I am reading Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. The story of Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, who I believe is set to go to trial next year. I have not read too much on the Internet about it but I plan to after finishing the book.

Book was recommended by my niece who works for a big pharmaceutical company. The author is a WSJ reporter.

I am 72 pages in and so far, this true story is more frightening and gripping to me than many fiction books.

I have been trading books all summer with a friend. I get some good ones at the Dollar Store. I just finished Tuesdays with Morrie : An old Man, a young Man, and Life's Greatest Lessons. Before that it was Light of Paris. Now I'm reading To Kill A Mockingbird again as it has been years since first reading it.

tackykat, there is a very good HBO documentary based on that book, called The Inventor, which came out earlier this year. It makes for fascinating viewing.

I'm reading The Great Alone, by Kristin Hannah. The library gave me a new copy of the hardcover as a gift when I did a program for their Senior Fair in May. It's my first book by this author, and I'm enjoying it. It takes place in remote Alaska, mostly during winter, and I'm glad I'm reading it in the heat of summer.

I have to say, though I've been a reader all my life, my life has always been too busy to enjoy what people refer to as "summer reading". This is the first year that I've actually had time to try it...to spend a lazy summer afternoon in the cool shade with a cool drink and enjoy a good book. I really, really like it!

Allisande, I've read a number of Kristin Hannah's books, she is among my favorite authors. I, too, enjoyed 'The Great Alone'. Two other books of hers that stand out in my mind are "True Colors" and "The Nightingale".

I just checked my library's online card catalog for "The Crate", they don't have it. It sounds like one I'd like to read. Guess I'll have to ask them about interlibrary loan.

Rusty

Socks-- yes I do have moderate dry eye and I am "older" actually 65.......there is some validity to what you say, and I do prefer to read on my kindle paperwhite so the lighting is always good. Lately it's not my eyes, it's my brain. I have a lot going on and while I used to find reading a great-relaxing- free- and enriching escape, somehow the past few weeks I am fighting it. I know I will find something and get right back into it because I love reading so much.

I think we all at times have these spells and I am in it right now. Haven't had one of these in a long time.

Just thought I would be pertinent and mention another one of Kristin Hannah's which was very interesting (but I did not love) The Winter Garden.

I just finished My Ex Life. Eh. I'd give it 2-3 stars only...I'll let you know what the rest of the book group thinks.

Up next The Crate: A Story of War, a Murder, and Justice...a nonfiction story about holocaust survivors who find a crate full of bones. Local library is having a discussion with the author and I'm looking forward to it.

(Note to all participants, if you can bold the book titles, it helps others who scroll through the thread looking for references to books. Thanks!)

I realized I usually have this thread going in Home Dec Convos, and instead accidentally put it here. So I'll keep them both going this month...hhireno kindly started the one over there.

I just finished The Crate by Levison and thought it was a 4 star with enough interest for a book club.

Up next The Lilac Girls.

I just finished Beneath a Scarlet Sky ( excellent) and have started The Feather Theif.

Annie, I wish someone would keep a thread like this going here. Someone started an online book club on the Good Reads website for KT and other forum members, but it didn't last very long, just a few months. I think a more 'unstructured' thread, like this, seems to work better. I know I find it interesting, and it seems others do, too. Thank you for starting it.

Rusty

Annie Deighnaugh, thanks for mentioning the Home Dec Conv forum. I found some threads of interest to me there that I hadn't seen here. - June

Good news- I think I am reading again. For a book club, the next one is The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. So far, so good. It's a really interesting book- takes place in Newark NJ sort of autobiographical but with fiction. It's the area that DH's family lived in so there's that of recognizing names and eras.

The fiction part is really cool. It takes place at the end of FDR's 2nd term, and the twist is that Lindbergh is drafted to run against FDR and wins. I am still at the beginning, but this has already happened and it's just fascinating at least to me.

salonva, I loved that book. A sort of companion to it is Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, a cautionary tale for our times, even though written in the 1930s.

Rusty: I wish someone would keep a thread like this going here...

Great! Feel free to start one up every month.

Finished The Tattooist of Auschwitz and about halfway thru The Life of Pi.

