67. A Rather Lovely Inheritance

By C. A. Belmont
Rated 4 Stars
From: Library

I was in need of a light and easy read and this book was just the thing. Light, fun, and fluffy. The plot doesn't take too much scrutiny but if you can suspend your disbelief and just go along for the ride it is a pleasant way to spend a day.

FROM AMAZON: Penny Nichols, finds herself an heiress after her great aunt Penelope dies. Penny flies to London for the reading of Penelope's will and is met by her dashing cousin Jeremy, a barrister. Jeremy receives Penelope's luxurious French villa, while Penny is given her London flat and the contents of the villa's garage. Although their feckless cousin Rollo is well provided for, too, he is envious of his cousins' inheritances and drops a bombshell: Jeremy might not be a blood relation. The revelation sends Jeremy into a depressive funk, causing him to withdraw from Penny, who becomes determined to discover the truth. As she starts to dig into the family's history, the mystery takes her back several generations, and she realizes the connections among them all are more complex than she ever could have imagined. An entertaining yarn with family drama and intrigue aplenty

66. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

By Paul Theroux
Rated 4 stars
From Library


This book get a 5 star review at amazon and is breathlessly reviewed on the site:


Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: Way back in the dark pre-Internet, limited-air-travel world of 1975, the way to get from Europe to Asia was by train. A young and ambitious writer named Paul Theroux made his literary mark by taking the 28,000-mile intercontinental journey via rail from London to Tokyo and back home again. His book, The Great Railway Bazaar, became a travel-lit classic. Thirty years later, an older, wiser, and even less sanguine Theroux decided to retrace his steps. The result is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, a fascinating account of the places you vaguely knew existed (Tbilisi), probably won't ever go to (Bangalore), but definitely should know something about (Mandalay). Get on board Theroux's fast-moving travelogue, which features some of the most astute commentary on our distorted notions of time, space, and each other in the age of jet speed, broadband connections, and cultural extinction. --Lauren Nemroff --

I am finding parts of this book beautifully written and then again parts of it are a little hard going for me. I just finished reading a 107 word sentence that shifted focus several times and IMO should have been several paragraphs if not chapters. Doesn't this man have an editor? But it is good book. Right now the author is wandering around the Republic of Georgia and you can't get much more topical than that.

65. Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige

By Kathleen Gilles Seidel
Rated 3 1/2 Stars
From Library

I have been a KGS fan for a long, long time. She wrote great, insightful, character driven romance novels. I own her entire romance back list and they have a permanent place on my keeper shelves.

However, she has moved on from the romance genre and started writing more main stream novels. I think they call it women's literature or some such thing. Her first one, An Uncommon Degree of Popularity was not much to get excited over. Readable, but only just. This one is a little better. Maybe by the next one she will have a handle on this new direction she wants to go in. Me, I just wish she would go back to romance where she really stood out.

Being the mother of the groom isn't quite a snap for divorced nurse Darcy Van Aiken in this gently humorous look at how an upcoming wedding upsets the delicate balance of family relationships. Darcy, a busy mother of three, gets along with ex-husband Mike, likes her oldest son Jeremy's bride-to-be and discovers an unexpected affinity for the bride's wealthy but down-to-earth mother. There's just one flaw in the ointment: Mike's new girlfriend, clothing designer Claudia Postlewaite, is determined use the wedding as a means to boost her professional and social standing. From the moment Claudia begins her campaign and cold-shoulders Darcy, there's trouble afoot, but instead of letting the book turn into a comic tug-of-war, Seidel (A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity) reveals the traps people-and especially parents-set for themselves in their marriages and lives. The good (Darcy) vs. evil (Claudia) battle here is light, digestible and full of chuckle-inducing moments.

64. Lost on Planet China

By J. Maarten Troost
Rated 5 Stars
From: Library


FROM BOOK LIST:

Troost, who entertained readers in The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004) with tales of life on a South Pacific island, now turns his attention to China. Settled in Sacramento, California, with his wife and two sons, Troost gets restless and floats the idea of moving his family to China. His wife is amenable, so he sets off to scout ahead. What he finds in Beijing is a crowded, smoggy city where something as simple as taking a walk can be a dangerous proposition, given the hazardous traffic. Troost visits one burgeoning industrial city after another, finding immense crowds, odd cuisine, piteous beggars, and masseuses offering sexual favors. He also discovers a country that firmly believes that it's on the edge of something big; in spite of a great divide between poor and rich, China is undergoing a tremendous push toward modernity. Troost's crisp, engaging prose invites the reader to experience his adventures right alongside him. At turns meditative, whimsical, humorous, and shocked, Troost is an excellent guide to the vast, multifaceted country that is modern-day China.

