Hi everyone and welcome to March!

I was hoping to send this out last night after working on it during the day but ran out of time. It did remind me of a few years ago when I sent one out late at night and received a hilarious complaint.

It wasn’t too late – around 9:30 pm EST which is where they were located. But I had someone e-mail me furious, stating that I sent the e-mail too late and “woke them up”. It’s not like I call everyone on the telephone to let them know the newsletter is in their inbox. It’s an e-mail! Is this the first ever e-mail they have received after bedtime?

Always makes me laugh.

I took my family to Toronto for the weekend this month. I had gone there with my 15-year-old daughter last April, and we ended up spending approximately 8 hours at the Eaton Centre as she shopped for clothes. Not the most fun experience of my life.

She wanted to go to the Eaton Centre again this time and I groaned. However, it ended up being a pleasant surprise as she only wanted to check out a few clothes shops. We ended up spending over 3 hours at the large Chapters bookstore there!

It’s been cool seeing her get into books, and it was even cooler getting to spend so long in a bookstore! With being kindle only, I never really visit them anymore. I forgot how fun it was to “judge a book by its cover” – literally adding authors to my TBR list primarily due to the book cover.

I’m going to make an effort to visit a bookstore or library at least once per month just to browse. It brought back a lot of memories of when I would do that on a regular basis, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until then.

At the end of the visit, she came over to me with two books and said “I can’t decide which one I want”. My response of course was “Which ONE? Buy them BOTH. Heck it’s books – buy them all!”.

Lot of work is being done over at the new site, Book Notification. Primarily it has been adding new authors due to all the new author requests and Goodreads imports files. We have now added about 4,000 new authors since the January 1st beta launch.

While that has been the focus, we also launched the new My Library section yesterday, which I love. The best part of it is being able to easily see all the books you have read, and what you rated them. There’s also a “Want To Read” section where you can add all of the books you want to read. I’m surprised I didn’t break the site by filling that all out.

Anyway head on over to Book Notification so you can get notified on your favourite author’s latest books, print book lists, track all of the books you have read and much more! And thanks to everyone for their patience when it comes to the Goodreads imports, and the new author requests. Working on them all as fast as I can and hope to be caught up by the end of March so we can focus on rolling out more cool features.

Whenever I go on a trip, I always like to read a psychological thriller. One of those standalone novels with short chapters, twists and turns, and the type of book that gets its hooks into you. You don’t choose to read; the book has a gravitational pull that you can’t ignore.

So I decided to read my second Freida McFadden novel, Do You Remember. The plot of this one is about a woman who wakes up every day and doesn’t remember anything for the past 10 years. It took a little bit to get into it but once I had read a few chapters, I was hooked.

I thought it was overall a good book. Not enough for me to put Freida into the upper echelon of authors in that genre, but good enough that I ended up reading another book by Freida, The Housemaid, immediately after that.

While reading that – it hit me as to why I am enjoying the books, but don’t feel the urge to recommend them strongly here. From the books I have read by her so far – the characters all feel very dumbed down. There’s no subtlety to the characters.

If you are meant to hate a character, the point will be hammered home repeatedly in a very obvious manner. The plot can be similar to that, and the characters can be wooden or two-dimensional at times. It borders on young adult territory at times.

Despite that, I am still really enjoying the books I ended up staying up until 2 am the first day I was reading The Housemaid, falling into that “one more chapter” trap for about 30 chapters.

She had a sequel to that which was released in February, called The Housemaids Secret. While I enjoyed the first book, I wasn’t sure if there was enough to it to warrant a sequel. Thankfully I was wrong. I really enjoyed that book, and she does a great job when it comes to big “Gone Girl” like twists.

I believe all of her books are on Kindle Unlimited, and it was a bit frustrating because my Kindle Unlimited list of books is maxed out – meaning for every book I want to add, I have to return one.

So this motivated me to read a few Kindle Unlimited books I have out and try and clear that list. I started with Noble Beginnings, the first thriller in the Jack Noble series by L.T. Ryan.

This is hyped up as one to read if you like Jack Reacher, Mitch Rapp, etc. The CIA created Jack Noble, and now they are out to kill him. Similar to the Gray Man series.

