RidgewayGirl's Categorical Challenge Part II

Yo.

Every time I see that one of your threads has new entries, my thought right as I'm about to click is, Damn, what am I gonna have to go get now? I think I should create a tag just for you.

As for guilty pleasures, per the previous thread...it's Buffy comix, and before that Sookie Stackhouse.

16cammykitty
Abr 8, 2011, 9:42 pm

I still love your categories! 38 in is pretty impressive.

17RidgewayGirl
Abr 9, 2011, 10:25 am

Aw, shucks, guys. Thanks. I'm 300 pages from finishing an 840 page book and feel like I've been absent for months. See you in a few days!

18bruce_krafft
Abr 10, 2011, 8:30 pm

I must remember to refer to your 'Lost in the City of Light' category when I get done with the current books that I have. My daughter and I are planning a trip there sometime (hopefully not too many years from now!)

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

19Bcteagirl
Abr 10, 2011, 8:39 pm

800 pgs! Yowza. I did one of those last year but the most I have done this year is a little of 600. Which book?

20RidgewayGirl
Editado: Abr 12, 2011, 10:23 am

I apologize in advance if I sound immensely braggy and full of myself. I have spent the past two weeks reading Vergebung, the German language translation of Stieg Larsson's third book. It was 848 pages long, German vocabulary and sentence structure being what it is. It kept me going, surprisingly, and I enjoyed the odd experience of living solely in the world of a single book for so long. Towards the end, I would wake up in the middle of the night and go read for an hour or so.

About the actual book; if you liked the first two books in the trilogy, you will have already read this one, or be planning to. I do recommend them although Larsson takes a bit of getting used to. He will never skip over anything, or fail to give you needed information, so there's a lot of information dumping, which may not be used in the story for several hundred pages. He is also not the most brilliant of stylists and his journalist character is pure male wish-fulfillment. But if you've read the first two, then you're used to Blomqvist, the unlikely lady magnet. Larsson's main character, Lisbeth Salander, is a masterpiece and I love how Larsson keeps his purpose, that of showing how even in a modern society, women are discriminated against and how thin the veneer of male tolerance is (and if you disagree, look at how Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are discussed in contrast to how their male counterparts are seen). Larsson does have an axe to grind, but it's so subtly used, and there's so much action and intrigue going on around it, that you might miss it. The story may open with Salander being brought to the emergency room with a bullet in her head, but she is never a victim.

21ivyd
Abr 12, 2011, 12:29 pm

>20 RidgewayGirl: Congratulations on the German language achievement! I'm really impressed!

I enjoyed the odd experience of living solely in the world of a single book for so long.

I like that, too, though it doesn't happen very often. I have several very long books in my tbr stack, and now that completing a full 11 in 11 looks doubtful, I am determined to read them this year. I'm really looking forward to spending a week or more immersed in one book.

I thoroughly enjoyed Larsson's trilogy, and totally agree with your perceptive comments.

22auntmarge64
Abr 12, 2011, 12:40 pm

>20 RidgewayGirl: Quite the achievement! I thought it took forever to read it in English, but I sure did enjoy it.

23katiekrug
Abr 12, 2011, 1:20 pm

>20 RidgewayGirl: Wow, I am seriously impressed. I just picked up the first of the trilogy in Swahili and am looking forward to starting it.

Okay, it's actually in English but now I feel so inadequate ;-)

24DeltaQueen50
Abr 12, 2011, 1:46 pm

LOL at Katie! But you do deserve a pat on the back for reading such a huge book in German! I am really behind in this series as I have only read the first one so far. I do plan on getting to the second one soon for this challenge, the third will probably have to wait until next year sometime.

25RidgewayGirl
Abr 13, 2011, 9:47 am

I found Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel on the "New Books" shelf at my local library and thought I'd give it a try. I have the worst luck with picking books randomly, so I was expecting it to be bad, but it wasn't. It was an odd little book, though.

Lilia was abducted by her father from her mother's Quebec house in the middle of a winter night when she was seven. Since then, she and her father lived on the road, never staying long in any one place. Eventually, he settles down in a small town in New Mexico, but Lilia keeps traveling. Her longest stay was in Brooklyn, where she met Eli, moved in with him and then left one morning.

Michaela's father was a private detective hired by Lilia's mother to find her. He tracked her movements across the US, even as his daughter and wife disappeared from his life. Michaela contacts Eli, telling him that Lilia is in Montreal and that he should meet her there.

Eli has been working on his dissertation for so long that he suspects that he'll never finish. When Lilia walks out, he is unable to move on. When he receives the message from Michaela, he drops everything and goes to Montreal to find Lilia.

Last Night in Montreal is a book more concerned with style than realism. Neither of the female characters ever seem particularly real, coated as they are with the many layers of their colorful pasts. This doesn't make the story any less interesting, but it did mean that I had to adjust my expectations of what would happen. I'm left with more questions than answers, but the book was a pleasant read that evoked the odd geography of Montreal in winter.

26lkernagh
Abr 13, 2011, 7:50 pm

Good review of Last Night in Montreal. Yes, it is an odd little book - your summary reminded me of the plot as I couldn't remember it off the top of my head.

27RidgewayGirl
Abr 16, 2011, 11:50 am

Thank you to LauraBrook for reminding me of Dear Enemy by reading Daddy Long Legs.

Jean Webster most famous book, Daddy Long Legs, was made into two movies and is a charming book about an orphan who is sent to college, paid for by a trustee who requires only that she send him periodic letters about her progress. What is a little less well known is that there is a sequel.

