indeed they can. I myself have multiple email addresses that I use for different purposes (shopping; social media; family-and-friends). I carefully segregate them.

Of course one should never give out another person's contact information without express permission. If someone contacts me for the purpose of getting in touch with a mutual acquaintance, I offer to take their information and pass it along. That leaves the option of saying No in the hands of the mutual acquaintance. This caution has sometimes taken people aback, but it is how I would like my information to be handled, so it is what I do.

Rosefolly, I do the same when someone asks me for an email address, as well as the reciprocal request when I ask for an address: I ask the mutual acquaintance to send along my email with a request to get in touch with me. Common courtesy!

Some may remember that I'd discovered there is a graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred - I borrowed it from the library a couple weeks ago, and while I did not particularly like the drawing style, it was very well done, and surprising (to me) how much more impact the visual form has when it was dealing with the inhumanity of slavery. I had to put the book down several times, which I don't remember ever doing when I was reading the original.

I flew through the 3 Murderbot Diaries novellas from Martha Wells - I really enjoyed the snarky voice of the 'security unit' cyborg who tells the story in first person, plus the space-opera action is enhanced with some thought-provoking questions about when does an artificial construct become human. But it comes in 4 separate novella-length books! Is this a new trend in science fiction? This is the second series of novellas which are actually one long story that I've read this year. You have to get multiple books to get the entire story. Kind of annoying. Murderbot will be 4 novellas (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol are all available, the fourth, Exit Strategy, is due out in October); Nnedi Okorafor's Binti novel was split into 3 novellas.

Right now I'm struggling with Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind. Does anyone know of an on-line study guide? I looked for one, but all I found was a brief overview that also mentioned that besides being dense with information, the English translation is pretty bad, which makes it harder yet. After 3 weeks, I'm still stuck in the first chapter trying to make some sense of the extended "bricoleur" analogy. I've even been browsing the course catalogs in local colleges looking for a class that might cover Levi-Strauss, but no luck so far. I've been looking in the anthropology departments, but if that's not the right topic, please, someone, set me straight! Not a topic I ever took in school, so I'm a bit lost.

Apparently you're not the only one to find his writings difficult, Donnamira. According to my rummaging around at Barnes & Noble...there's a whole book about him that claims to make his writings more understandable. Here's the link. They had 3 or 4 paperback editions available but the hard bound is sold out.

If this particular book doesn't help...it may direct you to other sources that may be more helpful.

HTH

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/claude-levi-strauss-edmund-ronald-leach/1101612985?ean=9780226469683

Donnamira, maybe the SF writers are trying to appeal to younger people who apparently have very short attention spans. Or, more likely, they are bombarded by so much media all the time that they can't pay attention to any one thing for very long.

Donna

I remember being assigned Levi-Strauss to read in college, yes, in an anthropology class. I never completed the readings. I found him impenetrable.

I had the vague impression that he had since gone out of vogue. Could be wrong about that.

If others have so much difficulty with Levi-Strauss, maybe mine is NOT senility setting in, as I have been fearing. :) I decided to add him to my reading list based on a review last spring by Michael Dirda of a book of comparative mythology by Serenity Young (Women Who Fly), in which he listed several "masterworks" in the topic many of which I'd already read (Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, Graves' The White Goddess, Frazer's Golden Bough), along with Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde, Jung and Levi-Strauss. I found Warner's book in the library (reading that one took some effort too - I had to keep revisiting passages to remind myself what point she was trying to make), but had less luck finding either of the works Dirda referenced for Jung and Levi-Strauss, so I got the only one available, which is The Savage Mind. I thought it might be similar to Campbell's The Masks of God/Primitive Mythology, but if it is, I can't tell! And it could be out-of-vogue, as you say - i know that Frazer's book includes a lot of outdated ideas.

Maybe it's time to move on to my other library book, There's A Mystery There, about Maurice Sendak and his art. :)

I'm finally catching up with this thread after being away for most of the summer. A very late-to-the-party welcome, Skibby! This is a wonderful place to visit and I hope you enjoy it.

Yoyo, I remember getting that book and sending it along to the next person, that was great fun!

I've been reading lots of fluffy brain candy all summer. I returned home to two books by one of my favorite authors, Ilona Andrews. I flew through the first book in his/her/their (they are a husband and wife writing team and I never know which pronoun to use) new Iron Covenant trilogy set in the Kate Daniels universe, Iron & Magic, which is Hugh D'Ambray's story and it was terrific. Yesterday the last Kate Daniels book, Magic Triumphs, arrived and I'm already half way through it, torn between wanting to gobble it up and make it last. I love their books and am looking forward to anything they write next.

I'm reading The Marriage Hearse by Kate Ellis. This series features Wes Peterson, a South Devon police detective who studied archeology and always has old bones stories interspersed with his present-day police work. I really enjoy the books.

Today I finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. This nonfiction book describes a period in the history of the Native American Osage tribe in which the U.S. Government allotted an amount of land in the state of Oklahoma to each tribe member, all of whom became wealthy when oil was discovered. As a result, many tribe members were murdered by scheming businessmen, government-appointed guardians, and even their own white spouses wishing to gain access to the Osages' land rights (and thus fortunes) through inheritance or legal finagling. It's a sad, sad story.

