Author Archives: smellincoffee

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About smellincoffee

Citizen, librarian, reader with a boundless wonder for the world and a curiosity about all the beings inside it.

Camino Island

Posted on December 25, 2017 by smellincoffee

Camino Island © 2017 John Grisham 290 pages Mercer Mann thought she’d reached the bottom of her career. After publishing early, and young, she’s floundered ever since, and keeps herself eating — and keeps the creditors for her $60,000 in … Continue reading →

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Crimson Shadow

Posted on December 24, 2017 by smellincoffee

Star Trek the Fall: Crimson Shadow © 2013 Una McCormack 352 pages After ten years of reconstruction, the Federation is preparing to leave Cardassia. Not all the locals gathering outside are there to wish its engineers and social workers a … Continue reading →

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Factory Girls

Posted on December 20, 2017 by smellincoffee

Factory Girls : From Village to City in a Changing China© Leslie Chang420 pages China as a whole may have a third more men than women because of the one-child rule and a preference for male children, but in Dongguan … Continue reading →

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Revelations and Dust

Posted on December 18, 2017 by smellincoffee

Star Trek the Fall:  Revelation and Dust 401 pages © 2013 David R. George III David R. George takes a bullet for the team in The Fall: Revelation and Dust. First in a five-part series with five participating authors, Revelation … Continue reading →

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Country Driving

Posted on December 12, 2017 by smellincoffee

Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory© 2010 Peter Hessler448 pages First things first: that statue on the cover intrigued me enough that I bought both books that used photographs of it.  Emperor Far Away made nary … Continue reading →

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books from 2017 (so far)

Posted on December 12, 2017 by smellincoffee

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from the Broke and the Bookish concerns favorite books for the year, and while there’s still a chance that some amazing book could pop up in the last two weeks of the year,  I’ll go … Continue reading →

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Favorite Covers from 2017

Posted on December 10, 2017 by smellincoffee

Although we’re not supposed to judge books by their cover, it still happens. A good cover can draw the shopper’s eye, and impart some feeling of what the book has inside.  Perhaps it’s an atmospheric murder mystery, a  grimly functional war … Continue reading →

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Empires of Light

Posted on December 9, 2017 by smellincoffee

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World © 2004 Jill Jonnes464 pages Empires of Light is less a history of how the United States became electrified and more a biography of three electrical titans – … Continue reading →

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Down and Out in Paris and London

Posted on December 7, 2017 by smellincoffee

Down and Out in Paris and London© 1933 George Orwell224 pages “Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge. “Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no … Continue reading →

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Welcome to the Orthodox Church

Posted on December 3, 2017 by smellincoffee

Welcome to the Orthodox Church © 2015 Fredrica Mathews-Green  384 pages What it means to be liturgical can’t be encapsulated in a creed; liturgy has to be practiced,  experienced.  In Welcome to Orthodoxy,  FMG creates a fictional Orthodox parish and … Continue reading →

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