DH recommends How Not To Die Alone, a debut novel by Richard Roper. I'll pick that up after I finish Kate Atkinson's Big Sky. He's starting S. J. Rozan's newest, Paper Son. (We love Rozan's Lydia Chin/Bill Smith novels.)

Finished "Bouquet" by Shirl Henke. Pretty light reading, also pretty good. Takes place in CA vineyards. Started on "We Must Be Brave" by Frances Liardet. I'm only about 50 or so pages in, can't tell much about it yet. Seems borderline boring, but I'll read more before I give it up. It opens in England in 1940, a WWII novel. Usually I find novels about that era very interesting, so hopefully this one will get better a little farther in.

From Annie's post above: "Rusty: I wish someone would keep a thread like this going here...

Great! Feel free to start one up every month."

I suppose I could. Not sure how dependable I'll be, but I'm willing to take a shot at it. At least until someone else can take it over. If someone else wants to do this, PLEASE do it!

Rusty

That'd be great Rusty.

As a suggestion for everyone, it's helpful when you finish a book to let us know what you thought ... how many stars on a 1-5 scale. That way we'll know whether to add it to our own list or not. It's also helpful if you think it would be good for a book group or not.

Great idea, Annie.

Recent reads:

The Art of Racing in the Rain--4 stars

Tattooist of Auschwitz--3.5 stars

I LOVED The Art of Racing in the Rain. I had to compose myself after finishing the book, then immediately handed it over to DH who also liked it.

I raced through the last book that I read because I enjoyed it so much, in fact, I got goosebumps after reading the last few sentences. It's a portrait of the author's Tutsi mother in Rwanda at the time of the genocide by the Hutus. It's a difficult subject to cover in a book, but the author fortunately gives an idea of the events without making it graphic and difficult to read. The book, translated from French, is The Barefoot Woman and the author is Scholastique Mukasonga. Beautifully written, 5 stars. I have put the writer's other two books on hold at the library. Her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, won the 2014 French Voices Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, her memoir Cockroaches was a finalist for the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.

After I finished the book, I began to read a volume of short pieces assembled by a long-time radio host (now deceased) that were contributed by listeners here in Canada. The topics covered many subjects, such as being away from home during Christmas, the occasions we said "oops," fountain pens, etc. These relatively secure and peaceful images are such a dramatic contrast to Mukasonga's sad tale.

I just finished Before We Were Yours and I give it 4 stars. Not the last star only because in the beginning, I felt it was a little slow and I was a bit disappointed but then it picked up for me and I ended up loving it. Its a novel based on a true story of black market adoption, corruption, murder, blackmail and abuse.

I've been working my way through the Outlander series. Boy, what a mix of classic romance, bodice ripper, Perils of Pauline, and historical fiction!

Fluff: another Jennifer Scott “Madame Chic” guide to living á la française. I really enjoy them because they are so simple, sweet, doable, and about France. One day I will live chic-ly.

My most recent reading:

I went on a Gillian Flynn binge reading Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, The Grownup, and Dark Places. I really enjoyed all of them and would rate them with 5 stars.

I am currently reading Little Heaven by Nick Cutter, rather gory thriller but I can't put it down. Maybe 4 stars.

Last week I read The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison. I liked it a lot and give it 5 stars.

I very recently read The Great Alone, it was fabulous!

Just reread "To Kill A Mockingbird" (re-read it every 4-5 years), and have

started, "Trevor Noah...Born a Crime".

I've just finished re-reading Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage the true story of Ernest Shackleton's intended Antarctic trip where his group was going to sail to Antarctica, travel by dog sled across the entire continent, and sail away from the other side. However his ship got trapped in the ice before he ever reached land, and was carried along in the slowly moving pack for months, before being crushed by the ice. He and his men then lived on an ice floe for about another year, until the ice broke up enough that they could take their small wooden life boats and sail to some remote, uncharted island.

Reading page after page of frostbite, and snow and ice and wind and the privations they faced made coping with the heat and humidity of Virginia a little easier.

