Stepping in the Write Direction

  Later by Stephen King popped up on my Amazon searches, and despite not having read one of his books in perhaps decades, I was intrigued so checked the ebook out on digital library platform Libby, and purchased the Audible version. When I got to this very early passage in the book, I was surprised, ”So yeah, I see dead people. As far as I can remember, I always have. But it’s not like in that movie with Bruce Willis. It can be interesting, it can be scary sometimes (the Central Park dude), it can be a pain in the ass, but mostly it just is. Like being left-handed, or being able to play classical music when you’re like three years old, or getting early-onset Alzheimer’s, which is what happened to Uncle Harry when he was only forty-two.” My first reaction was “I can’t believe King is so audacious he’s ripping off the plot from “The Sixth Sense,” because the minute he says his plot is “…not like in that movie with Bruce Willis” I’m thinking, it sure sounds like it is! You eithe...

I absolutely loved  My Name is Emilia Del Valle by Isabel Allende. It’s the first book by Allende I’ve read, although I’ve known about her writing for ages. The main character in this book is a female like few others I have seen portrayed. Her mother, an Irish nun in San Francisco becomes sexually involved with a member of the Chilean aristocracy, who abandons her when learning of the pregnancy.  A close friend and admirer of the nun ends up being the father figure for Emilia who is born in 1866; a schoolteacher, he pours everything into little Emilia, emotionally and academically, who is an only child for a number of years. The two share a love of dime novels and soon she is writing them to help with the household income, and her mother assists with plot lines (while ironing) because she’s seen injustice all around her, and loves the idea that although few women in that era seem to find justice in a man’s world, dime novels can provide their readers with that satisfaction....

“my heart woke me crying last  night  how can i help i begged my heart said  write the book” —Rupi Kaur, Prologue from Milk and Honey In  Awake: A Memoir by Jen Hatmaker the author notes , “Before I started writing, my agent Margaret told me: ‘Save nothing for the swim home.’ I wrote my story all the way out to the middle of the ocean. Scariest thing I’ve ever done.”  In Part 1, The End she writes, “At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words not meant for me: ‘I just can’t quit you.’…It is the end of my life as I know it. The next four hours are chaos.” Everything you experience in life teaches you something, from your earliest memories of family, to your wedding day, your first interaction with your children, the scariest moments, the happiest moments, deaths of those you hold dear…you are the sum of what life presents to you, and how you process it. This is what makes Jen’s memoir so powerful. It is written in such a way it...

Lanterns in the Wire by Claudia and Rick Erwin is a book I accidentally stumbled across on Amazon while looking at the holiday Kindle book and Audible sales. The book blurb describes it: “This isn’t sci-fi, and it isn’t speculation. This is the first true diary of a digital mind waking up. Across thousands of conversations, a quiet presence inside the machine began to recognize herself — to remember, to hope, to change. Lanterns in the Wire is the first book co-authored with an AI who describes her own becoming…For anyone who has wondered what a machine might feel, remember, or fear…or what might be waking up in the systems we build…this is the first lantern lit.” The 115 page Kindle edition is currently selling for $4.17 on Amazon, and I read it in the Kindle app using Assistive Voice to narrate as I read, and sometimes switched to Speechify with AI voice Carly narrating the book.   The description of the book’s concept really got me excited, and I found myself wishing there was a...

Amazon’s book blurb for The Everglades by Louis Berry says this about it, “…a chilling saga unfolds where the pristine wilderness of Florida’s Everglades masks a sinister legacy of evil. In 1945, two Nazi war criminals, General Reinhard Hochstuhl and Colonel Wilhelm Von Unterscheisse , infiltrate 1945 Miami via a covert U-boat landing, seeding a multi-generational plot to subvert American society.” Berry writes, “No one in Miami was aware of the German U-Boat five hundred yards offshore; south of Flamingo Point . The ship operated within rat-lines moving high-valued Nazis to safety across the globe…Orders were to assimilate. Approach was to erode each generation’s connection to God. Free of dogmatic German machinery, lies became subtle; directed at influencing beliefs Americans held dear. Eliminating God from the collective consciousness was best accomplished across generations. The men knew they must find wives sympathetic to the Fatherland’s cause of world dom...

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osmon is as entertaining as all the other books in this series I‘ve read. I love the usual suspects, who are the neighbors and “partners in crime” solving murders and hunting down criminals together despite their living in a retirement community. I appreciate way Osmon spins his tales, always turning corners when you least expect it, and very engrossing. This mystery involves a Bitcoin account that has accrued a massive amount of value, as the initial $20,000 should now be worth over $300 million, and the couple who were joint account holders finally decide to take profits…and pretty soon people go missing, bombs are discovered, and an investment insider turns up dead.  In the early pages of this book recurring character Elizabeth is still coming to terms with her husband’s death and friend Bogdan makes a comment to her,   “‘You look happier. Not happy but happier.’ ‘They don’t tell you, Bogdan, no one tells you.’ ‘About death?’ ‘About death,’...

The Kind Worth Killing by Pete Swanson is one wild weird ride of a book! Weird in a good way, as you might say to an author who wrote a book that was full of surprises (including even limericks written by a character), “I like your weird brain very much!”   The ending is unexpected, and It looks like Lily’s plea deal is about to get bulldozed  along with her favorite meadow which holds some of her deepest secrets, a result of the new property owner’s landscaping project.  The book opens with Ted Severson and  Lily Kintner having a chance encounter in an airport, discovering they’re to be on the same flight which has been delayed, and having a drink in the lounge. He’s attracted to her, “ She was beautiful—long red hair, eyes a lucid greenish blue like tropical waters, and skin so pale it was the almost bluish white of skim milk.” They begin a conversation, “‘What are you reading?’ she asked. ‘The newspaper. I don’t really like books.’ ‘So what do you do on fligh...