This past Sunday I went to the local Rotary Club Book Sale. I didn't buy too many but I figure I should do an update on those purchases plus any others I did since my last update. Great deal at the book sale. I bought 11 and only paid $10.00. Anyway, some new books for you to check out.
Latest Purchases
"“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula K. Le Guin's.” —Grace Paley
Late in the Day , Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin’s latest give voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological. As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. The poems are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Some Thoughts on Form, Free Form, Free Verse.”"I particularly liked this poem so far.
"In Ashland
Across the creek stood a tall complex screen
of walnut and honey-locust branch and leaf.
In a soft autumn sunrise without wind
my daughter in meditation on the deck
above the quietly loquacious creek
observed a multitude of small
yellow birds among the many leaves
coming and going quick as quick
into sight and out of sight again.
She said to me, they were
like thoughts moving in a mind,
the little birds among the many leaves."
Just lovely. I can picture it.
"When Mrs. Cobb heard unearthly noises in the antique-filled farmhouse, she called Jim Qwilleran for help. But he was too late. It looked as if his kindly ex-housekeeper had been frightened to death--but by whom? Or what? Now Qwilleran's moved into the historic farmhouse with his two cat companions--and Koko the Siamese is spooked. Is it a figment of feline imagination--or the clue to a murder in Moose County? And does Qwilleran have a ghost of a chance of solving this haunting mystery?"
"Julius Caesar gathers his legions in an alternate universe in order to defeat the devil and conquer hell"
"One night, the island of Guernsey convulsed. As shock followed shock, the landscape tilted violently in defiance of gravity. When dawn came and the quakes had stilled to tremblings, Matthew Cotter gazed out in disbelief at the pile of rubble that had been his home. The greenhouses which had provided his livelihood were a lake of shattered glass, the tomato plants a crush of drowned vegetation spotted and splodged with red.
Wandering in a daze of bewilderment through the devastation, he came to the coast, looked out towards the sea ...
There was no sea: simply a sunken alien land, now drying in the early summer sun.
Gradually, a handful of isolated survivors drifted together. But where were the rescue missions from the mainland? How far did the destruction actually extend?
For Matthew, whose beloved daughter Jane had recently moved to England, finding the answer was all he had left to live for."
"A fiendishly clever mystery in which Dr. Siri and his friends investigate three interlocking murders and the ungodly motives behind them.
Laos, 1979: Retired coroner Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, have never been able to turn away a misfit. As a result, they share their small Vientiane house with an assortment of homeless people, mendicants, and oddballs. One of these oddballs is Noo, a Buddhist monk, who rides out on his bicycle one day and never comes back, leaving only a cryptic note in the refrigerator: a plea to help a fellow monk escape across the Mekong River to Thailand.
Naturally, Siri can't turn down the adventure, and soon he and his friends find themselves running afoul of Laos secret service officers and famous spiritualists. Buddhism is a powerful influence on both morals and politics in Southeast Asia. In order to exonerate an innocent man, they will have to figure out who is cloaking terrible misdeeds in religiosity."
"Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his bolt hole in Hobart. It's the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch - and perhaps the girl - that brings him undone. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation. But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules - even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home. Port Vila Blues is Wyatt's fifth heist. It's faster than ever, racing towards the inevitable confrontation on a clifftop above the deceptively calm waters of Port Vila Bay."
"A bitterly ironic story about an ineffectual schoolmaster whose mathematical genius leads him to construct a machine which will demagnetize iron at a distance. He is led by unfortunate circumstance to use the machine in a hopeless attempt to blackmail England into initiating a program of disarmament."
"Robert Broke runs a small gallery on the Via de Benci and is an authority on Etruscan terracotta. A man who keeps himself to himself, he is the last person to become mixed up in anything risky. But when two men arrive in Florence, Broke's world turns upside down as he becomes involved in a ring of spies, the mafiosi and fraud involving Etruscan antiques. When he finds himself in prison on a charge of manslaughter, the net appears to be closing in rapidly, and Broke must fight for his innocence and his life."
"This story is about a unhappily married young couple. The husband is a struggling writer and after some arguments decides to kill his wife in his imagination (pushing her down the stairs, etc.) She, on the other hand, tells him that she is going to leave for a period of time and for him not to contact her. She leaves and decides to have an affair and just assumes a different name with her lover and no one know of her whereabouts...Her family and friends think that he has killed her (he buries an old carpet in the woods pretending that she is in it and the neighbor sees him). The police gets involved and he plays along pretending to be guilty.. well I don't want to give the ending away..."
"A West and Bailey mystery. Pip Carlton is a high-street pharmacist - a good son and a devoted husband, cherished by his loyal customers. He is distraught when, very suddenly, his wife Margaret dies. But not everyone believes that she simply slipped away."
"When Lolo Long's niece Jaya begins receiving death threats, Tribal Police Chief Long calls on Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire along with Henry Standing Bear as lethal backup. Jaya Longshot Long is the phenom of the Lame Deer Lady Stars High School basketball team and is following in the steps of her older sister, who disappeared a year previously, a victim of the scourge of missing Native Woman in Indian Country. Lolo hopes that having Longmire involved might draw some public attention to the girl's plight, but with this maneuver she also inadvertently places the good sheriff in a one-on-one with the deadliest adversary he has ever faced in both this world and the next."
"Confident that the inbred family of cannibals who ravaged the town of Dead River, Maine, ten years before are gone for good, the town's residents are ill-prepared for the return of the flesh-eating monsters."
"One young woman faces down an all-powerful corporation in this “profound…resonant” (NPR), all-too-near future science fiction debut that reads like a refreshing take on Ready Player One , with a heavy dose of Black Mirror .
Ready Player One meets Cyberpunk 2077 in this eerily familiar future.
“Twenty minutes to power curfew, and my kill counter’s stalled at eight hundred eighty-seven while I’ve been standing here like an idiot. My health bar is flashing ominously, but I’m down to four heal patches, and I have to be smart.”
New Liberty City, 2134.
Two corporations have replaced the US, splitting the country’s remaining forty-five states (five have been submerged under the ocean) between Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf. There are nine supercities within the continental US, and New Liberty City is the only amalgamated city split between the two megacorps, and thus at a perpetual state of civil war as the feeds broadcast the atrocities committed by each side.
Here, Mallory streams Stellaxis’s wargame, SecOps on Best Life, spending more time jacked in than in the world just to eke out a hardscrabble living from tips. When a chance encounter with one of the game’s rare super-soldiers leads to a side job for Mal—looking to link an actual missing girl to one of the SecOps characters. Mal’s sudden burst in online fame rivals her deepening fear of what she is uncovering about Best Life’s developer, and puts her in the kind of danger she’s only experienced through her avatar."
Whew... So there you go. A few reading ideas for you. Check them out.
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