What I’m Reading: Or Not Reading

I started the audio book A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel by Amor Towles.  I didn’t finish it.  I might someday though.  This one came up in my on line library.  I had been on the waiting list as it sounds very much like a book I’d like to read.  The problem, I had a couple other books come up at the same time….and I had a head cold.

I started listening to it but with a pounding head, I couldn’t concentrate.  The writing is much more advanced than a “fluff” for fun read….I don’t mind that.  I just couldn’t do it when my head was like it was.  It’s not a book that I could listen too and be doing a lot of other things.  So this is on my list to someday come back to.  Has anyone else read it?

Here’s what Amazon had to say, “He can’t leave his hotel. You won’t want to.  From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.”

Amazon readers gave it 4.7 stars.  With that high of a rating, I really need to get back to it.

The other book I passed on was…. The Unseen World: A Novel by Liz Moore.

The book looked good.  The premise seemed good.

The only problem, I didn’t read the last sentence when I read the review.

Here’s what Amazon had to say, “Ada Sibelius is raised by David, her brilliant, eccentric, socially inept single father, who directs a computer science lab in 1980s-era Boston. Home-schooled, Ada accompanies David to work every day; by twelve, she is a painfully shy prodigy. The lab begins to gain acclaim at the same time that David’s mysterious history comes into question. When his mind begins to falter, leaving Ada virtually an orphan, she is taken in by one of David’s colleagues. Soon she embarks on a mission to uncover her father’s secrets: a process that carries her from childhood to adulthood. What Ada discovers on her journey into a virtual universe will keep the reader riveted until The Unseen World’s heart-stopping, fascinating conclusion.”

So I found another review…the one from my online library…it included this “…..Eventually, Ada pioneers a type of software that enables her to make contact with her past and to reconcile the man she thought she knew with the truth.”

Um…I’m not a time travel girl…so I left this one before I even started it.

Amazon readers give the book 4.6 stars.  If you like time travel, this might be a good one….I’m the historical fiction girl – it’s hard to reconcile that with fantasy.