Dear Enemy is an epistolary novel in which Sallie MacBride, a frivolous young socialite, is convinced to take on the job of superintendent of the John Grier Home. Had her beau laughed a little less at the idea, she would have refused. She fully intends to occupy the post temporarily, until she marries an upcoming young politician and moves to Washington, but meanwhile she is fully engaged with improving the lives of the wretched orphans at the John Grier Home. She is both helped and antagonized by a Scottish doctor whose views often conflict with her own ideas.

Sallie is wonderful. She's as frivolous as she can be, but with a core of steel, a heart for the often unattractive orphans and willingness to work very hard and to fight for better conditions. Her letters make the most horrible of occasions entertaining. Dear Enemy also sheds light on how things like heredity and alcoholism were viewed a hundred years ago and it can be startling. I defy anyone reading this book not to go and look up the unfortunate case studies mentioned in this book.

I loved this book as a teen-ager and found that it has stood up to the test of time--I found it every bit as wonderful now.

28katiekrug
Abr 16, 2011, 12:39 pm

I think I saw one of the Daddy Long Legs movies many years ago. I did not know there was a book. I am going to look it up, along with Dear Enemy.

29lkernagh
Abr 16, 2011, 4:17 pm

Your comments about Dear Enemy have given me an idea for a new category for next year's challenge - epistolary novels - and that one is going on the list. Thanks!

30cammykitty
Abr 17, 2011, 5:18 pm

epistolary novels would be a great category. You have to hunt though. You aren't going to know it's epistolary just by looking at the title. Dangerous Liasons would be another, totally different one.

I'm thinking I may need to reread Dear Enemy too. Now that I'm an adult that works with kids, I'm sure it will feel completely different than it did when I was a teen.

31RidgewayGirl
Abr 17, 2011, 6:52 pm

Well, I would hope you would be doubtful of some of the ideas expressed in the book. It's helpful to remember that it was written in 1915, before eugenics took on such sinister meaning.

32RidgewayGirl
Editado: Abr 19, 2011, 11:47 am

Philip Kerr wrote a brilliant trilogy published in an omnibus edition as Berlin Noir about a detective in the hardboiled tradition. Bernie Gunther had a talent for witty banter that got him punched more often than not, an independent spirit and an eye for the ladies. The twist? Bernie lived and worked in Berlin in the 1930s and 40s, where survival often depended on one's ability to toe the line and no one's hands were clean.

He smiled without smiling--the sort of expression a snake has when it opens its mouth to swallow something whole. He was smaller than me, but he had the ambitious look of a man who might eventually swallow something larger than himself.

Field Gray is the seventh installment in the Bernie Gunther series. It's different from the earlier books, which concentrated on single cases or discrete series of events, and can be read as a stand alone novel. Field Gray takes Bernie from Cuba in 1954, back to the days of World War II and beyond, as Bernie tries to survive the attentions of everyone from General Heydrich to the CIA, from Paris in 1940 to a Soviet prison camp.

While the scope of the story is larger than before, Kerr still writes with his characteristically noir style. The plot, however, has grown in scope and intricacy. It's a ride as fast and as twisty as a roller coaster.

33DeltaQueen50
Abr 19, 2011, 5:14 pm

I think Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy is on my wishlist, if not, I will be sure to add it.

34AHS-Wolfy
Abr 19, 2011, 7:22 pm

@32, I found a copy of Berlin Noir in a local charity shop just last week. It had been on my wishlist for a while. Knowing that the series has reached its seventh instalment and still continues to provide enjoyment is a good sign. Thanks for your review.

35RidgewayGirl
Abr 19, 2011, 7:36 pm

Berlin Noir is fantastic, especially if you like noir.

36lsh63
Editado: Abr 19, 2011, 8:16 pm

Argh you're killing me! I look at Berlin Noir everytime I'm at the library. Guess it will have to come home with me next time.

37cammykitty
Abr 19, 2011, 11:49 pm

Killing me too. I've seen a snake smile exactly that way, and if I saw a guy do it... Run!!! So, I'll have to WL it. Yi Yi Yi! Someday I'll be crushed under my WL.

38RidgewayGirl
Abr 20, 2011, 10:02 am

cammykitty, that only happens when your wishlist turns into your TBR.

39cushlareads
Abr 21, 2011, 4:25 am

I've just found you again and now I remember that your thread is one of the worst (best!) on Lt for adding to my TBR mountain.

I've read the first of the Bernie Gunther books and loved it, and I have the next 5 here - I just need to bump them up and be in the right mood. I saw a long interview with him somewhere last week - I think in the Guardian - but skimmed it because I didn't want to read too much about what happens next.

A Place of Greater Safety and Restless are both on my shelves. I'll be watching to see if you start them. And I read The Fatal Shore years ago for a legal history class and LOVED it, and might even re-read it one day. It's long though...

40RidgewayGirl
Abr 21, 2011, 6:08 pm

Sarah Addison Allen's books sound exactly like the kind of thing that usually makes my teeth hurt. Adjectives like whimsical and charming are often used to describe them. Stories about small towns drive me mad, unless they are about claustrophobia and murder, preferably with a serial killer to keep the population in a state of terror. But one day VictoriaPL suggested I read Garden Spells, Allen's debut novel. I liked it. I didn't love it, but I enjoyed it. There is a heaping helping of magic in that book, and an annoyingly passive heroine, but the writing was light and agile and the characters were well thought out, so that their quirks made sense. They were characters, not Characters, if you take my meaning. So I've fallen into the habit of reading her books and in enjoying them a little more each time. My tolerance for whimsy is on the rise.

