Audiobooks are my preferred method of distraction during my daily commute, and while The Bone Clocks didn't grab me immediately, eventually its clever interlinking story arcs lured my mind away from the surrounding river of taillights and exhaust.* Like Mitchell
The wild, unpredictable shapeshifter Nimona has just appointed herself sidekick to archvillain Lord Ballister Blackheart, promising to aid him in his quest to prove to the kingdom that the Institute of Law Enforcement and Heroics is up to no good. But NImona doesn't play by the normal rules, and she quickly has everyone in an uproar wondering just who she is and where her mysterious powers come from.
Dealing with people is not always a pleasant experience. For Bernadette Fox, it's actually a form of extreme torture. The parents at the alternative school where her daughter, Bee, attends 8th grade are atrocious. For that matter, all Seattle residents (especially those transplanted from Idaho and Canada) are exhausting. She builds walls around her eccentric life, where she lives in a decaying former girls boarding school with Bee, her genius Microsoft-legend husband, and dog.
When a documentary is made about a polarizing figure, the film itself may receive praise simply for existing rather than earning acclaim as a well thought-out film. Zac Simpson’s documentary about Sam Childers, otherwise known as the Machine Gun Preacher, has capitalized on Childers notoriety.
Vango is a thrilling adventure mystery set in Europe on the cusp of the second World War, focused on the mysterious identity of a young man on the cusp of adulthood. Not even Vango, said young man, knows the mystery of his origins, and no one believes he is constantly watched and hunted by shadowy figures. They consider him paranoid. Talented, pleasant, and promising, but strangely paranoid.
In a total departure from her usual fare of FBI profilers, Gerritsen takes the reader on a journey that starts in WWII Italy to present day Boston where Julia Ansdell lives with her husband and daughter. While in Rome, Julia, a professional violinist, purchases a book of gypsy sheet music for her collection. Tucked inside the pages is a single sheet of hand written music, a waltz. Julia is immediately intrigued by the passion and complexity of the music.
In Career of Evil, Cormoran Strike and Robin are in a slump - they've not had much work lately. They only have two paying cases at the moment, both rather tedious surveillance jobs. Although postponed, Robin and Matthew are still planning to be married. When a motorcycle courier is waiting with a box at the office for Robin, she assumes it's an order of wedding cameras. It's not. It's a severed leg. Immediately, Strike can think of three people who would send him a leg.
If the phrase "training run" has ever been part of your vocabulary – whether in reference to you or someone near you – you're bound to get a laugh, cringe, and sigh out of My Year of Running Dangerously. Combining two of my favorite topics, memoirs and running, acclaimed journalist Tom Foreman uses his storytelling skills to recount his monumental return to distance running.
I wish Kurt Vonnegut were alive to read this masterful literary homage. I'm not the only one who sees the connection. Margaret Wappler writes in the October 23, 2015 issue of the New York Times Book Review: "King’s devotion to a passionately experimental style, in a genre often beholden to formula, is inspiring. Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this, if he had ever been cyber-bullied on Facebook."
If you remember (or have heard anyone talk about) LPs, 8-tracks, bell bottoms and the time when disc jockey Wolfman Jack ruled the FM radio waves; watch this to relive it or to see what it was like. The 6-disc set compiles some of the best performances from the NBC Friday night variety show.
