It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? a place to meet and share what you have been and are about to be reading over the week. It’s a great post to organize yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit, comment, and add to your groaning TBR pile! So welcome in everyone. This meme started on J Kaye’s blog and then was hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at The Book Date.
Jen Vincent, Teach Mentor Texts, and Kellee of Unleashing Readers decided to give It’s Monday! a kid-lit focus. If you read and review books in children’s literature – picture books, chapter books, middle-grade novels, young adult novels, or anything in those genres – join them.
Personal:
- I had a brain fart last Monday and showed up to my eye Dr appointment three weeks early. They were pretty amused by it. I, on the other hand, was very embarrassed by it.
- BK had an eye Dr appointment (same place) on Friday. Because he has type 2 diabetes, they had to dilate his eyes, and guess who got to drive home? Me. I felt bad because he wasn’t happy about it, and his eyes took a while to return to normal.
- We did yard work over the weekend. I am looking to get the flower garden area of my house (in the very back) back to what it was when we moved in. Unfortunately, I hadn’t worked there in almost four years, and it was a mess. We did make a dent, but there is so much to do. We also trimmed the bushes back in the front and discussed what to use for mulch next year.
- And for my big news. We got another kitten, and this will be number seven. I didn’t want to take her because I didn’t want another cat to care for. But she is young (I think she’s around six weeks old), and the person was going to take her to a kill shelter. Her original owner (not who we got her from) would dump her in the country (which is why the person we got her from had her). She is a fluffy little thing and extremely confident. She’s going to the vet on Friday to get checked out (she is skin and bones), get tested for FIV and Feline PanLuekemia, get her hearing tested (she is white and has blue eyes), and start her kitten shots. Her name is Yuki. Yuki is Japanese for snow and is perfect for her.
Reading
- My reading has gotten off track. I am stuck on the book I am reading now. But, I am hoping to have the book finished tonight, with the review written and published tomorrow.
- My NetGalley ARC shelf is off the rails again. But I have 4 ARCs that I need to read and review that will come off. When I do that, I will be under 60 again.
What I am Reading Now:
This is a science-fiction novel, originally published in Italian.
“17 Planets is an entertaining and intelligent sci-fi odyssey with a wide appeal. A.R. Alexander has written a book with a gripping plot, a strong heroine, and a fascinating dynamic between heroine and hero.”
Editorial review from THE BOOK REVIEW DIRECTORY
Search for 17 planets on bookreviewdirectory dot com
A woman with an extraordinary mind and a dark past demanding revenge. 17 planets divided into four factions whose leaders forgot their inhabitants all arrived from the same place: Planet Earth. A threat that could turn a tool that saves everyone’s life into the worst imaginable nightmare. Elizabeth, a chameleonic and seductive woman, is the only one who can make a difference, but her uniqueness weighs on her shoulders like the world weighs on Atlas’ shoulders.
These are just some of the ingredients of this novel where action scenes alternate with political ones and the relationship between the many characters, as much as the suffering and the claustrophobic anguish, alternate with the human need for love and loyalty. All seasoned with a drops of eroticism and a hint of humour.
Books I plan on reading later this week:
A sparkling adversaries-to-lovers romcom set at a magazine publisher in Manhattan. When Casey and Alex are forced into proximity, they soon realize falling for each other is just as much of a risk and as it is a reward.
Casey Maitland has always preferred the reliability of numbers, despite growing up the daughter of two artistic souls. Now a twenty-four-year-old finance expert working in Manhattan, Casey wonders if the project manager opening at her company – magazine powerhouse LC Publications – is a sign from the universe to pursue a career with a little more sparkle. That is, until she’s passed over for the job in favor of the board chairman’s son.
Alex Harrison is handsome, Harvard-educated, and enigmatic. Everybody loves him – except for Casey. But when the two are thrown on the same project, they both have something to prove. For Casey, it’s getting tapped for a transfer to the London office and fulfilling her dreams of travelling. For Alex, it’s successfully launching a brand that will impress his distant father.
As work meetings turn into after hours, Casey and Alex are drawn to each other again and again, but neither can avoid the messy secrets and corporate intrigue threatening to tear them apart. What they discover about their workplace might change everything – including the dreams each of them is chasing.
Reality and the supernatural collide when an expert puzzle maker is thrust into an ancient mystery—one with explosive consequences for the fate of humanity—in this suspenseful thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Angelology
“This novel has it all and more. In the nimble, talented hands of Trussoni the pages fly.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci
All the world is a puzzle, and Mike Brink—a celebrated and ingenious puzzle constructor—understands its patterns like no one else. Once a promising Midwestern football star, Brink was transformed by a traumatic brain injury that caused a rare medical condition: acquired savant syndrome. The injury left him with a mental superpower—he can solve puzzles in ways ordinary people can’t. But it also left him deeply isolated, unable to fully connect with other people.
Everything changes after Brink meets Jess Price, a woman serving thirty years in prison for murder who hasn’t spoken a word since her arrest five years before. When Price draws a perplexing puzzle, her psychiatrist believes it will explain her crime and calls Brink to solve it. What begins as a desire to crack an alluring cipher quickly morphs into an obsession with Price herself. She soon reveals that there is something more urgent, and more dangerous, behind her silence, thrusting Brink into a hunt for the truth.
The quest takes Brink through a series of interlocking enigmas, but the heart of the mystery is the God Puzzle, a cryptic ancient prayer circle created by the thirteenth-century Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia. As Brink navigates a maze of clues, and his emotional entanglement with Price becomes more intense, he realizes that there are powerful forces at work that he cannot escape.
Ranging from an upstate New York women’s prison to nineteenth-century Prague to the secret rooms of the Pierpont Morgan Library, The Puzzle Master is a tantalizing, addictive thriller in which humankind, technology, and the future of the universe itself are at stake.