63. The Night Villa

By Carol Goodman
Rated: 5 Stars
From: Jani

FROM: AMAZON

In this complex and lyrical literary thriller from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover), University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. A donor has funded both the exact reconstruction of a Roman villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius buried nearby Herculaneum in A.D. 79, and a computer system that can decipher the charred scrolls being excavated from the villa's ruins. Sophie's hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, extracts from the scrolls—the journals of a Roman visiting the villa just before the volcano erupted—shade toward bloodshed and betrayal. The scrolls' oddly modern tone aside, Goodman deftly mixes cultural and religious history, geography, myth, personal memory, dream and even portent without sacrificing narrative drive, against the beautiful backdrop of the locale with its echoes of unimaginable loss.

62. Oxygen

By: Carol Cassella
Rated 4 Stars
From Library

"Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Marie has carefully constructed and constricted her life according to empirical truths, to the science and art of medicine. But when her tried-and-true formula suddenly deserts her during a routine surgery, she must explain the nightmarish operating room disaster and face the resulting malpractice suit. Marie's best friend, colleague and former lover, Dr. Joe Hillary, becomes her closest confidante as she twists through depositions, accusations and a remorseful preoccupation with the mother of the patient in question. As she struggles to salvage her career and reputation, Marie must face hard truths about the path she's chosen, the bridges she's burned and the colleagues and superiors she's mistaken for friends." "A quieter crisis is simultaneously unfolding within Marie's family. Her aging father is losing his sight and approaching an awkward dependency on Marie and her sister, Lori. But Lori has taken a more traditional path than Marie and is busy raising a family. Although Marie has been estranged from her Texas roots for decades, the ultimate responsibility for their father's care is falling on her." "As her carefully structured life begins to collapse, Marie confronts questions of love and betrayal, family bonds and the price of her own choices. Set against the natural splendor of Seattle, and inside the closed vaults of hospital operating rooms, Oxygen climaxes in a final twist that is as heartrending as it is redeeming."--BOOK JACKET.

61. The Unthinkable

By Amanda Ripley
Rate 4 Stars

Nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselves and our families. How will we react? What will it feel like? Will we be heroes or victims? Will our upbringing, our gender, our personality--anything we've ever learned, thought, or dreamed of--ultimately matter? Journalist Amanda Ripley set out to discover what lies beyond fear and speculation, retracing the human response to some of history's epic disasters. She comes back with wisdom about the surprising humanity of crowds, the elegance of the brain's fear circuits, and the stunning inadequacy of many of our evolutionary responses. Most unexpectedly, she discovers the brain's ability to do much, much better, with just a little help.--From publisher description.

60. Give us this Day

By R. F. Delderfield
Rated 5 Stars


I read all three of these books in one gulp and I have to admit that by the time I got about half way through with this one I was started to go a little cross eyed. Had this not been such a good book I would have put it down. But it wouldn't let me do that.

FROM AMAZON:

Weaving the fortunes of the patriarchal Adam Swann and his family into the pageantry of English history in the years following Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897, this sweeping historical novel takes Swann's four sons and daughter into the perilous reaches of government and commerce and the army. As this younger generation of Swanns strives to wed personal dreams to national values, the rumble of the guns of August 1914 signals the end of the world as they and imperial England have known it.

59. Thier's Was the Kingdom

R. F. Delderfield
Rated 5 Stars


This is the second of Delderfield's Adam Swann during the late 1800s and features his children growing into their various interests including the family haulier business established during the British industrialization age 1860+ Adam's wife, Henrietta, had taken the business reins while Adam fought in a war and lost his leg. Now she is attending their 9 children while they choose schools and vocations.

58. God is an Englishman

By R. F. Delderfield
Raed 5 Stars

I cannot imagine how I have managed to not read these books before. If anyone had asked me I would have bet money that I had. But, better late than never I guess.

The story traces the development of a haulage firm that serves all of England, Wales and eventually part of Scotland. While that is the major focus, the family life of the founder of "Swan on Wheels" is very much a part of it. In fact, all the characters involved are well presented with divergent and believable personalities.