The best thing I can say about it is it was a very quick read. It was all action, not a lot of substance. It did get better in the final act of the book though so I’ll at least read another book in the series.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I read. The new site continues to keep me very busy due to its success, and all of the new users that are signing up. Not complaining though, and hopefully by the end of March things will have calmed down a bit.

I finished up The Consultant by Bentley Little at the beginning of the month. Loved it. I then watched the TV adaptation as soon as it aired.

This has to be one of the worst adaptations I have ever saw. The word “adaptation” shouldn’t even be used for this. It’s an adaptation in name only. Practically everything from the book was dropped.

I had a bad feeling as The Consultant wears a bow tie in the books, and it is referenced constantly throughout. Then I watched the trailer and he was wearing a regular tie, and I just knew it wasn’t going to be a good adaptation.

That’s the bad news. The good news? I loved the show regardless! Christoph Waltz is an incredible actor, and I really enjoyed the show. Disappointed that the adaptation was non-existent, but it was still a fun show.

Very sad to hear the news that Kyle Mills is giving up the Mitch Rapp series. Don Bentley is taking it over. I haven’t read anything by him but hopefully, he can keep the series going at the high-quality Kyle delivered.

A quick note in regard to that: Kyle is going to revisit the character he created in the novel Fade. If you look on practically every other book site including the likes of Amazon and Goodreads, it lists that as part of a two-book series along with The Second Horseman.

We, however, list it as a standalone (and now the first and only novel in the Fade series with a new book coming out next year). I had a couple of people write in to point out to me that it is part of a series and that our listing was incorrect.

However, that is not the case at all. All of the other sites are incorrect. I know this because when I looked at the two books, they didn’t seem connected at all. So rather than just list them together because all the other sites do, I actually took the time to get in touch with Kyle, who confirmed that the books are not linked and are not part of a series.

I just wanted to share that to mention the extra mile I always go to when it comes to our lists. I’m not saying they are perfect, but I do strive to make them that way.

Each month we give away 5 $25 Amazon gift certificates to random subscribers. Big thanks to Thomas V. who won last month, but told me to give it to someone else. So it’s 6 people this time around.
To win all you have to do is be a subscriber. Nothing more! When we go to hit “Publish” we take a list of all of our subscribers, throw them into a random draw and those are the winners.
Our winners this month are:
Bill W. from Framingham, MA
Rebecca P. from Evanston, IL
Pat B. from Bartlett, IL
Jeanne M. from Alpine, CA
Dave (Winery in email) from Brunswick, OH
Susan L. from Secaucus, NJ
All of you have been e-mailed. If you don’t see anything, check your junk folder or contact me.
Graeme
OrderOfBooks.com
Quotes of the Month
“I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.” Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, thePequod;male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.”
– Maureen Corrigan in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading
““She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
Henry James in Daisy Miller
Submit your own quotes; just hit reply. Book related are great but happy to share non-book related too! Thanks to Mark and Madeline for this months.

Book Recommendations

In this section, I give 3-5 random book recommendations. They can be old books, they can be new. But either way – I recommend you read them if the type of genre they are in appeals to you. Feel free to e-mail suggestions to site@orderofbooks.com as many of the suggestions each month are from our readers. If you wish to add a description for the book around the same size as the ones below that’d be great too! I should note we also have a huge backlog of recommendations so if you don’t see one that you recommended then don’t worry – it’ll show up eventually!

Wendy wrote in to recommend this series, stating:

“For all those Doc Ford fans that like to travel to Florida to see the sights mentioned in those books, try the series by H Terrell Griffin set in Long Boat Key area. Matt Royal is the main character and there are great sidekicks too. Great series!”

Longboat Blues is the first novel in the series. The body of his girlfriend is found on his condo balcony and Logan Hamilton is indicted for murder. His friend is a retired trial lawyer named Matt Royal, who gets out of his early retirement in order to represent him.

I talked a bit about dog books in the last newsletter (and why dog lovers should avoid The Collector by Bentley Little). Susan wrote in to recommend this great series:

“Since dogs are in the newsletter, there’s a duo (one a Canadian) that writes as Sara Driscoll, with a heroine who is with a K-9 search and rescue dog FBI unit. Good writing, very interesting characters. Many appear in multiple books.”

If you love reading books featuring dogs, check out this great series.

