FRIDAY FINDS
showcases the books you ‘found’ and added to your To Be Read (TBR) list…
whether you found them online, or in a bookstore, or in the library — wherever!
(they aren’t necessarily books you purchased).

So, come on — share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!
Click on the logo to add your link

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Today, I’m presenting the last 5 titles added to my Goodreads TBR, with the synopsis copied from Goodreads as well.

FICTION

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest
and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz.
He does not understand the reason for his fate.
He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish.
And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.”
In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.
The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events,
not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses
–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense.
Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment,
Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

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NONFICTION

Few westerners will ever be able to understand Muslim or Afghan society unless they are part of a Muslim family.
Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century.
In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport.
Chesler was now the property of her husband’s family and had no rights of citizenship.
Back in Afghanistan, her husband, a wealthy, westernized foreign college student with dreams of reforming his country, reverted to traditional and tribal customs.
Chesler found herself unexpectedly trapped in a posh polygamous family, with no chance of escape.
She fought against her seclusion and lack of freedom, her Afghan family’s attempts to convert her from Judaism to Islam, and her husband’s wish to permanently tie her to the country through childbirth.
Drawing upon her personal diaries, Chesler recounts her ordeal, the nature of gender apartheid—and her longing to explore this beautiful, ancient, and exotic country and culture.
Chesler nearly died there but she managed to get out, returned to her studies in America, and became an author and an ardent activist for women’s rights throughout the world.
An American Bride in Kabul is the story of how a naïve American girl learned to see the world through eastern as well as western eyes and came to appreciate Enlightenment values.
This dramatic tale re-creates a time gone by, a place that is no more, and shares the way in which Chesler turned adversity into a passion for world-wide social, educational, and political reform.

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“Cells to Civilizations” is the first unified account of how life transforms itself–from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations.
What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant, and a child who learns to walk and talk?
Award-winning scientist Enrico Coen synthesizes the growth of living systems and creative processes, and he reveals that the four great life transformations–evolution, development, learning, and human culture–while typically understood separately, actually all revolve around shared core principles and manifest the same fundamental recipe. Coen blends provocative discussion, the latest scientific research, and colorful examples to demonstrate the links between these critical stages in the history of life.

Coen tells a story rich with genes, embryos, neurons, and fascinating discoveries.
He examines the development of the zebra, the adaptations of seaweed, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and the formulations of Alan Turing.
He explores how dogs make predictions, how weeds tell the time of day, and how our brains distinguish a Modigliani from a Rembrandt. Locating commonalities in important findings, Coen gives readers a deeper understanding of key transformations and provides a bold portrait for how science both frames and is framed by human culture.
A compelling investigation into the relationships between our biological past and cultural progress, “Cells to Civilizations” presents a remarkable story of living change.

HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THESE BOOKS?
WHICH ONE IS YOUR FAVORITE
OR SOUNDS MORE APPEALING TO YOU?

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to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading,
along with your initial thoughts about the sentence,
impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.
Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

Click on the cover to read more about it,
as Heather Webb will be on tour at France Book Tours in January!

“The missive arrived in the night. I paced from bed to bureau and back again, finally pausing to open the velvet drapes. The moon cast a ghostly glow on the dogwood blooms and barren rose gardens. My gardens of paradise. Others had intended it to be my prison, but I found it a hard-earned refuge. A place of safety after a lifetime of flight,a heavy crown, and the deaths of so many I held dear.”

I’m almost done with this upcoming amazing historical fiction -to be released on the last day of December. I enjoy the descriptions of Martinique, the way the author related the events of the Revolution, and how she describes the characters of Josephine, her first husband and then the famous one!

WOULD YOU KEEP READING?
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS  IN A COMMENT PLEASE