The Peach Keeper is Sarah Addison Allen's fourth book and here there's a little less overt magic and the heroines are a lot more capable of taking care of themselves.

On some level, all women knew, they all understood, the fear of being outnumbered, of being helpless. It throbbed it their chests when they thought about the times they left stores and were followed. The knocks on car windows as they were sitting alone at red lights, and strangers asking for rides. Having too much to drink and losing the ability to be forceful enough to say no. Smiling at strange men coming on to them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, not wanting to make a scene. All women remembered these things, even if they had never happened to them personally. It was part of the collective unconscious.

The story is still slight and charming and romantic, but there's a slight hint of an edge now. Allen's writing is both lighter and more substantial. The Peach Keeper is an excellent choice for a rainy afternoon.

41DeltaQueen50
Abr 21, 2011, 7:01 pm

You've described Sarah Adison Allen's books to a Tee! So far I have read the first two, but I do plan on reading all her work eventually. As I have learned that I will enjoy her books I tend to save them for when I really need a "feel-good" book.

42dudes22
Abr 21, 2011, 8:07 pm

I got The Peach Keeper as an ER book and wish I'd written a review as good as the one you've given here. I think you've caught the essense of the book just right. I still haven't read the 3rd book, but I'll get around to it.

43cammykitty
Abr 21, 2011, 9:24 pm

38> Oh yes, but WL books have a way of materializing eventually. Bad bad very bad! Hmmm... thinking about Peach Keeper. I tried to get it as an ER, but got something else instead.

44VictoriaPL
Abr 22, 2011, 7:50 am

I'm so glad you enjoyed The Peach Keeper! During some parts of it I thought it was too neat and bow-tie pretty, but the dreamer in me likes that. I think ultimately I want my chick-lit to have that happy-ever-after optimism. Is there more edge in this one than in Garden Spells? I'll have to think on that.

45lkernagh
Abr 22, 2011, 10:59 am

Great review of The Peach Keeper Alison! I have the book on my TBR pile for next week so now I am really looking forward to it.

46RidgewayGirl
Abr 22, 2011, 1:24 pm

The Twisted Thread by Charlotte Bacon is, on the surface, a murder mystery set at a prestigious boarding school. Told from several viewpoints, from a steady maintenance man to the cop who was once a student at the school, the story ties together to paint a picture of privilege and loneliness, of arrogance and desperation.

Claire Harkness symbolized everything about Armitage Academy; beautiful and clever, she's won early admittance to an Ivy League college. She's the leader of a secretive group of popular, wealthy girls and her parents live in New York and Paris. But Claire is found dead in her dorm room one morning, possibly murdered and having just given birth, to a baby that is nowhere to be found.

Madeline has been hired to teach English at Armitage for a year, a temporary placement in a life she doesn't have completely under control. When Claire is found murdered in the dorm that she helps supervise, Madeline is driven to find out what happened and her youth and inexperience allow her to approach the closed world of teen-agers with absent parents and too much money.

The Twisted Thread reminds me of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn and The Crazy School by Cornelia Read. It has an uncertain protagonist who is nonetheless willing to confront the past and practices that others would rather keep secret. The plot was well designed, and the characters revealed more and more nuance and depth as the story progressed. My one caveat is that the book lasted just a little too long. it's not necessary to tie off each thread so tidily, and in doing so, the book lost the tension of the earlier chapters. Still, Charlotte Bacon is an author well worth reading and I look forward to her next book.

47RidgewayGirl
Editado: Abr 23, 2011, 9:23 pm

Black Robe by Brian Moore follows a priest, called a blackrobe by the native peoples, Laforgue, as he travels into the wilderness to help the two priests living in a Huron settlement in 1645. Laforgue feels his vocation strongly, the hope of saving people from damnation is a calling for which he is prepared to endure much. He has secret dreams of martyrdom. And then his beliefs slam up against those of the Algonquins guiding him upriver.

At that moment a great shadow passed over him, and, looking up, his prayer stillborn on his lips, he saw, high above, a huge eagle of a sort he had never seen in France, its head white, its beak and talons yellow, its great blackish wings rigid as sails, catching the wind eddies as it glided back and forth over the trees. Suddenly, swift as clashing swords, the great wings shut. The eagle plummeted between the trees. And as Laforgue knelt there, his struggles, his deafness, the dangers of this journey were transformed miraculously into a great adventure, a chance to advance God's glory here in a distant land. God was not hidden: He had shown Himself in the eagle's flight. Laforgue saw the eagle rise from the trees, its great wings beating steadily as it carried off its prey. In the beauty of this wild place, his heart sang a Te Deum of happiness.

This is Canada, Quebec, before the Europeans had more than a slight impact on those natives living near the few settlements. Europeans, coureurs de bois, who traded for furs, hadn't yet changed the native way of life. The fur traders adapted to their hosts instead. The "blackrobes" on the other hand, with their goal of saving souls for Jesus and a willingness to die in the process, were the first Europeans who wanted to change things.

The strength of this book is how is presents two sides without glorifying either of them. The 'savages' here are neither noble nor ignorant. The priests neither holy nor intent on destroying a way of life. Despite the strength of his belief, Laforgue cannot help but be shaken when unbaptized, unsaved Algonquins risk torture and death to keep their word.

What mercy? If Our Lord tests me, if He tests Daniel, then he promises us something which repays us a thousandfold for any suffering, any danger, any death. But what does He offer to these others, what mercy does He show to these Savages who will never look on His face in paradise, these He has cast into outer darkness, in this land which is the donjon of the devil and all his kind?