Judy wrote in to recommend this standalone novel by Deanna Raybourn. Here is what she wrote:
“I just finished a book I would like to recommend. It just jumped in my hands at the library. It is Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn. It turned out to almost be a comedy. Four 60-year-old ladies trying to figure out who is trying to kill them and why.”
I always love when a book just jumps out at you like that. Visit our Deanna page.
Always enjoy giving love to new authors. Tom wrote his first novel just last year. Frank wrote in to recommend it.
“It was a good read that didn’t bog down. Good Italian Catholics, lots of now classic cars and relevant 1960s history. “
It takes place in 1968. The Brovelli Brothers own a used car lot in Oakland, California and business has been slow. They try to make money by repossessing cars from deadbeats. One deadbeat who they have good history with and usually cut some slack – they find his ex-girlfriend in the trunk of a repossessed Impala. The family work together to try to prove his innocence. Visit Toms page for more.

March 2023 Book of the Month

Boo – it’s a standalone, and not a Myron Bolitar novel!

Either way, it should be a good one. Harlan always writes great mystery novels with the sort of twists and turns that will keep you up all night.

In I Will Find You, David Burroughs is a family man living his dream life. That is until his three-year-old son is murdered, and David goes to prison for the murder.

That all happened five years ago. Yet today, David discovers that his son is apparently still alive. Now David has to escape the prison, find out what happened, and find his son.

I already know I’ll be burning the oil at midnight with this one. Pre-Order now.

10 More Notable Books Releasing in March

And don’t forget you can get updated on all the upcoming books by your favourite authors with your own personalized calendar at BookNotification.com.

March Charities

While I appreciate all offers of donations to show your appreciation for the site and newsletter, I’d much rather you do that by supporting some great causes. Each month I pick a few select charities broken down by our most popular countries or topics that you can support instead. Thanks!

Special Effect

Kentucky Kitty Cats

Ronald McDonald House

GiveDirectly

Picture of the Month

Many of you mentioned that last month, the book fountain was at the Cincinnati public library. I’ll be sure to visit one day! This months picture was submitted by Ellen. It is a coffee table at Barrel of Books and Games in Mt Dora, FL. I love it – although I’d be so scared that I’d spill a drink over it!

Send in your own to site@orderofbooks.com or by replying!

Images, jokes, etc. We’ll take it all!

Your Thoughts:

Last month I asked how long you put into a book before giving it up. The replies are later in the newsletter.
This month I am asking:
“Have you watched any recent adaptations of books? And what are your thoughts?”
I’ve asked before about your thoughts on the best adaptations but this is dealing with more recent adaptations. There have been a lot of books adapted to TV and movie over the last few years. I won’t set a specific year – but I’d say anytime in the last few years.
Will Trent. Inspector Gamache. Reacher. Just to name a few.
Here’s my own thoughts on some that I have watched recently:
Bosch: Loved this show. Titus Welliver really made the show his own, and I’m excited for the new season as well as the spinoffs featuring J.Edgar and Ballard.
Reacher: Excellent adaptation. Ritchson was excellent in the role. I went back and re-read Killing Floor afterwards and was impressed with how closely the show followed the book.
The Consultant: As mentioned in the opening – excellent book. Good TV show. Worst adaptation in recent memory.
Pieces of Her: I actually only watched the first couple of episodes of this, although really enjoyed it. I need to get back to it.
The One: Based on the novel by John Marrs. I loved the book. I watched the first episode of the show and I wasn’t impressed with the direction it was going, but I need to watch more.
The Gray Man: Just dull. So so dull. Which is a shame as I mean, it seemed to follow the book to a decent degree, and that book is one of my all-time favourites. I was bored out of my mind watching the movie.
The Weekend Away: A Netflix movie based on the psychological thriller by Sarah Alderson. It was alright. A few eye-rolling moments. It was one of those movies where reading the book really helped, as the movie didn’t really establish the relationships with the characters well. But thanks to the book, you could get invested in it more.
I’m forgetting some for sure. What about you? What adaptations have you watched lately, and what are your thoughts?
E-mail us your feedback tosite@OrderOfBooks.comor just reply to this e-mail, and we’ll pick the best comments and feature it in next months newsletter. Five people will also randomly win a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.

Reader Mailbag:

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Order of Books » Newsletter » OrderOfBooks March 2023 Newsletter

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