nomadreader

narrated by Mozhan Marno The backstory: A few months ago, I listened to Chris Pavone's debut thriller, The Expats , and loved it. When I saw his follow-up was also narrated by Mozhan Marno, it moved to the top of my audiobook queue. The basics: Featuring some of the same characters as The Expats, The Accident  is the story of an anonymous manuscript of the same name. The manuscript implicates many famous people and its release could have devastating consequences. The narrative begins with a publisher receiving a copy of the manuscript. Pavone intersperses key sections of the manuscript itself as the novel's events unfold. My thoughts: As a reader, book blogger and librarian, I'm pretty tuned into the business side of publishing, but The Accident  takes the reader deep into the publishing business, and it was a fascinating subplot. It's actually hard to decide which plots are subplots in this novel. There are many characters and locations, but the narrative never...

The backstory: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry  is one of my book club's November picks. The other is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves  by Karen Joy Fowler , which I LOVED. (My book club meets every other month and reads two books.) The basics: A.J. Fikry is a widowed book store owner on Alice Island, a fictional Martha's Vineyard-like place. His prized possession is a valuable and rare copy of very early Poe poems has been stolen, and he is rather miserable all around. My thoughts: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry  is a story for book lovers. It's filled with recommendations and inside jokes: "He wants Maya to read literary  picture books if such a thing exists. And preferably modern ones. And preferably, preferably feminist ones. Nothing with princesses. It turns out that these works most definitely do exist. He is particularly fond of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Emily Jenkins, Peter Sis , and Lane Smith."   At times the novel gets somewhat meta, and I f...

I've had a Kindle for two months now, and I still love it. There have been huge changes in how and what I read since I got it, and I've been following the news about e-book price wars, delayed e-book releases and the general wackiness of the publishing and retail industry quite closely. A Book Borrower Turned Book Buyer Before I got my Kindle, I rarely bought books. I have the benefit of both the university library and a fantastic local public library system . On the rare occasion I can't get a book through either library source, I would usually wait six months and request it through interlibrary loan or obsessively enter blog contests to win a copy. I've lived in four states in four years, and I'm tired of moving books, so I didn't feel the need to collect them. As a book blogger, I also have the luxury of review copies to entice me, so I do acquire books. Despite not being a book buyer, I adore my Kindle. I don't mind paying for books with the conveni...