This wasn't an easy read, this isn't a sweet tale with a feel-good ending, but a serious book intent on historical accuracy and an examination of one man's faith. Father Laforgue is very much a product of his place and time, yet he is a thinking man forced to examine his worldview.

48katiekrug
Abr 23, 2011, 9:17 pm

>47 RidgewayGirl: I think this was made into a movie and I saw part of it in school. Not sure, though. I don't remember much...

49RidgewayGirl
Abr 23, 2011, 9:24 pm

I knew there was a movie, now I want to watch it.

50lkernagh
Abr 23, 2011, 9:44 pm

Thanks for the review of Black Robe. It is something I will keep in mind when I am ready for a good book with some thought provoking 'teeth' to it. Right now I am sticking with fun entertaining reading.

51RidgewayGirl
Abr 24, 2011, 4:36 pm

In April in Paris by Michael Wallner a young Wehrmacht translator accidentally becomes involved with the French Resistance. I wonder if the story is more plausible in the original German?

52moneybeets
Abr 24, 2011, 8:12 pm

48, 49--The movie version of this was very striking. I also had to see it for a class and had been wanting to rent it again, just couldn't remember what it was called. I had no idea it was a book first! Now I have a book and a movie to get :D

53Bcteagirl
Abr 25, 2011, 9:57 pm

Black Robe sounds interesting, thanks for the review! :)

54RidgewayGirl
Abr 28, 2011, 8:32 am

Sophie Hannah is an author who regularly shows up in online recommendations for me, so I finally read Little Face, her first novel. She's British and writes psychological suspense-type mysteries and with all the Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters in my library, I can see why the computer would throw her name at me.

In Little Face, a woman takes her first outing without her newborn baby, only to return to find that the baby sleeping in the crib is not her child. Her husband thinks she's nuts, but her mother-in-law, with whom they live, is unsure. The police are unwilling to open an inquiry, that is, until the woman and the infant disappear a week later.

I liked Little Face. I'm glad that the author has several other books written, as I'm sure I'll read another one when I want something Rendellesque.

55RidgewayGirl
Abr 28, 2011, 8:36 am

Little White Lies by Gemma Townley was a bog standard British Chick-lit novel. Nothing to complain about, but also nothing that will stick in my mind for more than a day.

Of the four books read for my British category, three have "little" in the title. I'm tempted to change the category name to "Little Britain" and see if I can find eight other British books with "little" in the title. Probably not.

56RidgewayGirl
Abr 30, 2011, 8:17 pm

I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman tell the story of Elizabeth, who was kidnapped, held captive for six weeks and raped. She's now an adult and while she is more cautious than most people, she's built a good and happy life for herself as a suburban wife and mother. Her captor has sat on Virginia's death row for the past twenty years and now, as his execution date nears, he and his supporter will do anything to save his life.

Lippman is good. She's good at creating an atmosphere and at exploring difficult issues. She's good at creating twists that surprise while making perfect sense. She's a storyteller.

57lsh63
mayo 1, 2011, 6:05 am

#54. Rendellesque you say? That's all I need to know. Of course the book sounds perfect for me.

Also, I couldn't remember if I read I'd Know You Anywhere. Then it slowly came back to me. I love her Tess series, but the stand alones are maybe just a notch better.

58RidgewayGirl
mayo 5, 2011, 10:04 am

Anne is my favorite of the Bronte sisters. Her heroes are neither blind nor brutal, and with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall there is everything one could possibly want from a Victorian Melodrama; midnight escapes, brutality, unrequited longing, perseverance against all odds, unfortunate marriages and as unpleasant and prickly a heroine as one could ever want. I love it.

Despite my love for Wildfell Hall, or maybe because of it, I had never read Anne's other novel, Agnes Grey. The dreary synopsis - the wretched and put-upon life of a governess, with its unique social and economic realities - just didn't call to me in the same way as thwarted passion did. I've read it now, and I'm so glad I have. Agnes is a cranky girl, full of self-pity, pride and self-righteousness, but she's not the pill that Wildfell Hall's Helen is, not by a long shot. Agnes grew on me, so that while I was rolling my eyes at her at the beginning of the book, I was rooting for her by the end of it. And there's plenty of unrequited love and disastrous marriages and even a little dog saved, for those who like a bit of drama with their biting social commentary.

My one annoyance concerned my edition of Agnes Grey. It featured end notes, which could have enhanced my reading, but the end noter would state only the obvious and clearly thought I was an idiot.

59christina_reads
mayo 5, 2011, 11:54 am

@58 -- Love your comments on Anne Bronte! I think Agnes Grey is really interesting to read in conjunction with Jane Eyre. They're both about governesses, but they go in very different directions!

60cammykitty
mayo 6, 2011, 11:49 am

Little dog saved! I'll have to read it, but before I'll buy, I'll make sure it's not the edition with the condescending footnoter.

61RidgewayGirl
mayo 6, 2011, 5:02 pm

Probable Cause by Theresa Schwegel is a well-written police procedural about a rookie cop who is initiated into the group of cops he works with by robbing a jewelry store. It all goes horribly wrong and Ray ends up trying to figure out who the good guys are when the cops aren't.

62citygirl
mayo 9, 2011, 5:41 pm

You fiend. Now I have to get The Twisted Thread and check out this Cornelia Read person.

63RidgewayGirl
Editado: mayo 12, 2011, 8:39 am

New Zealand author Paul Cleave's newest book, Blood Men sets itself up for something brilliant. The son of a serial killer, whose life was destroyed with his father's arrest, rebuilds and overcomes his father's notoriety to live a quiet life as an accountant, happily married, with a daughter. He and his wife are in a bank in downtown Christchurch in the middle of a sunny December day to see about qualifying for a mortgage, when the bank is robbed. And the action and reactions begin.

