Summer Reading?

Meet Cliff Janeway, Former Denver homicide detective forced into retirement for taking the law into his own hands in a domestic abuse case. Now he runs a book store dealing with rare 1st editions which natually always leads to murder. Well, not really. But it seems like it. Good stuff though.

I was returning a video to library yesterday and saw that the lastest book in this series was out. The Bookwoman's Last Fling is the fifth in this mystery series by John Dunning. I love mysteries, novels of intrigue/spy and when combined with the book collecting world it seemed too good to avoid. This particular one adds horseracing to the mix of murder and books.
I am kind of obsessive about reading series characters in order so I would recommend starting with Booked to Die but they can be read in any order as they do stand alone with the exception of missing a few things about characters that develop over the course or ones that come along later. Dunning was a reporter and used to run a book store in Denver until he closed it down after success of the first Cliff Janeway book. He still maintains an online version of the store, Old Algonquin Books.

If you liked the Davinci code genre but prefer something a little less page turny and tad more literary, the Washington Post book world critic suggested the following , "If you like these sorts of books, I suggest instead Lawrence Norfolk's Lempriere's Dictionary, A.S. Byatt's Possession, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost."

I would choose Instance of the Fingerpost and Lempriere's Dictionary as I think they have been overlooked. If possible find UK version of the Norfolk book as the American one has been expurgated to the point of confusion in some spots. I have a copy of the Byatt book but have never read it as I wanted to read Middlemarch first since they are related. Obsessive again I know.

Catching up on a couple months worth of music blogs is nigh impossible but I did find a reference to an older Onion piece on I am Fuel music blog (its in my list somewhere). Apologies if you saw this already...


Inventory: Seven Songs With Factual Or Logical Mistakes In The Lyrics

1. U2, "Pride (In The Name Of Love)"

It's probably difficult to work the assassination of a civil-rights leader into a song––but if anyone can do it, Bono can! Unfortunately, he fudges the facts a bit in the last chorus of this song, when he sings about the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., "Early morning, April 4 / Shot rings out in the Memphis sky." King was actually shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at 6:01 p.m., which makes Bono off by about 10 hours. But he did get the date and the city right. Oh, and the pride part. Which isn't bad for a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

The rest are here...