I've since started reading "Bear Town" which is fiction about a small remote northern town that is crazed and driven by ice hockey. So far it has been slow going but it has one of the same benefits and the Shackleton book. Ice. Lots of ice.

Bob, I LOVE Endurance (edited to add text after mistakenly posting before it was complete). I listened to it twice as an audiobook and found it simply amazing what he and his men went through.

Right now, I'm reading Catherine the Great : Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie. She was an amazing person and the book is wonderful. My sister just finished Shoes for Anthony by Emma Kennedy which takes place in Wales during WW II. She really enjoyed it, so I will read it next.

I started to read another of Mukasonga's books that I mentioned in my previous post. It was way too dark and I don't think I will finish it.

Infrequent participant here. I stopped in to find ideas for a next book to read & found two that look interesting Red Daughter & Barefoot Woman. Thought I should contribute. Resistance Women by Jennifer Chiaverini. The main character, Mildred, was a real person & much of it was her life in Germany during the rise of the Nazis. Some chilling parallels to today. I rate it 4 stars.

guilty pleasure is Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series. Just finished his latest The New Girl. It did not follow his usual formula, but does make heavy use of current events. Always enjoy his books.

I am reading the Stillhouse Lake series by Rachel Caine.

It's about a woman who unbeknownst to her was married to a serial killer. In the books she is fighting for her and her children's lives and reputations. She is being stalked and doxed by both online and real life people who refuse to believe she wasn't an accessory to her husbands crimes.

I am also reading Endurance......Years Gone By by Lori Oleson.

It's a collection of stories of great horses and riders from the 70's, 80's and 90's in the sport of endurance riding in the US. The early day although certainly not the earliest. But definitely a window of time when the sport grew tremendously. My instructor and her two most successful horses are prominent in the book. No surprise to me since I have yet to pick up anything on endurance without her name in there somewhere. One of our school horses is a cousin to one of those exceptional animals.

PS I also loved The Art of Racing in the Rain.

> Bob, I LOVE Endurance (edited to add text after mistakenly
posting before it was complete). I listened to it twice as an
audiobook and found it simply amazing what he and his men went through.

I agree. If it were a work of fiction I'd find it entirely too far-fetched to be believable, but given that it is a factual account supported by photographic evidence it is indeed amazing. I recently saw a PBS show where someone was trying to duplicate the second-last part of the journey where Shackleton and 5 others sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island, 800 miles away, in a 22 foot boat, across what are widely considered to be the roughest seas anywhere in the world. The modern adventurer, IIRC, had to call his support ship because he was in danger of sinking.

I'm reading the Hannah Swensen series by Joanne Fluke...talk about recipes...OMGOSH...I wanna bake something! really good reads and some of her books have been made into movies for the Hallmark Channel!

Finished The Life of Pi. I'm giving it 2 stars. And have started The Lost World (Conan Doyle). Not getting much reading done because of yard cleanup after a bad storm on Saturday. Exhausted & manage to only read a page or two before dropping off. Then, the next night, I have to re-read those couple of pages to remember where I'm at! Only me to do the clean-up because DH is recouping from surgery.

Being a Michael Connelly and Jeffery Deaver fan, I have had to branch out since I have read most of their books. I found A Death to Record by Rebecca Tope a British author writing about a murder on a dairy farm in the Cotswolds that kept me guessing until the end.

Also, enjoyed The House on Oyster Creek by Heidi Jon Schmidt which was set on Cape Cod. It turned out to be a love story with a different ending. Beautiful prose.

I will try to find other works by these two at my library.

Butter Down the Well by Robert Collins. It's about his life as a young boy in 1930's in Saskatchewan.

Finished Paper Son and can't recommend it. Way too much backstory about Chinese in The South. Rozan always has 'a cause', which I enjoy, but I doubt this will be a best seller in Mississippi, where the story takes place. (Meth labs, Good Ole Boy cops, 'politics'.)

I like "light" reading. "A Street Cat Named Bob", was 5 stars.

I'm starting "Alita"....before I see the movie.

I ended up ditching "We Must be Brave" a little over half way through, had a few fairly good chapters, but mostly way too boring for my taste. So no stars.