The first half of this book is full of normal human reactions to horrific events. People are terrified, observers unable to take greater action than to use their phones to record the events unfolding and there are occasional and usually futile acts of bravery. Eddie is himself frozen and uncertain, both during the robbery and afterwards. He's conflicted and angry and very real. And then the book descends into a revenge fantasy bloodbath. Every so often, Eddie reflects for a moment, but he never really allows contemplation to halt his forward motion. Blood Men is a brutal read; during the first half it seemed to be leading somewhere revelatory, but in the second half, as the body count rose, it was merely gratuitous.

64cammykitty
mayo 12, 2011, 9:22 pm

Oy! Thanks for letting me know to avoid that one. High body counts are okay, but not if they are gratuitous.

65GingerbreadMan
mayo 14, 2011, 2:58 pm

@63 Warning thankfully accepted, but I can't help feeling that that sounds interesting anyway.

66cammykitty
mayo 14, 2011, 11:32 pm

@65 That's the thing about a well written review. If it's specific enough, you can read it and think what bothered them wouldn't bother me... or well, it wasn't their sort of book but it is mine. So RidgewayGirl, hey, that was a good review. :)

67dudes22
mayo 15, 2011, 10:21 am

@66 Very true - very well written review. When I started reading it, I thought it was an interesting book but, by the time I got to the end, I knew it wasn't for me. One less for the wishlist - not such a bad thing.

68RidgewayGirl
mayo 15, 2011, 3:08 pm

Let me add that I have a high tolerance for gore, as long as it's part of a plot that makes sense. I love Chelsea Cain's books, and she doesn't really have a light touch in that regard. It's just that I don't like gore for the sake of itself. Torture porn is not that interesting.

69GingerbreadMan
mayo 15, 2011, 4:19 pm

Hm. "Torture porn" made the pendulum swing over to "pass", I think.

70Bcteagirl
mayo 15, 2011, 8:38 pm

69: Ditto.

71RidgewayGirl
mayo 16, 2011, 9:20 am

I was at a movie the weekend-before-last and was not paying attention to the trailers until I saw the name of the movie - One Day - and realized that I have that book. So I read it right away, before the movie version takes away my ability to experience the book without imagining Anne Hathaway as a bolshie girl from Yorkshire.

One Day by David Nicholls was very well reviewed in the NYT Book Review, but at heart it's a simple love story, albeit one that spans years, rather than weeks. Each chapter takes place on July 15th, and year after year, shows the developing relationship between Dexter, a somewhat obnoxious middle class poseur, and Emma, a bolshie, brilliant, working class Yorkshire girl.

It took me a few chapters to get sucked into Dex and Emma's story, as their lives separate and converge, but as they always care about one another. I spent much of Sunday grabbing small chunks of time to read and had a hard time putting it down. One Day was charming and readable and I enjoyed it immensely.

72katiekrug
mayo 16, 2011, 11:32 am

I've got One Day on the TBR shelves; must read it before seeing the movie...

73dudes22
mayo 17, 2011, 12:16 pm

@68 - I read the first Chelsea Cain because of all the good rviews it was getting here, and I have to say, the gore did not bother me. In fact, I plan to continue on with the series. Your comment shows me I put your review of Blood Men in the right context for me.

71 - Your review reminds me of the old movie "Same Time, Next Year" with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. Same premise.

74RidgewayGirl
mayo 18, 2011, 9:22 am

There are travel memoirs that become classics. While they take place at a particular time, they either manage to grasp what is eternal about a place or they perfectly capture a lost version of the place they're writing about. Down and Out in Paris and London captures the eternal of being poor in a great place, I think, and A Moveable Feast is a snapshot of a great time that is gone and still mourned.

Adam Gopnik's account of a American family living in Paris for five years, Paris to the Moon, falls into a second category; a book that is a snapshot of a time and a place, but one that is rapidly fading and which will be forgotten in a few more years. It's a very specific memoir, full of a young father's infatuation with his son, and it's the story of a specific family (well-to-do New Yorkers writing for The New Yorker) in a specific place (Paris, circa 1995).

Which is not to say that this is not a highly readable book. It is. But I suspect that my enjoyment of it is based on the similarities of our experiences. I lived in Paris for a year and we started our family in a European country and watched our children being not altogether American. So much of what I liked about Paris to the Moon were the parts where our experiences overlapped. Gopnik interviewed Bernard-Henri Levy; I had a crush on Levy when I lived in Paris (I was taken with the idea that a philosopher could be a sex-symbol). Gopnik's wife had their second child in Paris; I had my two children in Munich, and found Gopnik's experience to be similar to my own. My time in Paris occurred just a few years before Gopnik's, so that I recognized his version of Paris more readily than I do Paris of today.

There are pieces of this book that are very, very good. The chapter on the trial and surrounding media storm of a French public official charged with war crimes was excellent and a brief segment on the French interviewee's astonishment over being called by fact-checkers was funny and thought-provoking.

There is simply a lot of this book that is specific to Gopnik's own experiences and which doesn't expand to universality. His search for an American-style place to work out, for example, or the long story of his son's first crush at age five. And while the reader gets an painstaking account of the bedtime story Gopnik told his son, complete with his son's trenchant commentary, there is almost nothing about his wife or how the move affected their relationship.

I loved this book, but I think that I loved it because of the memories it brought back, more than for the writing itself.

