Good reads

I tend to shy away from popular fiction  by prolific writers, simply because it's not always that good, and for as much as 25 bucks a book, it had better be magnificent and rarely is.  However, someone gifted me with a John Grisham book this week, "The Street Lawyer" and once I started it, had to just plow right through.  Read it in one day, if not one sitting.   Not a huge amount of grue (some writers, like Patricia Cornwell, seem to be of the splattered brains genre, and it gets wayyy overdone),  and a good steady march to the end.

I have reached  the fifth book in the six-novel "Lucia" series,  always fun,  although by this time parts of it are becoming tedious--been there, done that about nine times--but it was and is still fun to read. 

And a stunning book, gently written, by Gail Tsukiyama, "The Samurai's Garden" about a 20 year old Chinese boy who is sent to Japan for his health in 1937 just after the begining of the Sino-Japanese war, and what happens to him there.  It's the kind of novel that stays with you afterwards, for quite some time.