The Alibi Book Club #11 | 2016 Book Haul

My last book post featured two festive novels, but now Christmas is over and 2016 is upon us, I thought I would spend money on some much needed new reads. Having read all my favourites over and over and looking through my youtuber books a thousand times, I thought I would broaden my tastes and buy some books I never got round to read last year. I was stalking Jennie's blog and I really missed losing myself in a good read for months, so here is a different kind of post to show you what I bought...

001: Ian McEwan - Atonement:
I've wanted to read this for a while, but since studying Enduring Love for A Levels, it kind of put me off. My friend said it was really good, so I thought to wait a bit then read it. I'm currently eighty pages in and it's very good so far, though you have to be really awake to read the long descriptions and not half asleep in the evening haha.

"On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone."

002: Karen Joy Fowler - We Are Completely Beside Ourselves:
I was drawn to this book purely because of the title, but the description of the plot sounds really good. It's one of those books that I've always seen on the Waterstones recommendation tables, so how could I object to that? I really can't wait to read this!

"Rosemary's young, just at college, and she's decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we're not going to tell you too much either: you'll have to find out for yourselves, round about page 77, what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other. Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone - vanished from her life. There's something unique about Rosemary's sister, Fern. And it was this decision, made by her parents, to give Rosemary a sister like no other, that began all of Rosemary's trouble. So now she's telling her story: full of hilarious asides and brilliantly spiky lines, it's a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice. It's funny, clever, intimate, honest, analytical and swirling with ideas that will come back to bite you. We hope you enjoy it, and if, when you're telling a friend about it, you do decide to spill the beans about Fern - it's pretty hard to resist - don't worry. One of the few studies Rosemary doesn't quote says that spoilers actually enhance reading."

003: Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None:
Just like probably anyone over Christmas, I was gripped with the BBC's three part adaption of Agatha Christie's novel. I loved it so much that I wanted to read the novel because I have an everlasting trust that novels are always better than films/tv adaptions. I haven't been proven wrong so far so I'm super excited to get stuck into it.

"Ten strangers, apparently with little in common, are lured to an island mansion off the coast of Devon by the mysterious U.N.Owen. Over dinner, a record begins to play, and the voice of an unseen host accuses each person of hiding a guilty secret. That evening, former reckless driver Tony Marston is found murdered by a deadly dose of cyanide. The tension escalates as the survivors realise the killer is not only among them but is preparing to strike again...and again..."

004: Anthony Horowitz - Moriarty:
After reading The House of Silk, I was pretty stoked to see there was a second installment in Horowitz's version of Sherlock. I've always liked murder mysteries but this series is what got me into crime novels. And of course Moriarty is just the best villain ever to be honest.

"Sherlock Holmes is dead. Days after Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty fall to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls, Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase arrives from New York. The death of Moriarty has created a poisonous vacuum which has been swiftly filled by a fiendish new criminal mastermind. Ably assisted by Inspector Athelney Jones, a devoted student of Holmes's methods of investigation and deduction, Chase must hunt down this shadowy figure, a man much feared but seldom seen, a man determined to engulf London in a tide of murder and menace. The game is afoot ..."

005: Jennifer Egan - A Visit From The Goon Squad:
I tried to read this when it was first released but being around 13/14, I couldn't get into it as my interests were mainly with teen novels and I was only just starting to read adult fiction. But after seeing Jennie review it on her blog, I thought to give it a second chance as I'm coming up for 19 now. Wow, I am old...

"Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house-and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, revelling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardour for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang-who thrived and who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both-and escape the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers."

I hope you didn't get too bored with the descriptions, but if you enjoy this post, then I'll do more whenever I buy books. But for the mean time I'll just review them in the series as I go through them.