![]() ![]() But after Big Foot dies, other bodies start turning up, and Janina and her neighbors are drawn further and further into the mystery of their deaths. But she wouldn’t like to hear herself referred to by that name, which she thinks is “scandalously wrong and unfair.” In fact, she explains, “I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person”-hence “Oddball” and “Big Foot.” Janina spends much of her time studying astrology and, on Fridays, translating passages of Blake with former pupil Dizzy, who comes to visit. Janina narrates Tokarczuk’s ( Flights, 2018) latest creation to appear in English. It’s rural, and remote, and most of the other inhabitants are part-time city-dwellers who only show up in the summer, when the weather is more temperate. They’re having trouble getting hold of the police, and, as Oddball points out, “He’ll be stiff as a board before they get here.” Janina and Oddball-and Big Foot, up till now-live in an out-of-the-way Polish village on the Czech border. When her neighbor Big Foot turns up dead one night, Janina Duszejko and another neighbor, Oddball, rush to his house to lay out the body and properly dress him. A series of deaths mystifies a small Polish village. ![]()
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![]() ![]() We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). ![]() ![]() Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans. ![]() But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. ![]() ![]() ![]() She does not know that the winter will require as much of her as it does her husband, that both her courage and faith will be tested to the breaking point. Meanwhile, on her own at Vancouver Barracks, Sophie chafes under the social restrictions and yearns to travel alongside her husband. ![]() And while the men knew they would face starvation and danger, they cannot escape the sense that some greater, mysterious force threatens their lives. As they map the territory and gather information on the native tribes, whose understanding of the natural world is unlike anything they have ever encountered, Forrester and his men discover the blurred lines between human and wild animal, the living and the dead. The Wolverine River Valley is not only breathtaking and forbidding but also terrifying in ways that the colonel and his men never could have imagined. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn’t return–once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there’s no telling what awaits him. ![]() In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. ![]() An atmospheric, transporting tale of adventure, love, and survival from the bestselling author of The Snow Child, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. ![]() ![]() ![]() To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse." "It wasn't as though the farm hadn't seen death before, and the blowflies didn't discriminate. This was a perfect example of a book being extremely dark and terrifying without being overly graphic for the shock value. Half the fun of this story is, even if you guess at the who, you probably won't guess the why until it's revealed. The writing is excellent, the pacing was quick with fully fleshed characters, and the ending was satisfying without being too cut and dry. I know it's early days, but I have a feeling this will be a top read of 2017 for me I'll go as far as saying if I had read it last year it would have been in my top 2016 reads. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was a small towner, residing in a mofussil town 25 km north of Miami with a population of 30,000, who got obsessed with Chandler, his works and Chandler’s city of love, Los Angeles. He then went on to gorge on all of Raymond Chandler’s works. It was more happenstance that he first came to experience Chandler’s hardboiled artistry whence he chanced upon Robert Altman’s version of “The Long Goodbye” at a student movie night. ![]() ![]() It was not that Connelly read all Of Chandler’s works and took to crime writing both as a reporter or novelist. ![]() It came from Chandler’s own experiences whilst working as a screenwriter for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. It’s interesting because the book came out of sheer disdain for the way the writers were treated in Hollywood at the time. But the coloured light fooled you.” Not surprisingly, the 1949 classic featuring Philip Marlowe turns out to be Michael Connelly’s favourite piece of crime fiction. “It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. “I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it,” Raymond Chandler said about his city of joy in The Little Sister. ![]() ![]() Balancing on the razor's edge between hope and despair, Frey describes the writhing delusions of withdrawal, the constant need of addictions screaming to be fed, and the blinding Fury that overtakes him and makes him want to run. His ordeal inside the clinic is hardly less harrowing. A few more drinks, the doctors tell him, will kill him. ![]() ![]() He is wanted in three states for crimes ranging from DUI and resisting arrest to assaulting an officer, attempted incitement of a riot, and felony mayhem. His body is shot, and his mind is in an almost constant rage of self-hatred and destructiveness. He took everything he could find, and as much as possible: Cocaine, crack cocaine, crystal meth, PCP, glue, and alcohol in quantities so great he blacked out every day for years. When he arrives at a famous clinic in Minnesota, he is nearly dead from a decade of drug and alcohol abuse so spectacular even doctors who have spent their entire careers treating addicts are amazed. ![]() It was revealed that parts of his "memoir" were fabricated.