Progress report: ARCs

When we first moved to the woods of Maine, our house wasn't even on Google maps. Now the UPS man has found our house so often these past two weeks that he doesn't have to look us up anymore. The ARCs are piling up, so I need to buckle down and read instead of spending so much time blogging. In addition to Andrew Jackson, (see earlier post), here's what's sitting on my TBR table awaiting review:

• Sacred Hearts Random House, pub date: July 14, 2009, 304 pgs

From Sarah Dunant, acclaimed author of the Birth of Venus and In the Company of Courtesans, comes an engrossing new novel set in a convent in Renaissance Italy where a defiant sixteen-year-old girl has just been confined against her will--for life.

I can't wait to read this...it's next up after I finish three current reads: Dewey (for the 999 challenge Libraries category) , Lobster Chronicles (for 999- read again category), and Tall Tales (for 999-short stories).

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• Evolution of God by Robert Wright; Little, Brown, pub date: Jun 8, 2009, 576 pgs

The New York Times Book Review calls it " A feast of great thinking and writing about the most profound issues there are...fiercely intelligent, beautifully written, and engrossingly original."

I've had Karen Armstrong's History of God on my TBR pile (in fact I've started it twice) so I think I'll give this one a go and see how they compare. It's definitely going to take a few weeks to read it. So look for a review later this summer.

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• Cemetery Dance, an Hachette Audio book by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, and read by Rene Auberjonois--13 hrs of listening.

Publisher's Weekly says: "Bestsellers Preston and Child kill off a regular supporting character at the outset of this suspenseful tale of urban terror, their ninth to feature FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast (after The Wheel of Darkness). William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife, Nora Kelly, an anthropologist with the New York Museum of Natural History, are celebrating their first anniversary when Smithback is fatally stabbed in their Manhattan apartment, apparently by a creepy neighbor, Colin Fearing, an out-of-work British actor."

I haven't read the previous books, but this sounds like one I can't wait to listen to. As soon as I finish Cutting with Stone, this is next on the audio list.

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• The Night Gardener by George Pelecano; a Back Bay books reprint hot off the presses, 400 pgs.

From Amazon: "The haunting story of three cops:one good, one bad, one broken, and the murder that reunites them in a showdown decades in the making.... Gus Ramone is good police, a former Internal Affairs investigator now working homicide for the citys Violent Crime branch. His new case involves the death of a local teenager named Asa, whose body has been found in a community garden. The murder unearths intense memories of a case Ramone worked as a patrol cop 20 years earlier, when he and his partner, Dan Doc Holiday, assisted a legendary detective named T.C. Cook. The series of murders, all involving local teenage victims, was never solved. In the years since, Holiday has left the force under a cloud of morals charges. Cook has retired, but he has never stopped agonizing about the Night Gardener killings. The new case draws the three men together, re-igniting the love, regret, and anger that once burned between them, and old ghosts walk once more as they try to lay to rest the monster who has stalked their dreams."

I may have to fight my husband (an aspiring crime writer) for this one. Seems he's had Pelecanos on his TBR list for quite awhile. I think he thought I got this for him for Father's Day. So...if I play my cards right, we could have a guest reviewer for this one.

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• I'm waiting for at least 3 more I know are on the way, so I need to get cracking...