It feels like I'm living in the Dark Ages (in the darkest sense) but this time around with timely news casts, blogs, newspapers, twitters, communal online sharing, television, radio, and more to provide endless recaps and spotlights shining on the best but mostly the worst of human doings. Is the world, are people worse now more than ever? Does it just feel that way because it's communicated so much? What would have happened to western civilization if in the Middle Ages they'd gotten daily, hourly blow by blow accounts of the derranged, despotic, dreadful accounts of the grand and minutia of the world they lived in?
The library has been my friend, and yes I'm nearly in the black now... but there's this one very reasonable hardcover I know I'd wind up overdue and fined over.
Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri mystery series; Rebecca Cantrell's 'Trace of Smoke'; Many Lawrence Block; Wallander Series: Hening Menkel; "The Bean Trees": Barbara Kingsolver; "About a Boy": Nick Hornby; "Fudoki": Kij Johnson "Summer of the Big Bacchi": Naomi Hirahara "Gasa-Gasa Girl": Naomi Hirahara "Liar's Club": Mary Karr; "The Talisman": Steven King, Peter Straub; "The Alienist": Caleb Carr; All of Donna Leon's Inspector Guido Brunetti; "Smilla's Sense of Snow": Peter Hoeg; All of Raymond Chandler; "The Kite Runner": Khaled Hosseini; "Crescent": Diana Abu-Jaber; "The Funny Little Woman": Arlene Mosel, Blair Lent; All of Cara Black's Ami Leduc series; "Death of a Red Heroine": Qiu Xiaolong "When Red is Black": Qiu Xiaolong; "In Our Strange Gardens": Michel Quint; "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress": Dai Sijie; "When the Emperor Was Divine": Julie Otsuka; "Wind in the Willows": Kenneth Grahame, Ernest H. Shepard (Illustrator); "Harriet the Spy": Louise Fitzhugh; The Amelia Badelia stories; All Maurice Sendak; "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbor's Baby": Ludmilla Petrushevskaya