Karen's Book Nook

I was very happy to see that many of the downloadable audio books from my library are now iPod compatible so I was able to finally use them with my Nano instead of a cheesy mp3 player.  This series caught my eye. I haven’t read Kate Wilhelm before but I always like recurring character novels so I expect it will be a good one. Book 1 of the Barbara Holloway series  is Death Qualified.

Publishers Weekly: Nell Kendricks is charged with murdering her estranged husband, Lucas, who disappeared years ago while working on a top-secret experiment attempting to use chaos theory to change the observer’s perception of the universe. Now it appears that Lucas had spent the intervening years drugged and amnesiac, a handyman at the university where the studies had taken place. Attorney Barbara Holloway, who is “death qualified” (i.e., legally permitted to act in capital cases), agrees to defend Nell, despite having left the profession, disillusioned by its practices….

I’ve had this audio book, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing by Andrew Weil, MD on my ipod for quite some time and started listening today.

About the book: A complete course of eight breathing exercises that Dr. Andrew Weil uses in his own life, and has prescribed to hundreds of patients over the past two decades. In plain language, Dr. Weil explains the secret of breathwork’s power over our health, and its remarkable ability to influence – and even reprogram – the nervous system. A practical introduction to this crucial aspect of self healing, presented by this bestselling author and influential physician.

I’m reading the last of my unread Carol Goodman books, The Sonnet Lover. (She’s one of my favorite authors and I’ve read all of her works so far.)

About the book: Did Shakespeare pen a series of passionate sonnets, unknown to modern scholarship, ardently praising a mysterious dark-haired beauty? This tantalizing question is raised in a letter to literature professor Rose Asher. But the letter’s author, Rose’s star pupil, is not telling. A troubled, enigmatic young man, he plunged to his death in front of the college’s entire faculty, an apparent suicide. Determined to find the truth, Rose journeys from New York to Italy, back to the magnificent Tuscan villa where as an undergraduate she first fell in love.

My current audio book is Night, by Elie Wiesel. It’s part of a trilogy.

Amazon.com Review
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life’s essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel’s lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.

My newest audio book is Michael Connelly‘s The Brass Verdict. I really enjoy his books and I’m sure this one will be just as good as the others.

About the book:
Things are finally looking up for defense attorney Mickey Haller. After two years of wrong turns, Haller is ready to go back to the courtroom. When Hollywood lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his biggest case yet: the defense of Walter Elliott, a prominent studio executive accused of murdering his wife and her lover. But as Haller prepares for the case that could launch him into the big time, he learns that Vincent’s killer may be coming for him next.

Enter Harry Bosch. Determined to find Vincent’s killer, he is not opposed to using Haller as bait. But as danger mounts and the stakes rise, these two loners realize their only choice is to work together.

My newest audio book is Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark.  Should be a quick one.

About the Book: It has been ten years since twenty-one-year-old Charles MacKenzie Jr. (“Mack”) went missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already accepted at Duke University Law School, he walked out of his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side without a word to his college roommates and has never been seen again. However, he does make one ritual phone call to his mother every year: on Mother’s Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer her frantic questions, then hangs up. Even the death of his father, a corporate lawyer, in the tragedy of 9/11 does not bring him home or break the pattern of his calls…

I love Carol Goodman’s books and I’m sure that this one will be no different. As always there’s a water element to everything I’ve read so far.

About the book: From Booklist
Juno McKay is thrilled when her best friend Christine returns to their upstate New York college, Penrose, to give a lecture about the stained-glass window Juno will be restoring. Christine shocks her audience when she theorizes that Augustus Penrose, the college’s founder, depicted his sister-in-law, Clare, not his wife, Eugenie, in the window. After the lecture, Juno finds Christine somewhat troubled and worries about her after she boards her train home. A week later, Juno and her 15-year-old daughter, Bea, kayak on the Hudson River to the Penrose estate, Astolat, where they discover a body: Christine….

Not as many as I would have liked but here are the titles that I finished in June.

• A Mercy (Vintage International) by Toni Morrison
• The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation by Elizabeth Berg
• The Night Villa: A Novel by Carol Goodman
• The Host by Stephenie Meyer
• The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella

Looking at the list, thank goodness for audio books or else I’d have only a couple of books read for the month. Hopefully July is better!

My “running around” audio book is They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie. I’m running out of titles at my library to rip so I may have to start requesting some and hit up my TBR list. Normally, the audio books are just fillers for me and I grab what I see when I go.

About the book: Amazon info: Flighty but good-hearted Victoria Jones craves love, intrigue, and adventure. She strikes gold in Edward, a handsome and mysterious traveler whom she’s vowed to follow to the ends of the earth. Yet no whirlwind affair can prepare Victoria for what unfolds once she lands in Baghdad. Not a day in Edward’s shadow, and she hears whispered warnings of danger and witnesses the murder of a secret agent in her hotel room. And when she discovers that a romantic rival for Edward’s affection has arranged for her kidnapping, Victoria fears that her impetuous nature could be the death of her.