Book Haul

It's been a while since I've let you know what I've got in the book pipeline from Curled Up With a Good Book, so I thought I would share what's currently on my "To Read" list. All of these books were free. And all of them are in pristine hardcover (or very nice trade paperback) so they'll sit nicely on my shelves too.

The first book is Wings of Fire, a fantasy anthology of dragon stories. Look at the beautiful cover! Edited by Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon, this book features some of the best fantasy authors out there, from George R.R. Martin (shouldn't you be finishing the next Ice & Fire book????), Charles de Lint, Michael Swanwick (one of my favourites), and Ursula K. Le Guin.

None of the stories are new (some of the authors, like Anne McCaffrey and Roger Zelazny, are dead!), but they all look like they will be interesting.

Hell, I think I was just taken in by the cover. I didn't even realize this was a reprint anthology. I still have faith that it will be entrancing.

The second book on my stack is 61 Hours, by Lee Child. It's another "Reacher" novel, but since I'm not familiar with the series at all, that doesn't mean anything to me (and maybe not even to you).

The main character's name is Jack Reacher, and it's a suspense novel of some kind. What attracted me to this book?

Child has appeared a couple of times on the hilarious Fox News late-night show Red Eye, and he is a great interview. Funny and engaging, he pretty much sold me on the book. Let's hope it lives up to all of that. It sounds like it will, though. And it takes place in my old neck of the woods! Well, kind of. South Dakota instead of Iowa. And a snowbound South Dakota, no less. The description sounds exciting.

The third book is from one of my favourite suspense writers, Tess Gerritsen (who I've mentioned a few times on this blog). Her new Jane Rizzoli/Maura Isles novel is Ice Cold, and it looks like Gerritsen's leaving the warm (or, I guess, sometimes cold) confines of Boston to head out west. Maura Isles, at a conference in Wyoming, goes on an impromptu ski trip with her colleagues when their SUV breaks down. They stumble upon an abandoned village in the Wyoming wilds. (I must be heating up this summer, as my tastes in reading seem to have a cold bent to them).

I do go into all of the books I'm going to review with an open mind, but Gerritsen has never disappointed me, and I don't expect her to this time, either. Hopefully the Rizzoli/Isles TV series that's coming on to TNT will be shown up here in Canada too!

Finally, we have Lisa Gardner's latest thriller, Live to Tell. I fully admit that I wasn't that impressed with The Neighbor, but I was impressed enough (and heard enough good things about Gardner from various "unbiased" sources) that I'm willing to give her another try.

This is another Detective D.D. Warren novel, and I hope she's given a bit more character in this one than the last one. It looks very intricate, almost as much as The Neighbor was. We'll see whether it holds up better than the other one.

Before I get to all of that, though, I have a library book I have to get through, which I wasn't expecting to be ready quite this soon. I've loved Connie Willis' short stories every time I read them, but she hasn't written a novel since 2002. I loved her book To Say Nothing of the Dog, a time travel Victorian romp.

Her latest is Blackout (that's the American cover, and apparently I have the British cover, which I like a lot more), and it's another time travel book, though this one is definitely not a comedy of manners (or at least not so far). Again, the subject is World War II (the time travellers in Dog were trying to get to Coventry in World War II), but this one seems to be a bit darker, a study of ordinary heroism as things are going wrong in the time travel laboratories of 2060 Oxford.

I wonder if this is the same "world" as To Say Nothing of the Dog? Late 21st century time travel is very similar. I don't remember much of the first book, so I don't know if I'll be able to recognize whether or not it's the same world.

Either way, I know the book will have Willis' trademark wit and excellent storytelling.

I'm greatly looking forward to them all!