Friday Finds is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading to showcase books you recently found and added to your TBR (to be read) list. It doesn’t matter whether you found them free online, borrowed them from a library or purchased them somewhere. Anything works.
A great haul for me this week! Eight books which I ordered from Powell’s Books earlier this month have arrived.
Death of Yesterday by M.C. Beaton (Hamish Macbeth #29)
Something Borrowed, Someone Dead by M.C. Beaton (Agatha Raisin #24)
The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #5)
Ten Little New Yorkers by Kinky Friedman (Kinky Friedman #18)
They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy
Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant
Hard Time by Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski #9)
Total Recall by Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski #10)
Any guesses which book shot to the top of the TBR list? (hint: Series mysteries are my favorite contemporary reading and this is one of the series I have been reading the longest.)
Did you have a productive week? Share your Friday Finds with us! Please leave a comment with the link to your own Friday Finds post on MizB’s blog or here. If you don’t have a blog, you may share your finds in a comment here anyway. We’d love to know what you found this week.
Vauquer Boarding House 
Ah, Paretsky and Connelly, two of my favorites. I have been following the Connelly trail. After I got hooked I decided to begin at the beginning, and so I have been reading them in publication order. I am up to 2009 now, but meanwhile Paretsky is falling behind.
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I fell away from Paretsky several years back (I have too many series to keep up with, lol), but am picking it back up. I too got hooked on Connelly and am reading them from the beginning. You are ahead of me! I am only up to 2005.
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Don’t you love it when books you order arrive? It’s like christmas all over again! A neat collection, happy reading.
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Thanks, Caitlin! I went on a tear and have another order arriving next week. Happy reading to you too.
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Yvette,
Just one book arrived this week, but it’s been one I’ve wanted for some time. It’s Loren Eiseley’s _Notes of an Alchemist_, one of his three books of poetry. I now have all three. I’ve post a number of excerpts from his prose works and have now begun posting some of his poetry.
A superb writer and a life-changer, for me anyway.
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Oops, Fred, you missed clicking on Yvette’s blog and ended up here with Dagny. Always happy to talk about books though! I’ve not read anything by Eiseley. I see you have posted at least one sample of his poetry at Fred’s Place though, so I’ll go over and read it.
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You’ve got a lot of posts about Eiseley. I enjoyed Meaningless Voices http://freds-ramblings.blogspot.com/2014/07/loren-eiseley-meaningless-voices.html
I noticed in the comments section that Jim (Tarnmoor) also likes reading Eiseley.
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Madame Vauquer,
Chalk it up to a senior moment early in the morning. I had just read a post on Yvette’s blog and the name carried over. Yes, I really like his essays/prose writings? Yes, Jim also is an admirer of Eiseley. There aren’t many of us I fear.
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LOL. I do that all the time, Fred. I am also especially bad if two names begin with the same couple of letters and my fingers don’t always type the name I intend.
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Madame Vauquer,
Is this one of the reasons it’s called the Golden Age?
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Ha. We take what we can get. Better than calling it the Gray Age which would at least describe my hair.
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Madame Vauquer,
You should see my hair and beard. At Xmas time, little kids ask me where Rudolf is.
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Another fantastic selection of books. Here are my FF http://cleopatralovesbooks.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/friday-finds-july-25/
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Thanks, Cleo. You have some of interest to me also, especially the mysteries.
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🙂 Thank you!
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I have all of Sara Parentsky’ s CO books and she is must author to read. The others are new to me.
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What are her CO books? I used to read her V.I. Warshawski books. Then I got too busy, but I am starting to catch up on them now.
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The CO must be a typo. I meant read all of her books
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Gotcha. I’ve been reading the Stephanie Plum ones for years, although I’m quite a way behind in the series. I really like all the gang. Grandma Mazur is my hero, lol. I haven’t read any of the other series but I’ve met Diesel and plan on reading that series as it comes up. That only leaves Alexandra Barnaby for me to try. I was a bit put off by the title Metro Girl.
