35, NG22, M18, E35

Robert Crais, Hostage

Nachdem mir der Lesestoff ausgegangen war und ich mich erinnerte, wie gut der Standalone "The Two Minute Rule" von Crais gewesen war, probierte ich es mit diesem Einzelband aus 2010, und wurde nicht enttäuscht von der spannenden Story mit einigen ungewöhnlichen Wendungen. Aber ganz so gut wie Two Minute Rule ist es denn doch nicht.

Diesmal gings nach Breidenbach bei Lindlar, in die Wiesen und Weiden über Oberbreidenbach.

Die ländliche Idylle bei strahlend blauem Himmel und sehr angenehmen 22 Grad war purer Genuß.

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Bedrückend und erschreckend anzusehen waren die vielen toten Nadelbäume, größtenteils noch vom letzten Jahr verblieben.

Auch viele Misteln wirken bereits sehr angeschlagen.

Nur den Wildapfelbäumen scheint es noch gut zu gehen. Dem Löwenzahn sowieso. Und diese Woche soll es endlich regnen...

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Schön war's. Trotz allem.

34, NG21, M17, E34

Stephen King, If it Bleeds

Ich hatte den neuen King-Band schon vor einiger Zeit blind vorgestellt und guckte auch jetzt nicht vor dem lesen in die Synopsis. Darum war ich etwas überrascht, dass es sich hier nicht um einen Roman sondern um längere Kurzgeschichten oder, im Fall von der Titelstory, eine Novelle handelte. Und dann noch überraschter, als sich die Titel-Novelle als neue Holly Gibney-Story entpuppte. Die anderen drei Stories hätten mir auch schon gereicht, aber spätestens da hatte ich das Gefühl, es könnte nicht besser kommen. Okay, vielleicht mit noch einer Holly-Story - aber wir wollen mal nicht zu gierig sein...
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Man, talk about your trips down Memory Lane. I saw emails from long ago, photos of my dad from before his hair started to go gray, and IMs back and forth between me and Billy Bogan. No news in them really, just jokes, and illuminating information like I just farted, and incisive questions like Did you do your algebra. We'd been like a couple of kids with Del Monte cans connected by a length of waxed string. Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.
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(aus: Mr Harrigan's Phone)
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"I love you, Mom," Holly says, and ends the call.
Is that true? Yes. It's liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end. Could she break the chain? Strike off the manacle? Perhaps. She's discussed that possibility with Allie Winters many times, especially after her mother told her - proudly - that she voted for Donald Trump (oough). Will she do it? Not now, maybe never. When Holly was growing up, Charlotte Gibney taught her - patiently, perhaps even with good intentions - that she was thoughtless, helpless, hapless, careless. That she was less. Holly believed that until she met Bill Hodges, who thought she was more. Now she has a life, and it is more often than not a happy one. If she broke with her mother, it would lessen her.
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(aus: If it Bleeds)
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I love Holly. It's as simple as that. She was supposed to be a minor character in 'Mr. Mercedes', no more than a quirky walk-on. Instead, she stole my heart (and almost stole the book). I'm always curious about what she's doing and how she's getting along. When I go back to her, I'm relieved to find she's still taking her Lexapro and still not smoking. I was curious, frankly, about the circumstances that made her what she is, and thought I could explore that a little ... as long as it added to the story, that is. This is Holly's first solo outing, and I hope I did it justice.
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(aus: Author's note)
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(Stephen King, If It Bleeds, 2020)
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33, NG20, F17, E33

Lisa Jewell, Watching You

Im Gegensatz zu The Passage reichte dieses Buch grade mal zwei Tage. Wie immer wurde ich regelrecht in die Handlung hineingesaugt, die diesmal schon fast wie ein echter Krimi daherkam, Red Herrings und Täuschungsmanöver inklusive. Bei der Schilderung von Tom Fitzwilliam musste ich immer wieder an die Bezeichnung denken, die Mary Stewart diesem Typ Mann in 'Thornyhold' nennt - Homme Fatale. Genau wie in Thornyhold ist sich dieser Typ Mann seiner Wirkung überhaupt nicht bewußt, zumindest stellt sich das am Ende heraus, nachdem Jewell mal wieder alle Vorerwartungen auf den Kopf stellt.
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But what do you do with an unattainable crush once it's yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that's the thing with getting what you want: all that yearning and dreaming and fantasising leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasising. And maybe that's what lay at the root of Joey's sudden and unexpected obsession with Tom Fitzwilliam. Maybe he arrived at the precise moment that the hole in Joey's interior fantasy life needed filling.
And if it hadn't been him, maybe it would have been someone else instead.
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And he'd smiled sadly and said,'I didn't choose her. She chose me.'
She'd started at that. So similar to what Tom had said about Nicola. She wondered if that was how it worked, that while most women spent their lives searching for the perfect man, men sat around waiting to be chosen and then made the best of it.
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(Lisa Jewell, Watching You, 2018)

32, NG19, M16, NA8, E32

Justin Cronin, The Passage

Die Beschreibung meiner Fanfiction-Genossin und die Tatsache, dass es einen so aktuellen Bezug hat, reizte mich es zumindest mit dem ersten Teil zu versuchen, und ich bereute es nicht. Nachdem der erste Wlzer endlich geschafft ist, denke ich wird Teil 2 und 3 auch nicht lange warten müssen.
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A man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove; to understand him, you had to figure out waht that dust was made of, what was left of him after the rest of his life, past and future, had turned to vapor. Usually it was something simple - anger or sadness or shame, or simply the need for forgiveness. A few wanted nothing at all; all that remained was a dumb animal rage at the world and all its systems.
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The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richard: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves.
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His body was an immense, dying thing his mind could scarcely contain. And yet it was still his - the same body he'd lived in all the days of his life. How strange it was to die, to feel it leaving him. Yet another part of him had always known. To die, his body told him. To die. That is why we live, to die.
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Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.
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He has to come to it on his own. Those were the words Prudence had said to Auntie, true words; for it was the way of all things. The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your hair with his big hand, saying, Ain't you pretty, ain't you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass.
...
Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to your and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. You old life ended and the train took you away to another, and the next thing you knew you were standing in the dust with helicopters and soldiers all around, and all you had to remember folks by was the picture you found in the pocket of your coat, the one your mama, who you would never see again in all the days of your life, had slipped in there when she'd hugged you at the door.
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So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.
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(Justin Cronin, The Passage, 2010)

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere - the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years - she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy.

(Justin Cronin, The Passage, 2010)

Frohe Ostern allerseits!

...und bleibt gesund!