Friday Finds

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This week I didn't come across any new books to add to my TBR list so instead I'm going to share with you some of those books that have been on the list for a while but I just haven't manged to get a hold of yet. If you've have read any of these books I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on them.

This book just sounds really fascinating.

The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World, and the Way We Live Today
by Ted Conover

Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.

With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity.

A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life,
advancing civilization even as they set it back.

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I can't remember where I came across this book but it sounds like a fun and enjoyable read.

All My Friends Are Superheroes
by Andrew Kaufman

All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. There’s the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she’s sure that Tom has abandoned her. So she’s moving to Vancouver. She’ll use her superpower to make Vancouver perfect and leave all the heartbreak in Toronto. With no idea Tom’s beside her, she boards an airplane. Tom has until the wheels touch the ground in Vancouver to convince her he’s there, or he loses her forever.

A funny, sweet story, All My Friends Are Superheroes will remind you the greatest superpower of all is love.

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I really want to read this book, which I've heard great things about, though I have a tendency to shy away from books that may effect me emotionally, as I'm sure this one will. But hopefully one of these days I'll "man-up" and get myself to the bookstore to buy it.

To the End of the Land
by David Grossman

Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the “notifiers” who might darken her door with the worst possible news.

Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days’ leave being offered by their commander—a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy.

Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers, and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a “war and peace” rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the joys and anguish of raising children.

Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew.

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I don't often add mysteries to my wishlist but this one sounds like one I might really enjoy.

Double Black (A Ski Diva Mystery #1)
by Wendy Clinch

First in a very cool (literally) skiing series that introduces a sleuth who has ditched grad school, along with her cheating fiancée, to become a ski bum

Twenty-something Stacey Curtis is living the life she’s always dreamed about—until she finds a dead body in the ski chalet. And after her new landlord turns out to be the local sheriff, her life contains a whole lot more suspense than she bargained for. Populated with quirky characters, loaded with New England atmosphere, and co-starring a handsome young hunk with nerve, a sense of humor about it all, and an enormous trust fund, Double Black is an exciting run down some mysterious and treacherous trails.

This week's fun image:

via Imgur