Currently Reading

“The President is Missing” by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

This came out within the last few weeks and is a joint effort by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. My mom and I both bought copies at Target ($18 each for a hardcover), and she’s way ahead of me. I haven’t been reading as much, but I’m hoping to get some chapters in this weekend.

There’s a cyberterror threat facing the president, and he has to handle it before the country and ends up going missing. It’s a thriller, and it already seems really authentic. The only downside is that it’s ~500 pages, but sometimes I like to read longer books.

Past Readings

“The Soul of America” by Jon Meacham

I found this book because Jon Meacham is a contributor on MSNBC and although I don’t normally read history books, I thought I’d give it a try. It looks back on periods in American history and how different presidents handled situations during their administrations, played against the background of current politics in the country. It covered the creation of the Constitution, Lincoln and slavery, immigration in the early 1920s, McCarthyism, and the civil rights movement.

I had to look up a few things on Wikipedia to get a general understanding of what he was talking about, but that could be partly due to not learning about it in any history class. Each chapter looked at a different time period, event, or situation, and it’s interesting to see that history can, in fact, repeat itself.

You have to be dedicated to reading this book, and it’s not a summer beach read by any means, but it’s a good book if you want to learn more about American history.

“The Ex” + “The Wife” by Alafair Burke

I read both of these books within ~one week. I picked up “The Wife” on the new fiction section at my library and read it in four days. I don’t read psychological thrillers, but these were both really good.

“The Wife” had a few crazy turns at the very end but everything that led up to it kept me turning the page to see what happened next. The main character, Angela, has a troubled and mysterious past and is married to Jason, a best-selling author and professor at NYU, who is accused of sexual misconduct by two women. He gets arrested and then one of the women end up missing. Through the points of view of Angela and the SVU detective handling the case, we see what happens before, during, and after Jason’s arrest, and learn more about Angela’s past.

“The Ex” had one turn at the end, that I still had a few questions about at the end, but I still really liked the book. The main character, Olivia, is a defense lawyer who takes the case of her ex-fiance, who is accused of a triple homicide. He says he’s been framed, and she has to dig through all of the evidence and wonder if he’s telling the truth about what really happened.

My library has some of Burke’s other books that I hope to read soon.

“The Queen of Hearts” by Kimmery Martin

True life: I only picked up this book because I thought the cover was pretty. It turned out to be a good book. Thankfully I’ve watched half of the ER series, so I understood most of the medical terms. The book focuses on two best friends who are doctors, and a part of their past returns, who was their chief resident in med school. There’s this “big” secret that happened between the three of them, and his return brings it all back up.

I didn’t agree with the ending and how the main characters acted, and the big secret is drawn out a little too much and it gets lost in the middle among more current events. There was also a lot of backstory and parts of it didn’t seem relevant. I don’t think I would recommend this book to someone, but I don’t regret reading it.

What have you read lately?