Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
I believe both fiction and non-fiction books can be page turners. It is fun to have the kind of suspense in a story and the concern for the characters that keeps us up late at night because we can’t put the book down. I am not good at savoring books. I admit it. I get sucked in and just keep on reading.
Two fairly short non-fiction stories that I just read were page turners. I mentioned them last week, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor and Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels with Mom in the Land of Dementia by Kate Whouley. Another recent book was the memoir by E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room.
Recent page turners that I have read in fiction:
Fantasy
Dreamspinner by Lynn Kurland
Redshirts by John Scalzi
Son of Heaven by David Wingrove
Mystery
Suspect by Robert Crais
Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri
Open Season by C. J. Box (Joe Pickett, game warden in Wyoming)
Zany Mystery
Six Geese A-Slaying by Donna Andrews
What made these stories page turners was that I connected with the real human beings or the fictional characters and I wanted to find out what happened to them. What I wanted to know from the non-fiction books was what did the writer learn and what would they do differently?
The fictions stories were well plotted, but I wanted to know how the characters would manage to keep going in the face of bad trouble. Would Joe Pickett give in to his mentor for the sake of more money for his family? What was his wife really like?
Open Season is the first in the series and I will be ordering more.
Of the space series by Poul Anderson that I have been reading, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra (part 6 of the Technic Civilization Saga) is the best so far. It is a magnificent page turner.
Favorite page turners from the past:
Non-fiction
Prague Winter by Madeleine Albright
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre
Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku
Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne (Story of the Comanches and Quanah Parker)
Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire
Fantasy
Crossed Blades by Kelly McCullough
The Tainted City by Courtney Schafer
War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
Mystery
The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill (All of Susan Hill’s with Simon Serailler)
In order:
The Various Haunts of Men
The Pure in Heart
The Risk of Darkness
The Vows of Silence
The Shadows in the Street
The Betrayal of Trust
A Question of Identity
Zany Mystery
The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Owls Well that Ends Well by Donna Andrews
General Fiction
The Charioteer by Mary Renault
Children’s
Jinx by Sage Blackwood
Which books are your favorite page turners?
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! Auspicious Beginnings
by Emmet
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Hill Country Ride for AIDS - what your donation does
by anotherdemocrat
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A new series has begun:
Books Go Boom! Meeting Michelangelo
by Brecht
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Mnemosyne found this:
50 unseen Rudyard Kipling poems discovered
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
…Discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney in an array of hiding places including family papers, the archive of a former head of the Cunard Line and during renovations at a Manhattan house, more than 50 previously unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling will be released for the first time next month…
The 50 unpublished poems are being included alongside more than 1,300 of Kipling's poems in the three-volume Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipling, the first ever complete edition of his verse, out on 7 March.
New series from
Dave in Northridge:
Title: All Things Bookstore
Day and time; Alternating Tuesday with LGBT Literature, at 5:00 AM Pacific, debuting on March 12th.
Concept: We all love books and we all have had favorite bookstores. This series is about the bookstore: what we like about them, their history, the people who work there, the hours we’ve spent looking through them and the stores in which we’ve found our favorite books and our greatest treasures. This is also about the economics of bookstores and the forces that help or hinder the existence of independent bookstores. In short, diaries about anything that has to do with the bookstore.
and
Note from Limelite: Let your readers know that they should contact the Editor (Dave) if they want to write a Contributor's diary to the new series, which will be welcomed.
Another new diary and a need for Contributors.
Susan from 29 says:
I am reviving the political book club on Saturday afternoons, starting this Saturday (4:00PM eastern) with a diary by Dem Beans about "The Reagan Diaries."
NOTE:
plf515 has book talk on
Wednesday mornings early