Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times #5: My New Books Stack

We'll be having at least two inches of snow tonight, so Ken is not out of the woods yet (re: my header photo.)

I have had a lot of fun purchasing quite a few books this year thus far, and I seem to show no sign of stopping. My stack of new books is perched on one side of the double bed in the loft, where I sometimes read, especially in the summer months. Because it sits up a flight of stairs from the living room, it's well air-conditioned. On frigid winter days, I also retreat to read here, because my bedroom reading spot is quite exposed to our coldest winds from the northwest.

I won't wax on about new books you know and have heard about, but I will mention that Hilary Mantel's The Mirror in the Light is waiting patiently for me to turn to it.

I won't be reading it in the next month because I'm dying to tackle one of my very new "old" books, Gulag by the American Russian scholar Anne Applebaum. This work of history made a huge splash when it first appeared in 2004, because Applebaum was one of the first scholars to produce a major work of Soviet history after the opening of archives in Russia following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Gulag was a Pulitzer Prize Winner, a National Book Award Finalist, and it received high acclaim from English and American Russian historians. In 1952, approximately 2.5 million Soviet citizens were shipped to the gulags in the hinterlands of the Soviet Union, many in Siberia, but loads of them in provinces elsewhere. And that was not an unusual year. In 1953, the year  of Stalin's death, more than this number were shipped to the gulags. In the mid-late 1930s about 1.5 million each year. And so on. With the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev in 1954-55, many imprisoned in the gulags started to be released and started to make their way home.

My next book in the stack is an exciting new novel, Greenwood, by Michael Christie, a Canadian author. I was stunned by the 4.4 Goodreads rating for this novel. (Were these reviews submitted by frustrated book marketers desperately disappointed by their inability to promote this book the way they'd like?) Just wondering. Most reviewers gave it a "5." This does not often happen when I search for info on Goodreads. This novel, set in the future of 2038, is set on an island off the coast of British Columbia, and revolves around the near-legendary existence of very old, old-growth trees there. Definitely check out the link for more info. Michael Christie won awards for his previous novel, published in 2015.

For all of us crime-novel devotees, I did some more research about the books by the Icelandic crime author Ragnar Jonasson. I know some of you have read Snowblind.  I really, really liked it, and have contemplated reading another in that series of books, but it is difficult, because they were translated and published in English out of the order in which they were published in Iceland. This is what has been reported that I've read. If I am wrong, or if you have updated info, I beg you, please do set me straight.
Because I'm desperate to return to Iceland with Jonasson, I landed and purchased The Darkness: A Thriller, which is the first novel in the Hulda series. It's set partly in Reykjavik and partly in the "Icelandic Highlands." Yrsa Sigurdardottir said, "The Darkness is a true masterpiece of a crime novel, introducing an original protagonist, a plot full of twists and turns, and an ending that leaves you gasping for air." Hulda is supposed to be retiring, but she is allowed one last cold case. Doesn't that tempt you?

One last teaser: Quite frankly, I have four books ongoing at the moment. After reading another 50 pages in Stalin's Daughter today (it's so good-reads like the best page-turner novel), I continued reading an ARC I happily received and am now so sucker-punched into it. omg.
I'm delighted by Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, to be published on May 12th by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins. It is deeply gothic, a coming of age novel but NOT YA, with many sci-fi genre elements to twist and turn it. Very cleverly written by a young writer in her 20s, who is a graduate of Yale, a resident of Brooklyn, and who works as an archivist at a modern art museum. I will be saying much more about this one... HELP! I think I should stay in bed all day tomorrow and finish it. That good.