Bookish Blog Hop || A Book You Haven't Read Yet By An Author You Love

It's april! That means it's time for another Bookish Blog Hop!

Each day, bloggers answer questions about themselves and the books they are reading.

Yesterday, we were over at the Upstream Writer Blog hosted by Leslie Conzatti where we talked about books set in the past.

Today's prompt is:

A Book you haven't read yet by an author you love!

It's weird to talk about it in April but I love Christmas horror. Every year I look forward to watching Krampus, A Christmas Horror Story, and Rare Exports. I know, it's kinda strange. While others are watching A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Miracle on 34th Street, I'm watching murderous elves and sinister santas. I'm always looking for holiday horror in story form to give me that same feeling so that's how i ran across Snowball by Gregory Bastianelli.

In Snowball, a group of motorists on their way home for Christmas get stuck on the highway in a freak blizzard. They end up in one of the couple's motorhome where they all start telling stories of their worst winter memory because that is TOTALLY what you do when trapped in a preternatural blizzard. A few of the stranded motorists set out to try to find help and end up in a worse position than they started. The book was so much fun and exactly what I was looking for: totally irreverent Christmas spirit!

(If you want, you can read my review of Snowball here.)

I was very excited when I saw that Gregory Bastianelli released another novel just last week; this time one that appears to be ecohorror leaning. In Shadow Flicker, an investigator is sent after strange events start happening in a town living in the shadow of wind turbines. I have the ebook in hand and hopefully will be able to start it soon!

From Goodreads, here's the blurb:

An old man nearly chokes to death after stuffing dandelion heads into his mouth. A pregnant cow repeatedly runs headlong into a fence post. Oscar Basaran investigates a series of strange events on the Kidney Island.

Investigator Oscar Basaran travels to Kidney Island off the coast of Maine to document the negative effects of shadow flicker from wind turbines on residents living near the windmills, but is unprepared for what he encounters from the islanders.
Oscar’s research shows that sleep deprivation, light deficiency and ringing headaches brought on by the noise and constant strobe-like effect of the sun filtered through the spinning blades of the turbines brings on hallucinatory episodes for the closest neighbors to the machines.

Melody Larson’s elderly father nearly chokes to death after stuffing dandelion heads into his mouth. The Granberrys' pregnant cow repeatedly runs headlong into a fence post. Tatum Gallagher mourns her young son who vanished more than a year ago, presumed swept out to sea by a wave while fishing on the rocky shore, but several people claim to see him appear only in the glimmer of the shadow flicker.

Aerosource, the energy corporation that owns the turbines, hired Oscar to investigate the neighbors’ claims, but the insurance agent shows no allegiance to the conglomerate, especially after learning a previous employee sent to the island a year before has disappeared without a trace.

When Oscar meets former island school science teacher Norris Squires, fired for teaching his students about the harmful effects of shadow flicker, he learns a theory regarding Aerosource that sounds too preposterous to believe.

While it seems the shadow flicker effect has driven some of the island’s animals crazy, is it possible it’s caused an even worse mental breakdown among the human inhabitants? Or is something more nefarious at work on the island?

As Oscar’s investigation deepens, he discovers the turbines create an unexpected phenomena kept secret by a select group of people on Kidney Island who have made a scientific breakthrough and attempt to harness its dark power.

Join the Facebook group to be part of future blog hops

Here's what the others had to say:

Louisa - https://epicbooksociety.com/

In the Tall Grass by Stephen King

I have read A LOT of Stephen King books and haven’t found many that I didn’t enjoy (the only one I didn’t enjoy was Cell, which took too long to get to the point). To read all of them would take years, so I am slowly trying to get through the collection. He is the most influential and iconic thriller and horror fiction writer whose novels have made several feature films, including The Shining, IT, Carrie and The Mist, to name a few. 

I enjoyed reading the classics in the past, and I’ve recently read The Institute and The Outsider, but for some reason I skipped In The Tall Grass. I saw the movie for this novel recently, and thought the storyline was a bit weak and could have been summed up in a few sentences: It follows the story of a pregnant college student called Becky who is traveling to her aunts with her twin brother Cal. Along the way, they pass a field of tall grass where they hear a boy called Tobin calling for help. They venture into the tall grass to help Tobin, only to find they cannot get out. Eventually, a bunch of weird stuff happens and it is clear that there is some enchantment on the tall grass that stops people from being able to leave.

Because I found the movie boring, I haven’t been able to pick up the book yet, even though I know that I will love it. This is the problem with watching the movie instead of reading the book - it puts you off.

Leslie Conzatti www.upstreamwriter.blogspot.com

Okay, I have to hype this up, because I’m so unbelievably excited!! There’s an indie author I have followed ever since he had just one self-published book with a bad blurb and a terrible cover–but an UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME story, and that is R. R. Virdi, author of The Grave Report novels, the first of which was that book I mentioned.

This was back in 2014, and this book, as terribly-presented as it was, easily earned a place among the Top 5 Books I read for that year! I loved it, and I couldn’t rave about it enough! He kept writing, and every successive book in that series just got better and better. He improved the covers and improved the blurbs–the series was even nominated a couple times for a Dragon Award, and he was actually a finalist, although they didn’t win at the time. He started out another series, and I absolutely loved that one, too. I confess, I haven’t yet read his monster-hunter/LitRPG series, but The Grave Reports stands out as pretty much the best thing he’s written, in my estimation.

Which brings me to the book being released this year, produced by a legit publishing house, Tor Books. It’s called The First Binding, and it’s being compared to The Name of The Wind and The Lies of Locke Lamora–it’s a thousand-plus-page epic fantasy, and I’m so flipping excited!! Definitely I would recommend this to any fantasy lovers!

Kriti @ Armed with A Book

Tags: Twitter | Facebook

Marie Benedict is one of my favorite authors! The first book I read of hers was The Other Einstein and since then, I have dived into The Mystery of Mrs. Christie and Her Hidden Genius. I also had the chance to interview Marie on The Nerd Daily and honestly, all her future books are on my TBR. The one I want to highlight today is The Personal Librarian. As an avid reader and book collector, I am drawn to books about librarians and manuscripts. Below is the excerpt of the book:

The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian—who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray. In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps build a world-class collection. But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle's complexion isn't dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths to which she must go—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

Vidya Tiru @LadyInReadWrites
(Instagram | Twitter | Facebook )

I am going to go with a list here instead of just one book. A few of these books are also on similar top ten lists on my blog here and here. It is going to be a short list of five though this can become a list of too-many!!

Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed (His Kite Runner is one of our favorites)
Kim Michele Richardson’s The Unbreakable Child (I loved The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek)
Shel Silverstein’s Everything on It
Colson Whitehead: Any book other than Underground Railroad (read this already)