[mike777]

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen


I highly recommend both of these new books. Both of these are by first time novelists.

Child 44 is about a serial killer, thriller set in Stalin's Russia.


Atmospheric Disturbances is about a psychiatrist who thinks his wife has been replaced by a replicant and his patient who thinks he is a member of a secret society that controls the weather.

Both novels question reality at the limits of the human experience.

[sceptic]

ah you read science fiction, I wondered where you get some of your weird ideas from

[mike777]

sceptic, on Jun 3 2008, 01:57 AM, said:

ah you read science fiction, I wondered where you get some of your weird ideas from

no none of this is sci-fi I wonder why people read posts insane...

I repeat people seem to love stuff that is not in posts..not close...... but i see if you read these books and think they are science fiction category what can i say but you seem to read insane

I repeat my main point...many posters seem to read stuff that is not in posts. If you read these books as sci-fi category then you really have a problem reading.

Not sci-fi category of fiction.

Read these books and you decide.

[y66]

Just finished Mariette In Ecstasy by Ron Hansen. Wow, that guy can write. Think I'll read more of his stuff this summer.

Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review:

"A beautiful young girl defies her family to enter the cloistered world of a nunnery. She displays extraordinary devotion; her piety seems almost passionate. In time the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, appear on her hands. The convent turns upon her in disbelief. Seventeenth-century Italy? A backward mountain village in prerevolutionary Mexico? Neither. The story is set in 20th-century America, and the time and place—upstate New York—make it that much more intriguing. Hansen's delicate treatment of the idea of religious rapture, an idea that seems curious or even perverse to today's reader, takes us beyond skeptical rejection and makes this unlikely tale very accessible. He creates the cloistered world and allows us, ever so quietly, to peek within. We do not solve the mystery, but he helps us discover its spiritual power."

[mike777]

Just finished How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein.

Very fun, interesting late summer fast read. It tackles the subject of how the USA states got their shapes. How did Michigan get an upper peninusula that isn't attached to Michigan or why are some Hawaiian Islands not in Hawaii and why are California and Texas so outsized?