Welcome to Thursday, a day that once seemed lost, with nothing exciting happening anywhere. But then that changed, and today I am celebrating some of the bookish events around the blogosphere, like Lexxie’s Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts; Kimberlyfaye’s TBR Thursday; and Christine’s Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts.
Today’s featured book is from my TBR pile on Pippa: The Next Time You See Me, by Holly Goddard Jones, which has been lingering there since August 26, 2014.
For Lexxie’s post, this snippet about food comes on the heels of a frightening experience for Emily, a thirteen-year-old girl who is terrified about something she has discovered:
“…but now she was being led to a kitchen chair and her father was rolling up her pant leg to examine the ankle (“It’s a little swollen, but it don’t look broke to me,” he was saying, and her mother, breathlessly, “Are you sure?”), and her stomach was growling a little at the sight of a bag of Doritos, unopened, on the table to her left. She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t sounded an alarm. She pulled the sack of chips closer and tweezed the top between her fingers, pulling, releasing the putrid-pleasant scent of corn and cheese into her face as her father quizzed her on where, and why, and how, and What the heck are you thinking, rambling around by yourself at night? Her mother brought her a Coca-Cola, opened, and Emily did what she loved: she put a chip into her mouth and crunched, and while the crumbs were still circling inside her mouth, getting milled by her teeth and tongue, she chased them with a long draft of the soda, the sweet and bubbles washing it all down the back of her throat…”
(I am not a big fan of Doritos, but I could grab a bag right now!)
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In honor of TBR Thursday, here’s the blurb, and as I read it, I am astonished that it has been just languishing on Pippa:
When a small Southern town’s most fiery single woman is found dead in the woods, it’s not just her secrets that threaten to surface. There’s Ronnie’s sister, Susanna, a dutiful but dissatisfied schoolteacher, mother, and wife; Tony, a failed baseball star turned detective; Emily, a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with a dark secret; and Wyatt, a factory worker tormented by a past he can’t change and by a love he doesn’t think he deserves.
Connected in ways they cannot begin to imagine, their stories converge in a violent climax that reveals not just the mystery of what happened to Ronnie, but all of their secret selves. Praised as “immensely satisfying and skillful” by Kate Atkinson, author of New York Times bestseller Life After Life, The Next Time You See Me is a debut novel not to be missed.
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Here are some bookish/not so bookish thoughts:
- I have been watching a lot of TV and Netflix this week, which is not really new, but my reading has suffered a bit more than usual..I’ve been watching the OJ Mini-series, and feeling the resentment and chagrin I felt at the time the trial was on every TV channel back in the day, but when I saw Dominick Dunne, the author, as he was interviewed during the show, I was reminded that he wrote a book about the trial, both real and fictionalized, so I downloaded the e-book last night: Another City, Not My Own. (I actually read this book a few years ago, and don’t have a copy any more because of my purges…so I wanted a reread);
- When I was running errands on Monday, I stopped in between for a bowl of soup and a Pomegranate Martini…my go-to cocktail these days;
- My pre-Oscars activities involved watching a few of the nominated movies, and my favorites were Spotlight (yay, win!) and Room. I also have the e-book of Room which I plan to read soon.
That’s it for my thoughts this week! What are yours?
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POTPOURRI 