Book Chatter

Last week was a crazy work week. I spent much of the week putting out fires and it left me crabby and completely worn out. However, last night I got to go out to dinner and a movie with a girlfriend. We went to a yummy Japanese restaurant and sat at the Teppan grill (where they cook your food right in front of you). I had the salmon and it was soooo good.

After dinner we saw Angels and Demons. It’s based on the book by Dan Brown and is the continuation of The Da Vinci Code but completely stands on its own. It was very good but I was a tad disappointed with some of it. Having not read the book, I don’t know if it was close to the book or not but if anyone saw the movie and read the book, I have a question for you about the ending.

Today the sky is blue but I sure hope it’s not 105 degrees like it was yesterday. On top of the heat, my daughter woke with a fever but is acting perfectly fine. She’s obviously fighting something. Hope she wins the fight so she can go to school tomorrow.

I just finished a novel that I was really looking forward to reading but it sort of fell apart for me. I will be posting that review tomorrow. As for the rest of the day, we are just going to take it easy. Maybe we’ll head out for pizza later but for now, I am just sitting here half dressed catching up on my blog reading and finishing up one other book. Why am I half dressed? Because when your daughter wakes with a fever and is whiny, you end up getting interrupted 2-3 times on your way to the closet. Heck, I still have a towel on my head.

What’s on your plate today?

Friday Finds is hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s my find:

Castle by J. Robert Lennon

The blurb from Powell’s:

A mesmerizing novel about memory, guilt, power, and violence.

“In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county.”

So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon’s gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming, formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his woods that he does not own. What’s more, the name of the owner is blacked out.

Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forest — lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deer — that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with America’s current military misadventures — and Loesch’s secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to what — and who — might lie at the heart of Loesch’s property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, “contains enough electricity to light up the country.”

I’m intrigued and I haven’t even started to read it yet.

Chatting with friends about books and life…