From left to right and top to bottom.
Oleander, Aloe, Paperflower, and some sort of Hibiscus, maybe Swamp rose mallow.
Greek Flowers
Daily Harvest
This will be a tough one to read. I’m still half-way through the last one but the buy 2 get 4 books promotion by the local publisher Artline was too good to miss.
- The last Ronin – I plan reading one chapter per day with the little one (already completed two). It features one surviving ninja turtle and the elderly badass April O’Neil but it’s mostly for the sub-10 audience
- Lore Olympus – another graphic novel, which I’ve not unboxed yet
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky – in case I’m meeting the guy next month, I’d like to have that completed
- To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christofer Paolini – I have to admit that I got that for the cover because they add up nicely with the one above. I’m not sure if I’ll ever read it. The author is well-known for his series Eragon.
Goodreads Brings Back Friends’ Reading Challenges
One of my favorite parts of Goodreads used to be seeing how my friends are progressing toward their annual reading goals. It was fun and a little competitive in a good way.
Last year, Amazon decided to clutter Goodreads with about a hundred new challenges while somehow hiding the only one that mattered to me. For a while, seeing friends’ challenge simply disappeared.
Well, good news: it’s back. If you’re using the mobile app, you can find it under:
Settings → Reading Challenges → More frien…
I’m thankful it’s back so I can keep an eye on what my frien… read again.
Count the Cats
Given that I keep reading books about Zombies, I think this photo is with the right mood. This is the abandoned pool in Blagoevgrad, in an area called The Beach. It was made like that by a concessionaire for reasons beyond comprehension and is probably not fixable with municipality’s current budget and organizational capacity.
The area suffers from a cat infestation.
Nightshade by Michael Connelly, Book Review
Michael Connelly is one of my favorite crime/thriller authors. I’ve read almost everything he’s written (probably everything but I’m not sure about one book). He is producing high quality books pretty consistently. However, he has flops. Nightshade is one of the books I did not like.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been moved to Catalina Island, after a series of questionable life choices. Within the book, he has three tasks:
- Investigate the murder of a protected buffalo
- Get statements from some suspicious character who hit a police officer with a bottle
- Keep his partner Natasha happy
This is not what he does, so in a sense, he continues with the questionable life choices and is surprising that the police didn’t transfer him to the North Pole. He jumps in to investigate a murder, and of course, one murder leads to another, so there are many murders.
Had the killer or the multiple killers stayed put, none of the book would’ve happened as Detective Stilwell’s entire game is to find clues in the exceptional overreaction by the suspects, giving them away over and over. Remove that and there’s no book. The original clues get compromised or are mostly ignored by the detective. For example, the body found in the beginning of the book – the book itself makes it very clear the first body should’ve been found elsewhere or never found.
Now, Natasha. Detective Stilwell is in love, according to the pages. He will manipulate, lie to, and ignore Natasha “Tash” Dano over and over. His treatment towards her is reckless, irresponsible, and borderline abusive. Although it is completely fine to describe an abusive relationship in a fiction book, the term for what we see is fridging. Fridging is when a character is introduced for the sole purpose of being killed and placed in a fridge, so the detective has business to do. I felt that the female protagonist only exists to increase the difficulty level to Detective Stillwell. The character development for her felt superficial but it is like that for the rest of the characters as well, except maybe the main victim, whose life and dreams we’ll explore in greater depths.
The best part of the book is the cover. It is beautiful and was one of the reasons to read it last week.
I rated Nightshade with 2*/5. One of the stars is a bonus for the cover and the whole Catalina idea. The content is perhaps the worst I’ve read by Michael Connelly.
