Monday: Musings/Mailbox/Whereabouts

Go to your bookshelf and pick a random book. No cheating now, just reach out and pick one. Now tell us about it – where did you get it? Why? Was it a gift? Does it hold any special memories? Did someone recommend it to you? etc.

This is interesting! I simply closed my eyes and let my hand pick out a book. And that is Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi. I had bought it from the Sunday Pavement book bazaar for a pittance. I was intrigued by the back cover and had to buy it. However, I am yet to read this book.

From Publishers Weekly

In this novel, Hegi captures the events and atmosphere in the country prior, during and after WW II. Again she has produced a powerful novel whose chilling candor and resonant moral vision serve a dramatic story. With a sure hand, Hegi evokes the patterns of small-town life, individualized here in dozens of ordinary people who display the German passion for order, obedience and conformity, enforced for centuries by rigid class differences and the strictures of the Catholic church. The protagonist is Trudi Montag, the Zwerg (dwarf) who becomes the town's librarian; (she and most of the other characters figured in the earlier book). A perennial outsider because of her deformity, Trudi exploits her gift for eliciting peoples' secrets--and often maliciously reveals them in suspenseful gossip. But when Hitler ascends to power, she protects those who have been kind to her, including two Jewish families who, despite the efforts of Trudi, her father and a few others, are fated to perish in the Holocaust. Trudi is a complex character, as damaged by her mother's madness and early death as she is by the later circumstances of her life, and she is sometimes cruel, vindictive and vengeful. It is fascinating to watch her mature, as she experiences love and loss and finds wisdom, eventually learning to live with the vast amnesia that grips formerly ardent Nazis after the war.

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I finished:

Nothing!

I am in midst of:

Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo

I plan to read:

Anything that holds my interest

I posted reviews of:

The Emerald Swan by Jane Feather
The Captive by Brenda Joyce
Yellowknife by Steve Zipp
The Marshall and the Heiress by Patricia Potter
The Courtship by Catherine Coulter
The Switch by Sandra Brown
Life Support by Tess Gerritsen

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Monday Mailbox is hosted by Marcia.

I received only one book:

Buried Alive: The True Story of Kidnapping, Captivity, and a Dramatic Rescue by Roy Hallums from Thomas Nelson

Contractor Roy Hallums recounts the harrowing ten months he was held captive by Iraqi insurgents, the heroic rescue by American troops, and the faith that helped him survive it all.

In November 2004 Roy Hallums was working late at his office in Iraq at the Saudi Arabian Trading and Construction Company, supposedly well-protected by armed security guards, when four kidnappers broke in and hauled him away at gunpoint. The next ten months were the darkest of his life. Hallums spent most of his time in a concrete pit beneath a farmhouse, constantly bound and blindfolded. A small pipe in the ceiling provided the room’s only oxygen – and its only link to the outside world. Hallums banked on one group in particular not forgetting his existence—the US military. And sure enough, on September 7, 2006, they successfully rescued him. This is the edge-of-your-seat story of a trip through hell for Hallums, the daring rescue mission, and faith that brought him through the experience.