Ī Million Little Pieces is James Frey's scorching account of his descent into the hell of addiction and the brutal journey to recovery. ![]() In 2006, this book and its author became the subject of a highly publicized controversy-after Oprah had selected it as one of her books. ![]() ![]() Titles include A Hidden Magic Companions of the Night Curses, Inc Dragons Bait and more. ![]() “Alys herself is a worthy heroine, with a capricious gift for irony. A complete list of all books by Vivian Vande Velde. “Wicked wit and charm … as well as a gutsy heroine and a sexy dragon. But that doesnt matter-the villagers think she is and have staked her out on a hillside as a sacrifice to the local. But first she’s got to escape, and even if she does, how can one girl possibly take on an entire town alone? Then the dragon arrives-a dragon that could quite possibly be the perfect ally….Īn ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult ReadersĪ New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age 9780152166632 Fifteen-year-old Alys is not a witch. ![]() It’s late, it’s cold, and it’s raining, and Alys can think of only one thing-revenge. ![]() But that doesn’t matter-the villagers think she is and have staked her out on a hillside as a sacrifice to the local dragon. In this fantasy adventure, a teenage girl accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death by dragon finds an unexpected friend-and maybe something more.įifteen-year-old Alys is not a witch. ![]() ![]() "Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. ROBERT LENNON, Judge, Oregon Book Award for Fiction Red Clocks entertains, instructs, and enrages, sometimes in the same sentence-it’s terrific.” Zumas manages multiple voices and points of view with aplomb, in darkly comic prose that is never less than a delight to read. ![]() It’s political without being pedantic, experimental without being obscure. “Ambitious, innovative, and utterly absorbing. … To read this is to feel Leni Zumas knows everything.” “It’s brilliant stuff, and the woods surrounding the witchy herbalist character are both glittering and informed. ![]() ![]() "Leni Zumas’s fierce, well-formed, hilarious, and blisteringly intelligent novel squarely a piece of Trump-era art." "A thoughtful, complicated picture of womanhood-and a fierce argument for individual choice." "A page-turning plot is rendered in sentences as gorgeous & wise as poems." "A lyrical & beautifully observed reflection on women's lives." Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far, Vulture Shortlisted, Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction, 2019īest Books of 2018, New York Public Libraryīest Feminist Fiction of 2018, Autostraddle Shortlisted, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, 2019 Winner, Oregon Book Award for Fiction, 2019 Translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, & Ukrainian. ![]() ![]() What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you? So annoying I couldn't listen for more than 20 min In electric, pitch-perfect prose, Pierson gives us rare insights into not only a subculture but also the deeply human craving for something more that drives it. The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing offers an intimate glimpse of an unusually independent yet supportive community as well as a revealing, unforgettable portrait of its most daring member. But why? Pierson, who rediscovered the joys of motorcycling in the midst of a personal crisis, puts on her helmet and joins Ryan in his element in order to understand his singular desire and discipline, his passion and his obsession. Perhaps the most determined of them is John Ryan, a magnetic, enigmatic man who loves nothing better than breaking records of amazing distance - at no small risk to himself and his health. ![]() In this candid, eloquent, sharply observed book, Melissa Holbrook Pierson introduces us to this strange endeavor and the men and women who live to ride impossibly long distances, eating up road, almost without cease. Long-distance motorcycling is not a pastime but an obsession. ![]() ![]() ![]() Butler Author Robin Miles Narrator (2021) Wild Seed Patternist (Series) Octavia E. ![]() Butler Author Damian Duffy Adapter (2020) Wild Seed Patternist (Series) Octavia E. Butler Author (2012) Parable of the Sower Octavia E. ![]() It is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth heavily affected by climate change and social inequality. Butler Author John Jennings Illustrator (2017) Dawn Xenogenesis Trilogy (Series) Octavia E. Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.20in - 0.90in - 0. Parable of the Sower is a 1993 speculative fiction novel by American writer Octavia E.Butler online from Australias leading online eBook store. The moment Doro meets Anyanwu, he covets her and from the villages of 17th-century Nigeria to 19th-century United States, their courtship becomes a power struggle that echoes through generations, irrevocably changing what it means to be human. Buy the eBook Wild Seed, The Patternist Series by Octavia E. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu - until she meets Doro. She uses her powers to cure her neighbors and birth entire tribes, surrounding herself with kindred who both fear and respect her. She can heal with a bite and transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. ![]() Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. He fears no one - until he meets Anyanwu. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. Doro knows no higher authority than himself. In an "epic, game-changing, moving and brilliant" story of love and hate, two immortals chase each other across continents and centuries, binding their fates together - and changing the destiny of the human race (Viola Davis). ![]() |