75RidgewayGirl
mayo 21, 2011, 7:29 pm

The Whispering Wall by Patricia Carlon was written in the 1960s and it has the feel of a Hitchcock movie. Sarah has had a stroke, which has left her able to think and hear, but unable to communicate. She's been moved back home and is under the care of a nurse, but her niece is eager to gain control of Sarah's house and money. She divides up the ground floor into two flats and lets one out to a tired single mother and her awkward daughter, the other is let to a shady couple. Due to a closed up fireplace, Sarah can hear people talking in a room downstairs. She hears the couple arguing about how to best kill an aging relative, but what can she do to prevent a murder?

The story is told entirely from Sarah's point of view, trapped in her own head and desperate to communicate. It's a nail-biter of a tale and while it is clearly written fifty years ago, it has aged well. I'll be looking for Carlon's other books.

76pamelad
mayo 22, 2011, 5:53 am

I liked The Price of an Orphan, which is set on a sheep station: dry, hot and dusty, in the middle of nowhere, threatened by bushfire. Two well-meaning people foster a small boy, but they don't really understand or trust him, to their detriment. Excellent characterisation.

Who Are You, Linda Condrick was another good one. There's a common theme of miscommunication and isolation. Apparently Patricia Carlon was deaf.

The only books I wouldn't recommend are The Souvenir and Death by Demonstration.

77RidgewayGirl
mayo 22, 2011, 11:34 am

I didn't know she was deaf. I know she loved to garden and had lots of cats, but not that she was deaf. She did give a vivid picture of being trapped in one's own head in The Whispering Wall.

78bruce_krafft
mayo 22, 2011, 12:16 pm

>74 RidgewayGirl: Sure, now that I have filled all my categories that these books would fall under . . . :-)

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

79RidgewayGirl
mayo 22, 2011, 1:05 pm

Karen Russell's debut novel, Swamplandia!, is set in a Florida almost like the one we know. Thirteen-year-old Ava's mother, the famous alligator wrestler who swam dramatically through gator-infested waters as part of Swamplandia!'s evening show, has died of cancer, leaving her family bereft and the theme park without its star attraction. Ava's brother, Kiwi, is the first to desert the dying attraction, running away to the mainland and taking a job with at a rival theme park called the World of Darkness. Her father also leaves for the mainland, to line up investors for improvements. Ava is left alone on her island with 98 alligators and an older sister who is fascinated with the spirit world and who takes ghosts as boyfriends.

The weird Floridian setting of the Ten Thousand islands and the city of Loomis, with it's hell-based theme park is something you just have to go with. The journey Russell takes the reader on is enjoyable; odd and perilous and swampy.

80DeltaQueen50
mayo 22, 2011, 5:32 pm

My library has a lot of Patricia Carlon books but unfortunately not The Whispering Walls. I will definitely give this author a try though as the write-up on all her books sounded good.

81GingerbreadMan
mayo 24, 2011, 2:28 am

79 Sounds very much like something I'd enjoy. Never heard of the book or the author! Hooray for LT!

82RidgewayGirl
mayo 24, 2011, 9:25 am

We tried to talk about survival but we didn't get very far. I think postgraduate students may be an evolutionary dead end, though you'd think archaeologists would have more of a clue than mathematical logicians, say, or experts in late Latin poetry. Nina, who works on nineteenth-century travel writing, knows all about expeditions that didn't make it, but so far her suggestions are limited to wondering how the Franklin survivors cooked their colleagues, since the chopped up bones were found in cooking pots, and suggesting that there ought to be some way of catching fish using tights.

A small archaeological dig on the west coast of Greenland sets out to uncover what they can of a medival Norse farmstead during the brief weeks of summer. Back home, there are worrying indications that an epidemic might prove more dangerous than SARS or swine flu. Nina, the only non-archaeologist, soon begins to hear alarming noises at night and to suffer from vivid nightmares of what happened to the inhabitants of this small settlement. Tension grows as they lose both their internet and satellite phone connections to the outside world. With winter coming, the group begins to worry about whether they'll be picked up on schedule and whether there'll be a world to return to.

Cold Earth was one of those books that felt painful to put down. Sarah Moss builds such an exquisitely suspenseful tension as the group bickers, comes apart, and wonders if the world outside still exists, that up through the final pages, I was prepared for pretty much anything to happen. With its near-Arctic setting, I can't think of a better book for these hot summer days, unless you want to be able to put the book down now and then.

83RidgewayGirl
mayo 27, 2011, 12:43 pm

Years ago I read a fabulous YA coming of age novel called Sloppy Firsts. The protagonist, Jessica Darling, was a self conscious braniac growing up in a Jersey Shores world. Her best friend had moved, she didn't really like her other friends and she was strangely fascinated with the oddly pretentious and oft-suspended Marcus Flutie.

Perfect Fifths is the latest installment in Jessica's story, taking place eight years after she graduated high school. With this book, I have gone from fangirl-style excitement to a weary, inert hatred. I skimmed much of it, hoping that it would suddenly show a spark of life. It didn't.

Here is my problem. Why did a girl who felt like a misfit and who dreamed about getting the hell out of Pinesville make no new friends in eight friggin' years in New York? And why hasn't anyone else? This book featured a scene in which Marcus Flutie mentions that he ran into her high school crush on a building project in New Orleans. They recognized each other even though they had never actually met. And every character has either managed to become a multi-millionaire entrepreneur or to go to an Ivy League school, presumably on full scholarship, since none of them seemed to work. That Marcus Flutie guy, otherwise known as the one who got away, even wandered around after high school, teaching himself meditation, until Princeton jumped at the chance to educate him. Does this actually happen? Can I spend my children's college education funds now because all they need to go to an Ivy League college is a wacky hobby or a year spent as a hobo?

