October Read Choices

Hi, readers!

Welcome to fall! Is it time to wake Greenday up?
Ha ha I’m so funny.

Anyway, it is just about time for our October book! I have gotten a few suggestions from you and grabbed a couple of my own that looked interesting, so hopefully we have a good selection from which to choose.

I like to chronicle how our books and conversations turn out, but if you are uninterested in reading my thoughts and summations, feel free to skip down a few headings to where you will find summaries and the poll itself.

Sinister Magic

This book, despite it’s surprisingly positive reviews, did not meet a single one of our expectations or hopes.

Following a middle aged(ish) mom who fights supernatural crimes and apprehends magical criminals, I think there was a lot of room for some great plot and characters. I think we conclusively decided that it fell short in just about every single aspect.

There are quite a few books which follow it up, and there was only vague interest in potentially checking them out. The book had high potential and still has plenty of room to grow and expand to fill in the gaps of our disappointment, but we will have to see if that potential is enough to keep anyone’s interest.

The Rook

We are going to be meeting for our final discussion on this book this Saturday at 10:00 EDT.
So far, the consensus has been positive, interested, and hopeful for a good ending. With good prose, interesting characters, subtle but bright humor, it has been a pretty solid read in a lot of ways.

I already know of a couple of you who have finished it and intend on reading the sequel. I hope it meets your expectations!

Summaries for Our October Choices

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

307 pages
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.

There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more.

But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks, for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod’s family.

A deliciously dark masterwork by bestselling author Neil Gaiman, with illustrations by award-winning Dave McKean

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, by H.P. Lovecraft

406 pages
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”—H.P. Lovecraft

This is the collection that true fans of horror fiction must have: sixteen of H.P. Lovecraft’s most horrifying visions, including:

The Call of Cthulu: The first story in the infamous Cthulhu mythos—a creature spawned in the stars brings a menace of unimaginable evil to threaten all mankind.

The Dunwich Horror: An evil man’s desire to perform an unspeakable ritual leads him in search of the fabled text of The Necronomicon.

The Colour Out of Space: A horror from the skies—far worse than any nuclear fallout—transforms a man into a monster.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Rising from the depths of the sea, an unspeakable horror engulfs a quiet New England town.

Plus twelve more terrifying tales!

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

421 pages
Hannibal Lecter. The ultimate villain of modern fiction. Read the five-million-copy bestseller that scared the world silent. The Silence of the Lambs. A young FBI trainee. An evil genius locked away for unspeakable crimes. A plunge into the darkest chambers of a psychopath’s mind–in the deadly search for a serial killer. – back cover

Intensity by Dean Koontz

436 pages
Past midnight, Chyna Shepard, twenty-six, gazes out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend’s family. Instinct proves reliable. A murderous sociopath, Edgler Foreman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside. A self-proclaimed “homicidal adventurer,” Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to immerse himself in sensation, to live without fear, remorse or limits, to live with “intensity.” Chyna is trapped in his deadly orbit.

Chyna is a survivor, toughened by a lifelong struggle for safety and self-respect. Now she will be tested as never before. At first her sole aim is to get out alive–until, by chance, she learns the identity of Vess’s next intended victim, a faraway innocent only she can save. Driven by a newly discovered thirst for meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna musters every inner resource she has to save an endangered girl…as moment by moment, the terrifying threat of Edgler Foreman Vess intensifies.

 

Vote Here!