Next read "Sacred Ground" by Barbara Wood. Very good, 5 stars.

Currently almost halfway into "The Summer Guests" by Mary Alice Monroe. Enjoying it very much so far.

I've never belonged to a book club, so have no way to form an opinion of whether a book would be good for a group discussion or not.

Rusty

I just completed Under the Scarlet Sky and also enjoyed it very much. The author vividly narrates the exploits of a young Italian man in occupied northern Italy during WWII. It is a tragic and inspiring story. Not only is it about war but also a coming of age story.

I was not impressed with Ida and Martha. I picked it up because the two main characters were in their early 70's, unusual for most books. I was looking for something of senior friendships. The author touched on every current societal issues, then added a predictable ending. I am starting Last Boat Out of Shanghai, the story of the Chinese who fled Mao's revolution.

I'm into Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. I highly recommend this. Gottlieb is a therapist -- following a career in print and TV writing -- even some years of med school at thirty-plus. It's part commentary on her work with patients and part diary, detailing her own therapy following a romantic breakup she experiences in her forties.

I just finished The Secret History. I'll give it 4 stars, not for book group. For about the first 100 pages, I was, why am I reading this? But then it got good and interesting and compelling...psychological thriller. So many scenes I could picture just how Alfred Hitchcock would've done it if he were around.

Up next, another from the Great American Read: Anne of Green Gables.

I'm looking forward to the next book group book...Killers of the Flower Moon nonfiction about the creation of the FBI.

I finished the two "Secret Diary of Hendrick Groen" novels mentioned above. Amusing, a bit thought provoking, I wonder if we will get another in a few years. I recently finished Suzy Becker's "I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse" -- her account of discovering she had a brain tumor, the early days after the operation, and what stretched into months of recovery. Filling in the gaps this month has been a cozy mystery series by Ann Ross. Her heroine, Miss Julia, is a sort of 'steel magnolia' and charmingly blind to her own foibles.

On the couch next to me is a treat with a rather impressive subtitle: "BakeWise: the Hows and Whys of Successful Baking With over 200 Magnificent Recipes". I've read bits of cookery writing by Shirley Corriher before, am hoping this book lives up to its name.

Oh Nickel! I have read a few of the Miss Julia stories and I love them. The first was the best, imo, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind. A friend gave me a bunch of them from a book sale and I keep them at our summer cottage and our teenage granddaughters have found them and enjoyed them too :)

Just finished Lisa See’s new book “Island of Sea Women.” 5 stars! Excellent

Starting “Shepherd’s Hut.” Survival in the Australian outback. Winton. It’s written in slangy Australian vernacular which is read easily enough but different from most current popular fiction. I like survival stories.

Socks, I also loved The Island of Sea Women. I definitely agree with 5 stars.

For interested readers - although the book is fiction, it is based on the true incredible lives of women who lived and worked in this unique society. Amazing!

I just finished Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross, written in Germany in 1936. It takes place in a small town in Germany, after Hitler's rise to power but before the beginning of the war, and concerns prisoners who have escaped from a concentration camp. None of the prisoners are Jewish, but the foreshadowing of what is to come is remarkably prescient.

I've now started Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room, about a woman serving a life sentence in a California prison. It was a Booker Prize finalist last year. I very much enjoyed her previous novel The Flamethrowers.

Stacey—I totally agree. It also brings attention to a historical tragedy, not well known. It’s an outstanding book, unforgettable. Well researched too.

Finished reading the above and now I am reading In The Middle Are the Horsemen by Tik Maynard. I can't put it down. It is the story of his experience as a working student.
The son of prominent Canadian equestrians, Maynard decided to spend the next year as a “working student.” In the horse industry, working students aspire to become professional riders or trainers, and willingly trade labor for hands–on education. Here Maynard chronicles his experiences–good and bad–and we follow along as one year becomes three, what began as a casual adventure gradually transforms, and a life's purpose comes sharply into focus.

I am about to start The Old Man by Thomas Perry.

I just zipped through White Rose Black Forest, I couldn't put it down! https://www.eoindempseybooks.com/  It is a Nazi story based on true events. My first from author Eoin Dempsey but not my last.