Lovely Books and Things - 8.30.20

Lovely Books and Things
My Weekly Books and Films Update
Linking up with:
Sunday Post (details)
Mailbox Monday (details)

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HAPPY THINGS:

1. Independent Bookstore Day, August 29, online author events (details)
2. Schnitzel (recipe) and noodles - a favorite thing from The Sound of Music :-)
3. Setting up an arm chair travel theme for September. Will start off the month with The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel.

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Library: audiobook

The Summer Country
by Lauren Willig
Historical, Victorian, Barbados | Goodreads

Freebies: from Free Little Library

The Broken Kingdoms
by N.K. Jemison
Fantasy | Goodreads

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Virtual Author event: hosted by Booksmith
Listen to archive of this and check out their calendar for future free author events (here)
A conversation between:

Ballistic Kiss
by Richard Kadrey
Urban Fantasy | Goodreads

Shakespeare for Squirrels
by Christopher Moore
Humor Fantasy | Goodreads
A conversation between:

The Great Offshore Grounds
by Vanessa Veselka
Literary | Goodreads

Pull of the Stars
by Emma Donoghue
Historical, Ireland | Goodreads

Virtual Author event: hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore
Listen to archive of this and check out their calendar for future free author events (here)

A conversation between:

Winter Counts
by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Mystery, Thriller | Goodreads

Blacktop Wasteland
by S.A. Cosby
Mystery, Thriller | Goodreads

Virtual Author event: hosted by Book Passages
Listen to archive of this and check out their calendar for future free author events (here)

The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls
by Ursula Hegi
Historical, Germany | Goodreads

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AND watched: in virtual theatre

John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020)
Director: Dawn Porter
Documentary | imdb | my rating: 5
The film explores Georgia representative's, 60-plus years of social activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, health care reform, and immigration.

VOTE

Readalong update:

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen | Goodreads
co-read with Naida at the the bookworm

Aug 17-23: Prologue & chapter 1
I got halfway through the introduction and decided to stop as it was getting too spoilery for me. I will get back to it later along with the acknowledgments which was also part of the front matter of the book.

Enjoying the details of the trek and learning about the various members of the party and how they function.

Aug 24-30: chapter 2
Importance of a good comfortable pair of hiking boots made an impression. Similar to what I found when I read Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

Love his writing style. Felt the cold, danger and beauty of the Himalayas as the search for the Blue Sheep and Snow Leopard continue.

"I am here to be here, like these rocks and sky and snow, like this hail that is falling down out of the sun." -page 108

Liked the reference and thoughts about the Yeti.

Aug 31-Sep 6: chapter 3

Sep 7-13: chapter 4 & wrap-up

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* comment and TELL me what you have acquired for your shelves recently

*** THANKS to those on the front line during these times ***
Shelter In Place - Day 167, Week 25
Stay healthy! Be safe!

Thanks for stopping by :-)

WW2 and France

Extraordinaire!

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The Paper Girl of Paris
by Jordyn Taylor
Historical, WW2, YA, France | Goodreads
Now:
Sixteen-year-old Alice is spending the summer in Paris, but she isn’t there for pastries and walks along the Seine. When her grandmother passed away two months ago, she left Alice an apartment in France that no one knew existed. An apartment that has been locked for more than seventy years.

Alice is determined to find out why the apartment was abandoned and why her grandmother never once mentioned the family she left behind when she moved to America after World War II. With the help of Paul, a charming Parisian student, she sets out to uncover the truth. However, the more time she spends digging through the mysteries of the past, the more she realizes there are secrets in the present that her family is still refusing to talk about.

Then:
Sixteen-year-old Adalyn doesn’t recognize Paris anymore. Everywhere she looks, there are Nazis, and every day brings a new horror of life under the Occupation. When she meets Luc, the dashing and enigmatic leader of a resistance group, Adalyn feels she finally has a chance to fight back. But keeping up the appearance of being a much-admired socialite while working to undermine the Nazis is more complicated than she could have imagined. As the war goes on, Adalyn finds herself having to make more and more compromises—to her safety, to her reputation, and to her relationships with the people she loves the most.

The Dressmaker's Gift
by Fiona Valpy
Historical, WW2, France | Goodreads
Paris, 1940. With the city occupied by the Nazis, three young seamstresses go about their normal lives as best they can. But all three are hiding secrets. War-scarred Mireille is fighting with the Resistance; Claire has been seduced by a German officer; and Vivienne’s involvement is something she can’t reveal to either of them.

Two generations later, Claire’s English granddaughter Harriet arrives in Paris, rootless and adrift, desperate to find a connection with her past. Living and working in the same building on the Rue Cardinale, she learns the truth about her grandmother – and herself – and unravels a family history that is darker and more painful than she ever imagined.

In wartime, the three seamstresses face impossible choices when their secret activities put them in grave danger. Brought together by loyalty, threatened by betrayal, can they survive history’s darkest era without being torn apart?

The Book of Lost Names
by Kristin Harmel
Historical, WW2, France | Goodreads | my review
Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this unforgettable historical novel from the international bestselling author of the “epic and heart-wrenching World War II tale” (Alyson Noel, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Winemaker’s Wife.

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer—but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.


COMING SOON:

Red Mistress
by Elizabeth Blackwell
Historical, WW2, France | Goodreads
Release date: July 21, 2020
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, a determined young woman breaks with her past to become a spy in 1920s Paris, where shadowy intrigues and a dangerous romance put her loyalty to the test.

In the spring of 1914, Nadia Shulkina, the daughter of Russian aristocrats, looks toward a bright future. She has no premonitions of war, let alone the revolution that is about to destroy her comfortable world.

Her once-noble family is stripped of every possession, and more terrible losses soon follow. To save what’s left of her family and future, Nadia marries a zealous Bolshevik in an act of calculated reinvention.

It won’t be her last.

When she agrees to work undercover for the Soviets in 1920s Paris, Nadia is drawn into a beautiful yet treacherous world of secrets and deceit. Beset by conflicting loyalties and tested by a forbidden love affair, she becomes embroiled in a conspiracy that ends with a shocking murder. What chances will she take to determine her own fate?

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* image source: Place de la Madeleine by Eugene Galien Laloue