It’s Monday! What are you reading?

Hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Death Masks by Jim Butcher-  This is book five of the Dresden Files. In this one professional wizard Harry Dresden is challenged to a duel by a vampire. Now he just has to survive long enough to fight it. The Shroud of Turin has been stolen and brought to Chicago and Harry’s been hired to find it.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield-  The author was a teenager in the 1980s when every girl he knew was crazy about Duran Duran. He has written a series of personal essays about growing up. Each of them are based on a song from the 1980s. I grew up then and I had never heard of most of these songs. Obviously, I was terribly out of it.

32 Candles by Ernessa T. Carter-  Davidia Jones was a poor, abused girl in Mississippi. She had a crush on the most popular boy in school. She was convinced that her life would turn out just like a Molly Ringwald movie where he would learn to love her. Instead his sisters played a prank on her and she ran away. Fifteen years later she is a successful club singer in LA when her old crush shows up. He doesn’t recognize her and asks her out.

I hate, hate, hate plots based on mistaken identity. Luckily it ends quickly here.  The book deals with issues of revenge and letting the past go once her crush and his family realize the truth.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher- This is the start of a YA series. In the future all the undesirables have been put in a self-contained prison called Incarceron. The rest of the world has purposely regressed their technology and forbidden innovation. Claudia is supposed to marry the prince soon. Her father is the Warden of Incarceron. She finds a key that lets her communicate with a prisoner named Finn who is trying to escape.

I liked this book but it gave me Fight the Power dreams. I led revolutions all night.

The Manny by Holly Peterson -  I found this at Goodwill so I had to read it. It is typical chick-lit.  A network tv news producer has three kids and a lawyer husband. They don’t have any time for their kids and their nine year old son is not coping. She hires a man to interact with him on afternoons and he ends up pointing out the absurdity of her life.

Hunger by Jackie Morse Kessler-  This is a YA novel in which a seventeen year old anorexic girl is chosen to become Famine, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It is a short book that gets into the self hate involved in eating disorders.

The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva-  This book ten of the Gabriel Allon series. He is an Israeli agent who works as an art restorer as a cover. By this point in the series he is trying to retire.  A Rembrandt is stolen from a restorer and the gallery owner asks him to find it. This leads to a complex story involving stolen Jewish art, Swiss bankers, and the Iranian nuclear missle program.   I like this series. It isn’t necessary to have read them all but it adds some background.

Where am I reading? – Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Fantasy Island x 2, New York, Switzerland