This morning I put the iPod on playlists recently played and for my commute to and from work at Target the soundtrack was a mix of new music added to my music library. Some the tracks are from the albums that I bought at the Princeton Record Exchange a couple of weeks ago and some are just new albums. So here’s the twelve track playlist…
March Reads
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To meet my 2016 Reading Challenge of 60 books, I need to average five books per month. I fell one book short of that this month reading only four books. Overall though, I am two off the pace needed to reach my 60 book goal. Three of the four books that I read were either mysteries or thrillers,and were written by a favorite author. The fourth book was a mini-memoir. The three books written by favorites were: Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter,The Forgotten Room from Lincoln Child and Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger.
So while I have not posted much over the last few days, I have finished three books. Finished first was William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace, which was closely followed up by The Forgotten Room from Lincoln Child. Then today, I finished The Toaster Oven Mocks Me by Steve Margolis. Two novels and a personal memoir, all very good. In this post I will write about the first book Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger. William Kent Krueger is the author of the Cork O’Connor series set in northern Minnesota. I am a big fan of those novels.
I guess I started reading action thrillers back in the early 1980s, when a work colleague introduced me to the works of Clive Cussler and his hero Dirk Pitt! My first encounter with Mr. Pitt was in the book Raise the Titanic. I quickly went back and read his previous books and continued to follow Dirk’s adventures for several years. The novels always had a good mix of history and action.
Why the Biologic Clock is not going backwards….
Over the last month and a half I have not done a whole lot to turn back my biologic clock. In fact with my bronchitis and I think a couple of colds, I have basically been trying to keep that clock from taking great leaps forward. One of the things that I haven’t been able to do is start back running, which is hard to do when you can’t stop coughing, and it’s cold outside! But now even when the weather is nicer and I’m feeling better I am finding it difficult to find the time to run.
I haven’t visited the site – progstreaming.com lately, but I thought tonight would be a good night for some prog rock, so I took a trip to the site to check out the latest albums. When I search through prog albums by artists I don’t know (that’s most of them at progstreaming), the first albums that I give a listen to are the one’s whose albums covers look the most interesting. One of the album covers that caught my eye was from the band Mystery and their album Delusion Rain. Within the first few minutes of listening to the album, I knew I was going to like this band! Nice guitar, nifty vocals with words that I can actually understand and very melodic music. I was actually not surprised, when I went to ProgArchives, that the sub-genre of the band’s music was neo-prog, sometimes bordering on symphonic.
So it seems that I oftentimes avoid reading stand alone books written by authors whose series are among my favorites. This was the case with Karin Slaughter’s stand alone novel Pretty Girls, which was released in September of 2015. But when I saw that the Kindle Edition was on sale for $3.99 the other day, I thought now is the time! All I can say is Wow! What a fool I am!! And bring on William Kent Krueger‘s Ordinary Grace! I guess one of the reasons that I avoid stand alone novels is that I’m afraid that they won’t measure up to the series that I love! In the case of Karin Slaughter that series is the Grant County/ Will Trent Atlanta series. Hmm, let’s see Pretty Girls not only measured up it may be the best book that Karin Slaughter has written, and at least one of my top favorites of her books.
So a while back I came across the album In a World of Mallets by Jason Marsalis. I listened to the album because the lead instrument was a vibraphone and not because of the name Marsalis. In fact I didn’t even make the connection until today, when I was reading about Jason, who is celebrating his thirty-ninth (39) birthday today. I read that Jason was in fact the youngest of the famous Marsalis family ,led by father Ellis and includes brothers Wynton, Bradford and Delfeayo!. I felt a little better about not knowing who he was after I read at All About Jazz that…..
Gregg Hurwitz is one of those authors whose books I read sporadically and when I do read one of his books, after I finish it I usually say “Can You Tell me Edward, why you don’t read every Hurwitz book when it comes out?? To which I answer simply no – which is better than omitting I am a fool!! So when I recently saw that Hurwitz had started a new series and the first book Orphan X would be released soon, I knew I’d be a fool again not to read it!! Having just finished it the other day – I can say I am thankful I am not an old fool and bring on book 2 of the Evan Smoak series!!