I finally had some time to get about a third of the way into Karin Slaughter's latest, Pieces of Her. So far...I'm not impressed. I hope it's just me and not the book. I'll know soon enough. So far it gives me the feeling that she's really pushing herself to write this book. That she's really not "into" it. Ever get that feeling about an author/book? The main character, Andy [daughter of the woman/mother who's responsible for the title] is a 31 year old airhead who appears to have no more sense or purpose than a spoiled teenager. This is a Slaughter stand alone novel and not part of her Will Trent series. Her other two stand alone novels...The Good Daughter and Cop Town are both "in development for film and TV". Perhaps that's why this current effort seems as though her heart just isn't in it. I've read everything she's written. She's a talented writer. Hopefully...this book will pull itself together before I lose patience with its characters. I'll let you know. :-)

My DH recently bought himself a book (very rare occurrence) written in 1967 about a local doctor A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger illustrated with grainy photos of the Dr going about his 'rounds' and used in a film of the same name.

I thought the book would be about 'our' area and Dr Sassall (not his real name) and his patients and the first chapter does follow him about with a brief outline of his day-to-day work but, in the rest of the book the author changes to philosophical mode. "The myth of Faust, the life of Paracelsus, the works of Conrad, and the dream of the universal are each examined . . . "What is the value of a life saved? How does the cure of an illness compare with the better poems of a minor poet? . . .How far do we have to go in appreciating the value not just of art, but of life?"

I found the this part of the book very difficult to understand. The philosopher Alain de Botton has described it as 'One of my favourite books in the world an ongoing inspiration" and there are many similar comments from noted worthies of the day.

The Dr's village, St Briavels, in the Forest of Dean. is where my husband lived in the late 60's when he arrived in this area which is described as "economically depressed, no large-scale industries. . . The men form neither a proletariat nor a traditional rural community. They are suspicious, independent, tough, poorly educated, low church. They have something of the character once associated with wandering tinkers."

John remembers the 'locals' speaking of the Dr with high regard, he worked very hard for them, over and above what was necessary, in often difficult conditions.

Of course this was happening well over eight miles from where we live now . . . considered a different world . . . and the area has been greatly modified by middle class incomers with fancy jobs and cars, indoor plumbing etc.

Dr Sassall was not really a Fortunate Man as he suffered from depression and shot himself some years after the book/film were made.

Village of St Briavels

I finished Plantation Shudders last night, which was good timing since my copy of Postmark Bayou Chene arrived from the library yesterday. :) I liked Shudders; it was fairly short at 197 pages and a light murder mystery. A bit predictable, but it had enough plot twists to hold my interest.

In addition to Bayou Chene, I downloaded Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, which is a WWII story, based on fact, I believe.

Donna

Donna, I suspect you will enjoy Unbroken thoroughly. It was one of my book club's favorite ever books.

I've just finished skimming Jo Walton's book An Informal History of the Hugos. It has me looking up old favorites to re-read, and even buying a couple I had forgotten about, but once loved. It is based on a series of posts on Tor.com. Recommended for science fiction fans. See https://www.tor.com/2018/07/11/excerpts-an-informal-history-of-the-hugos-jo-walton/ to decide it interests you.

Rosefolly, my library has the Walton book on order so I added myself to the holds list. Thanks for the heads-up! (Although I confess that Walton’s own Hugo-winner, Among Others, did not appeal to me),

Donnamira, I found Among Others to be interesting, but preferred some others of her books to it. The story itself did not appeal to me so much, but I enjoyed it as a love letter to science fiction.

My favorites among her books are by far her series of three beginning with The Just City.

Currently reading Bellewether by Susanna Kearsley. It was enthusiastically suggested by a friend who gave it to me . Generally ,suggestions are best given without presenting the actual book......if I don't like the book can I still be friends with her !? :0) ( kidding of course, but it does put pressure on me to read /enjoy the story)

I know what you mean yoyo. I usually pass on paperbacks and have one friend who shares my 'taste' in books so no difficulties there. I made the mistake recently of handing on a light, but well-written book to my s-in-l thinking it might amuse here.

Vee "Maybe you'd like to read this ? I don't want it back so pass it on when you have finished with it."

H "A book? For me? To read?" Looks suspicious.

Vee " Well, I found it quite entertaining. I just thought you might enjoy it."

H Taking book as though it is a consignment of drugs and she should have on her rubber gloves. "I don't know, err but um . . ."

Vee, feeling very stupid as though she should have remembered H belongs to a sect that forbids the written-word or maybe never learnt to read " It doesn't matter, it was just an idea."

H "Well OK . . . thanks. I don't normally read books."

Vee, in amazement "Never read a book?"

H. "No, although I did read one a few years ago which was quite good."

Vee realising she has almost lost the plot "Oh, what was it called?"

H. " I've no idea."

Vee, oh dear. I think I would have been speechless after the 'few years ago' and staring as though at an exotic animal in a zoo!

I just finished the Maurice Sendak book by Jonathan Cott, There's a Mystery There - the first time I've ever seen an analysis explicated through transcribed interviews/conversations. A little too sycophantic, but it did give me a little more appreciation for Outside Over There.

I have begun Day of the Dead, the new Frieda Klein book that I believe is called Sunday Silence in England. Another to add to the why do they do that instance.

This is comment 167. Remember when Spike used to cut them off at 100? And only keep so many pages of threads? I suspect it was a storage issue, and a necessity of the time.

I see that I read Sunday Silence back in March, and Day of the Dead is an entirely new book. Sorry! I finished it today, and it is, as always, good.

Carolyn, you read so fast!

Kathy, it's what I do best!

I know that you probably won't believe this, but I actually took my ficus tree outside and dusted all the leaves over the summer. It's a completely different color now! (Perhaps something to do with years and years of no-dusting!)...