Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Chasing Fire - DNF

By:  Nora Roberts
Rated:  DNF
From Library
Format:  Book

Almost forgot to list this one.  I got about 30 pages into it and started asking myself why I was bothering to read it.  It just seemed so trite.  A Cut and Paste job from 1000 books she has written before. :(

Guess it's time to check out Mary Balogh out and see if she has another book out.  Joan Wolf has, of all things, a christian themed romance out.  I guess she is writing what publishers are putting out now days.  Still I like her well enough to check it out in spite of my aversion to christian themed books.  Most of them are so badly written.

I really need a romance book fix!

The number-one New York Times-bestselling author delves into the world of elite firefighters who thrive on danger and adrenaline-men and women who wouldn't know how to live life if it wasn't on the edge.

There's little as thrilling as firefighting-at least to Rowan Tripp. The Missoula smoke jumpers are in Rowan's blood: her father is a legend. She's been fighting fires since her eighteenth birthday. At this point, returning to the wilds of Montana for the season feels like coming home-even with reminders of the partner she lost last season still lingering.

Fortunately, this year's rookie crop is one of the strongest ever-and Gulliver Curry's one of the best. He's also a walking contradiction, a hotshot firefighter with a big vocabulary and a winter job at a kids' arcade.

Everything is thrown off balance when a dark presence lashes out against Rowan, looking to blame someone for last year's tragedy. Rowan knows she can't complicate things with Gull-any distractions in the air or on the ground could mean the end-but if she doesn't find someone she can lean on, she may not make it through the summer.

35. DOC

By:  Mary Doria Russell
Rated 5 Stars
From:  Library
Format:  Book

This book changed by whole conception of Doc. Holliday.  Not that I really knew all that much about him since Western history and books written about the west are really not my thing.  Lonesome Dove excepted of course.  I have visited Tombstone and with the exception of the cemetery wasn't much impressed.  It looked like a movie set and the Erps and Doc. Holliday were pretty much unreal made in Hollywood on some B movie lot.

And now this book . This is a sad book.  Doc Holliday was a sad, lonely and tragic figure and sort of makes the point with me that how ones life turns out pretty much depends on the spin of the wheel of life.  Had he not become ill he would have probably lived a long, happy and uneventful life in Georgia married to the girl he loved and no one would have ever heard of him.

Publishers Summary:

The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House.

Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives open to him, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally; he is also living with Mária Katarina Harony, a high-strung Hungarian whore with dazzling turquoise eyes, who can quote Latin classics right back at him. Kate makes it her business to find Doc the high-stakes poker games that will support them both in high style. It is Kate who insists that the couple travel to Dodge City, because “that’s where the money is.”

And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp really begins—before Wyatt Earp is the prototype of the square-jawed, fearless lawman; before Doc Holliday is the quintessential frontier gambler; before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology—when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety.

Authentic, moving, and witty, Mary Doria Russell’s fifth novel redefines these two towering figures of the American West and brings to life an extraordinary cast of historical characters, including Holliday’s unforgettable companion, Kate. First and last, however, Doc is John Henry Holliday’s story, written with compassion, humor, and respect by one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.