I had to fly back home for a month, I would have gone crazy without them.

Hopefully I can crack open something a little more cerebral this week.

The author is a Pulitzer winner for her news reporting, this is her first book, has won all sorts of awards for it.
I got hooked on the first page.
The story follows several people who live in a shanty slum next to Mumbai (Bombay) airport in India, and reveals a lot about how people make a living from the castoffs, litter of the rich in the area.
Slum dwellers give a whole new meaning to the idea of "hustling" to make a few pennies.
Yet the book is not a downer, and reveals much beauty and intelligence of the likable characters.

Manju Waghekar (Asha's daughter), the only college educated girl in the slum, has a Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/manjusha.waghekar

so she made it thru college....

Audustus, by John Williams and some Studs Terkel.

I've been looking, but nothing's caught my eye. I'll read about anything, except detective novels. I hate em. Which cuts alot of books out. Seems like alotta new fiction is just that.

You know what I love? A good apocalypse type book. The world after it ends type stuff. I tear thru em. I may have to just go back & reread something.

to compare Parker's style from early on to later.

Whole descriptive paragraphs...lots of them...instead of a story told primarily through dialogue.

Fifth Camel Club book. Just started last night, so no reaction yet other than "starts with a bang" which is pretty non-specific for Baldacci Books.

Listening: _The Naming_ by Alison Croggon. Fantasy, Pellinor. I hadn't run in to or even heard of these four before running into them on the library Overdrive site.

2013: 49 and counting

in 3229AD human civilization is scattered among the planets, moons and asteroids of the solar system. Billions of lives depend upon the technology derived from the breakthroughs of the greatest physicist of the day,Arthur Holywelkin, but in the last years of his life devoted himself to building a strange, beautiful and complex musical instrument called The Orchestra.......
during the last two weeks I started and discarded two books that seemed to have nothing to offer at this time . I will probably return to one of them later. I have to be in the mood for non fiction

It's a classic and I haven't read enough of those. Also, recently completed The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.

The Closers, Echo Park, and The Overlook.

The Overlook appears to be a very short book so I could get started on 9 Dragons by the end of the week.

This is her third novel set in Santa Fe, NM. The main character is Lucy Newroe, a reporter for a fictitious local paper, who also volunteers as an EMT.

I can overlook that the author has Santa Fe supporting two newspapers, but I'm going a little crazy with the amount of snow she has on the ground. On the very first page she has the Plaza in Santa Fe packed with snow "as it had been since the end of October." It's now December 20 in the novel. Except that at this high altitude, with daily sunshine, snow simply does not linger. Well, it can linger if the sun doesn't reach it. One side of my back yard will keep snow if the air temperature stays below 40 degrees, because the sun does not reach there. But the Plaza in downtown Santa Fe? Simply not possible. Even if we got a big snow dump and it stayed relatively cold, the sunshine and dry air guarantees the melt. If nothing else, there would be serious snow removal from the Plaza.

She even has knee-deep drifts elsewhere, which again, just does not happen here. If we get three inches of snow it's a lot. Well, okay, I just did a fast Google search and this city has gotten a couple of feet of snow on a few occasions, but trust me, it just does not linger.

I really hate it when writers violate local weather norms. Stephen King did it in "The Stand" in which he had Boulder, Colorado, completely snowed in all winter. Really? I've lived there. They might get three feet of snow all at once, but within 24-48 hours it will warm up to 60 degrees and the snow will be completely gone.