Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings has
announced the details for this year's RIP Challenge. Check them out and sign up to
join in the fun!
I will be attempting the Peril The First
Challenge: to read four books from the darker side of fiction. Here are the
titles (Descriptions from Goodreads):
The Little Stranger by
Sarah Waters
I will be reading this as part of a Read Along hosted
by The Estella Society.
The Little Stranger follows
the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life
of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his
home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to
the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand
and handsome, is now in decline-its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with
weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But
are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life?
Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is
about to become entwined with his.
The
Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I will be
reading this as part of a Read Along hosted by Carl at Stainless Steel
Droppings
After the grisly murder of his
entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other
supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as
Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a
sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary
guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There
are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the
graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already
killed Bod's family . . .
World War Z:
An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
This is a book that I have read before, but I really loved it and want to have the chance to review it.
Ranging from the now infamous village
of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological
trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern
forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the
cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided
hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt
where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable
chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
As with World war Z, this is one of my favorites and I want to review it and share my enthusiasm.
A Boeing 777 arrives at JFK and is on
its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are
pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet.
Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr.
Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a
rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and
boards the plane. What he finds makes his
blood run cold.
I'm so glad you are joining us for your first RIP event! And even more happy you are joining us for the group reads. I've been looking forward to reading The Little Stranger and I've been wanting to re-read The Graveyard Book for awhile now but was holding out for RIP.
ReplyDeleteI read The Strain a few years back and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I don't normally go in for contemporary reads like this but I am a del Toro fan and he did not disappoint.
I'm leaning toward doing both of the readalongs as well, although I'm still a bit undecided on the first one because of scheduling.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to see what you think of Max Brooks. If he has his father's sense of humor then I'd definitely like to try his books.
You know me: I am always happy to find a good Read Along to join! :)
ReplyDeleteI am also a fan of del Toro and I found The Strain very cinematic in the way it was written. In that way it is similar to WWZ, which is more like a series of vignettes than a cohesive narrative.
Doh! I didn't realize who his parents were! :D
ReplyDeleteWWZ is a great read: in many ways it is much more than a zombie story. It explores different societies and their responses to the disaster, which is such a great change to the normal offerings in the genre. I read it a year or so ago and have been trying to push it ever since: I am hoping that my review will do that! :)