Monkey Gods, Snakes, Clairvoyants and Cowgirl KGB agents
From our friend Mike B who always sends interesting book suggestions and was the instigator of our “Tales from Nightstand Book Mountain” blog entries! “I finished "The Lost City of The Monkey God" by Douglas Preston. Super interesting story on so many levels. Animals hadn't seen people in over 800 years and were curious about us, not afraid. Earth's most perfect disease raised it's ugly head (leshmaniasis). I wanted to visit this site until I read about that. Oh and the fer de lance!!*
I'm currently reading "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose.”
*Fer de Lance: a large, highly venomous pit viper found in tropical regions of Central and South America YIKES!
Thanks, Mike! I hope you had fun at your tiny cabin with a bunch of critters and humans filling it up last weekend!
I (Hannah) am re-reading The House of the Spirits (La Casa de los Espíritus) by Isabel Allende, because we’ve been watching a new series based on it and it’s very good. I read this book like THIRTY YEARS AGO. It’s fun to read it again. I think it’s my favorite work of magical realism that I’ve read. :)
Here’s a short blurb about it:
In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future.
The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.
Chris is reading Polostan by Neal Stephenson, book one of the “Bomb Light” series. He’s reading it in anticipation of Volume 2 coming out in the Fall.
Here’s a little blurb on that one: The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.