Oh, the plot of the book? Jessica runs into Marcus (literally, of course) in the Newark airport as she misses her flight. Then they talk for hours, except when they decide to communicate by passing hand-written poems back and forth. It's pretty much a very, very bad rip-off of Before Sunset, except with over-written dialog and much less point to it.

84katiekrug
mayo 27, 2011, 1:04 pm

I read Sloppy Firsts - loved it! - and the second one. Never got back to the series and now I'm glad I didn't. When did it fall off the cliff?

85RidgewayGirl
mayo 27, 2011, 1:12 pm

I loved the first two, which carried me through the next two. I think you stopped at the exact right place.

86RidgewayGirl
mayo 30, 2011, 2:23 pm

The Unburied by Charles Palliser was everything I like in a historical mystery; the mystery was intricate and well thought out, the setting was beautifully described and the characters were complex, believable and belonging to their time and place.

The Unburied actually consists of three mysteries, each set earlier than the one before. The oldest mystery is why Dr Courtine traveled to the English cathedral town of Thurchester; he is hunting an old manuscript that will strengthen his argument that King Alfred was a heroic king. The next concerns an ancient murder, long part of the town's local history, but new clues are brought to light when the cathedral having a new organ installed. The final mystery is set in the novel's Victorian present day and involves Dr Courtine, who finds himself an accidental witness to a seemingly straightforward crime.

87RidgewayGirl
Editado: Jun 2, 2011, 11:05 am

Este mensaje fue borrado por su autor.

88RidgewayGirl
Jun 2, 2011, 11:05 am

People go missing for all sorts of reasons; some flee difficult situations, some lose contact with their families, moving on without letting anyone know and some disappear through no choice of their own. In Among the Missing Morag Joss pulls together a family living in Scotland illegally, trying to make a better life for themselves even as they work to stay under the radar, a newly married woman whose husband is less sympathetic than he could be and a man recently released from prison, who can't escape the terrible thing that had happened.

Morag Joss writes beautifully about the people at the edges of society. She reminds me of Ruth Rendell and Denise Mina, weaving a compelling story about life's misfits.

89RidgewayGirl
Editado: Jun 2, 2011, 11:05 am

Este mensaje fue borrado por su autor.

90RidgewayGirl
Editado: Jun 2, 2011, 11:06 am

Este mensaje fue borrado por su autor.

91RidgewayGirl
Editado: Jun 2, 2011, 11:06 am

Este mensaje fue borrado por su autor.

92Bcteagirl
Jun 2, 2011, 11:53 am

Sounds like you have been busy! :) Cold Earth is one that keeps coming up that I think I will have to add to my wishlist :)

93DeltaQueen50
Jun 2, 2011, 10:14 pm

I have a couple of Morag Joss's books on my wishlist, but I see now I can add this one and The Night Following as well. Have you read any of her other books?

94RidgewayGirl
Jun 3, 2011, 11:29 am

I've read Half Broken Things and I loved it. I'm hunting down her others now. She has a mystery series set in Bath that I have one of and will read soon.

95DeltaQueen50
Jun 3, 2011, 1:07 pm

I'm going to start actively looking for her books as well, any author who brings to mind Ruth Rendell and Denise Mina is going to be worth the search! Thanks for the info.

96cammykitty
Jun 3, 2011, 11:36 pm

Among the Missing does sound interesting. I'm used to reading books about undocumented immigrants in the US. I'd like to see the issue from a different country's perspective.

97RidgewayGirl
Editado: Jun 13, 2011, 3:10 pm

I was on vacation last week and read two crime novels.

The first, Broken Skin, is the third installment in Stuart MacBride's excellent series of dark police procedurals set in Aberdeen, Scotland. This one is the weakest of the bunch, with an uneven plot and with more than a few characters veering into caricature. I expect MacBride to recover his footing in the next one.

The second was The Missing, the first in a series by Chris Mooney featuring a crime scene technician. This book began very well, but soon fell prey to a CSI view of crime solving, with the tech doing all the detecting, SWAT teaming and public relations on top of their own work. There was also an amazing amount of coincidence and conspiracy going on, from the evil FBI to the main character's elderly, dying mother. I won't be reading further.

98pamelad
Jun 14, 2011, 7:40 am

Will look for books by Morag Joss and Denise Mina. Never heard of them. Thanks for adding more new crime novelists to my list.

99RidgewayGirl
Jun 14, 2011, 1:25 pm

A Moveable Feast is my perfect book, the one I read over and over (twice last year). Hemingway captures Paris at a specific time, painting a picture of expat and artistic life at a time when great writers all hung out together in the cafes and nightclubs and racetracks of Paris. His descriptions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and many others are well worth the price of admission. A Moveable Feast is also the story of a writer learning his craft, and the story of a marriage that is strong until Hemingway brings it down. He's clear that the death of his marriage was his own fault and if he doesn't go into laborious detail, neither does he gloss over his own culpability. Hadley, his wife, is the only one who emerges unsullied.

So I wasn't sure a fictionalized account of Hemingway's first marriage, told from Hadley's point of view, was needed. After all, she is presented in A Moveable Feast as a strong, cheerful, grounded woman; not a bad way to be remembered. And my own irrational love of the book Paula McLain based The Paris Wife on left me determined both to read her book and to sneer at it. And now, having read the damn thing, I can't. McLain has done a good job at untangling the chronology and relationships. She's kept the speculation to a minimum and has clearly read Hemingway's books and biographies until they were coming out of her ears. Her writing is even similar in tone, without descending into parody. I liked it.

