My mom has taken to collecting authors. When she finds an author she likes she tries to find all his books and then keeps track of when both she and dad have read them. She's happy to pass them along providing you keep them together so I get the benefit of this book collecting.

The last author she gave me was Michael Connelly. His continuuing protagonist is Harry Bosch (Hieronymous Bosch! How's that for a great name!). I've just read the first one called The Concrete Blonde. I don't believe this is the first in the series-just the first of the ones mom has collected. To be honest, I haven't decided if I like these books, yet. It's fairly dark, combines both police/detective work and courtroom drama. Maybe it's a little too dark and the language a little bit rough for me although I have to admit it kept me until the end. Harry is an interesting, intelligent, broken character and Connelly uses the story well to advance our knowledge of his past.

These last couple of weeks I have also read Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. This was written in 1992 in Denmark and translated to English the following year. Smilla Jasperson is a Greenlander living in Denmark and the book talks about the difficulties she feels in not being completely comfortable in either society and in the injustices foisted upon one culture by the other. Smilla is brilliant, anti-social, tough, and intriguing. She becomes attached against her will to a little boy, also a Greenlander, in her apartment building. One day she arrives home to find that he has fallen off the roof and died. However, because she "knows" snow and how it looks in any situation she knows he did not simply fall. The book becomes a suspense thriller, a detective story, and a psychological description. I found it to be an absorbing story and beautifully written.

My bookclub chose it and then it was "unchosen" because of the fear that some would find it inappropriate or be offended. Sad decision. We read Infidel and I can't imagine being more offended by anything than that. One of the decisions we had made in our first meeting was that the person whose turn it was to choose the book did not have to have read it-only to have been intriqued by it. If it was found to be inappropriate or offensive each person could choose to continue or stop reading and that itself would constitute part of the discussion. Why and how it was offensive, where the original recommendation came from, do we continue to take recommendations from that source or not, etc. I spent some time debating about even continuing in this club. I'll bring this problem up next week at our meeting and see where it goes in discussion.

Just for fun-we're still finishing up the Olympics. I think it's lasting longer this year than aver before!