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I am curious what you think of M.C. Beaton. I loved the Hamish MacBeth tv series from BBC (mid-1990s and didn’t know about the books till the series ended. It turned out the author was very critical because the series writers (awesome British writers who have gained renown for their talent in small and large screen projects) changed her characters and added more. Well, I read her one or two of her books and missed the lovely fleshed out characters from the tv series. Interestingly, she changed how she wrote the characters after the series because she realized they were far more popular as depicted on screen.
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This reminds me of seeing a movie vs reading the book. I was well into the books before the series came along and I really couldn’t get into the tv series. A Hamish Macbeth book is actually my Teaser Tuesdays this week.
I love both the Hamish Macbeth books and the Agatha Raisin books. They’re easy light reading. I confess that after a great number of books Hamish’s romantic problems are getting on my nerves, but I tolerate them. I wonder if this is when Beaton changed the character. Interesting thought. The last few books too have had very dislikeable villains and a couple that I hated from an earlier book have resurfaced in the one I’m reading now.
As for Agatha Raisin, it took me a few books to actually warm up to the character. I enjoyed the books and they are more humorous than the Hamish books, but I didn’t like Agatha in the beginning. She is the same old Agatha, but eventually I warmed up to her. The secondary characters seem more fleshed out in the Agatha series.
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Madame Vauquer,
I have read a number of the Hamish Macbeth novels and enjoyed them, so I was looking forward to the TV series when I heard about it. Unfortunately I was disappointed and was barely able to finish the first one. I never did try to watch the second one.
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I know, Fred. I was so excited to hear that there was a tv series. I think I tried more than one, but soon gave up too.
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An update on Hamish and Death of Yesterday: 3/4 done with the book and fortunately the couple I so disliked have not featured very much. Turning out to be quite a good read.
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Maybe M.C. has the same problem with villains that another author I have read a whole series of, Jan Karon, did. She writes her good characters very well, you could almost sit down and have lunch with any of them but her bad characters are flat, 2D stereotypical villains. Some authors, for whatever reason, forget that even villains can have some good in them, or reasonableness, at least. They aren’t 100% all bad. So when they write them that way, they come off stilted and unbelievable. My favourite mysteries are by Dorothy Sayers and when I need a good read, I tend to go back to Nevil Shute. He’s best known for A Town Like Alice and On The Beach but he wrote so many good books.
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I’ve read some of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and seen quite a few episodes of the series, way back when. With two different Lord Peters. I actually saw the later series, with Edward Petherbridge first, then later the earlier series with Ian Carmichael. Very well done I thought.
Not sure I’ve ever actually read On the Beach, but I have read A Town Like Alice.
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Madame Vauquer,
I think I’ve read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, including a collection of short stories. I’ve also seen the two Lord Peters on TV, but in order so I saw Ian Carmichael first. I guess that biased me because I prefer Carmichael, even though Petherbridge is probably closer to Sayers’ picture of him.
On The Beach is a great novel–and a sad one. The film versions are OK, but lack the impact of the novel.
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Re preferring the series one saw first, that seems so often the case. I prefer Petherbridge although I really liked Carmichael once I got used to him.
My first Dr Who was Tom Baker, but I actually came to prefer Jon Pertwee who I saw later.
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I have collected all of Sayers novels and some of her books, like her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (she did a great job). I have just about all of Nevil Shute’s novels too and one I love to re-read is called Pied Piper, about an elderly man who has to get children out of Europe and back to England in the early stages of WWII and I also enjoy Trustee in the Toolroom, about an man who has to find his niece’s inheritance first by finding the sailboat her parents died on in the Pacific Ocean. Shute knows his stuff and writes it well.
As for Petherbridge vs Carmichael, I have only seen Petherbridge who seems the perfect Lord Peter according to Sayer’s writing but I have never seen Carmichael. Most reviews I have read heavily favour Carmichael. So I just stick to the books and imagine. 🙂
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Thanks for the info on some of Shute’s other novels. I hadn’t realized he wrote more (although I should have).
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