100ivyd
Jun 14, 2011, 1:55 pm

>99 RidgewayGirl: You've convinced me: until I read your review, I wasn't sure I wanted to read The Paris Wife. I have a re-read of The Sun Also Rises coming up soon on my list; following it with A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife sounds like a good plan.

101RidgewayGirl
Jun 19, 2011, 2:08 pm

Books about mountain climbing and polar exploration are endlessly fascinating, despite the uniformly bad writing. The type of person who would willingly give huge amounts of time and money to a hobby that involves relentless pain, drudgery and cold, not to mention an enormous risk of death, or of at least a few lost toes, is not the type of person who would enjoy crafting perfect sentences alone in a quiet room. This is why Into Thin Air was a bestseller; Jon Krakauer was a writer who was secondarily a climber and able to write lucidly about something so mysterious to the rest of us.

Forever on the Mountain was not written by Jon Krakauer. I've read a lot of books by climbers and they are usually really badly written, the force of the story they are telling overcomes the dense prose and inability to communicate intangibles. James M. Tabor's writing is much better than average, but that's faint praise--this is not a well-written book. It's much given to hyperbole, a lack of objectivity and, well, banal writing. Oh, but the story is compelling.

In 1967, a group of 12 climbers set off to climb Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. A month later, seven climbers are left dead on the mountain, victims of bureaucratic missteps, poor leadership and a storm that arose unexpectedly and raged for ten days. The most attention is given to the dynamics of the group of climbers and how their 24 year old leader, Joe Wilcox, was held to blame by many for the disaster. Tabor is convinced of Wilcox's innocence, driving the point home relentlessly over the course of the book.

Wilcox was the kind of guy who preferred to be in charge, was quick to take offense and who was a poor leader, but the men who chose to climb with him were all adults and responsible for their own safety. The National Park Service, still smarting from a media drubbing over the cost of a rescue effort just a few months before, refused to begin organizing a rescue at all, depending instead on other groups of climbers already on the mountain. And then there was that storm, which arose without warning and continued for ten full days.

The story transcends the writing while the men are on the mountain. I recommend sticking with this book through the slow and overlong opening, because when the climbers reach Denali, you won't be able to put the book down.

102Bcteagirl
Jun 19, 2011, 3:12 pm

This is the second good review I have read of this book! I have Into thin Air buried in mount TBR, if I like that I will move on to Forever on the Mountain as well.

103RidgewayGirl
Jun 21, 2011, 8:36 pm

Last year, I read detective novels by Ruth Rendell and PD James that left me worried. Rendell is 81 and James is 91 and it seemed that they'd both unhappily succumbed to crankiness. James's book was so full of class issues and the feeling that the world today was unbelievably horrific that I decided not to read anything more -- that book (The Private Patient) changed the way I now viewed her earlier, excellent novels. Rendell's last Wexford book had a similar flaw. Where earlier Inspector Wexford had viewed the dark world that he worked in with compassionate and understanding eyes, in The Monster in the Box he's descended into superiority and xenophobia. But while I was able to keep my pledge regarding James, Rendell has given me so many well spent hours reading her books that I just wasn't able to keep to my resolution.

Tigerlily's Orchids will not rank among her best, but it is still much better than the average psychological thriller. The novel is clearly written by an elderly author; many of the characters are older and the younger ones are unconvincing, she makes a big deal over things like cell phones and idioms that are no longer new (there is an explanation at the beginning of the book that the word "gay" no longer only means "happy and joyous"), and those oh-so-attractive threads of xenophobia and class divide are visible. But the book, which weaves together the lives of several people living in a small apartment building or in one of the houses nearby, fits together well enough and gets going in a relentless way a little over halfway through.

I've been looking for credible replacements for Ruth Rendell. She has been an excellent writer for decades, providing an incredibly varied, well-plotted and well written books at an astonishing rate. I'll miss her when she stops writing and glad that The Monster in the Box was not the beginning of a trend.

Morag Joss has struck me as similar in tone to Rendell, especially when Rendell writes as Barbara Vine. And Sophie Hannah's series of mysteries featuring detectives Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse are good replacements for her Inspector Wexford series (although the detectives are entirely different than Wexford and I think he would be appalled by them). I recently read the second in that series, The Truth-Teller's Lie, and while Rendell would have managed a more shocking ending that seemed a little more likely. Still, if Hannah continues to develop as a writer, she's be amazing in a few years.

104ivyd
Jun 23, 2011, 2:33 pm

>103 RidgewayGirl: Very interesting comments about P.D. James and Ruth Rendell! Over the years, I've read and enjoyed a great many books by both of them. I picked up a copy of The Private Patient (from the bargain bin) a few months ago but haven't read it yet -- now I wonder if I want to.

105dudes22
Jun 24, 2011, 4:16 pm

I'm wondering myself. I picked up a couple of PD James at the library sale ( not sure if they are newer or older) but will keep your comments in mind. I can't remember if I have any Rendell or if they're on my future reading ideas list.

106RidgewayGirl
Jun 25, 2011, 5:14 pm

I've had Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott around for awhile. I picked up a copy with great excitement and then started noticing the lackluster reviews. So it sat around until I grabbed it at random.

Ghostwalk is one of those books that is difficult to summarize because so much is going on. Here we get Isaac Newton's experiments in alchemy, animal research, a rekindled love affair that's a bit messy, acts of terrorism, ghosts, a clairvoyant with a bouffant and a tattoo and, of course, murder. It's a busy book, jumping back and forth between several plots that would fill a book all on their own. It was a fun read -- I like those novels that mix up historical events with a modern story, and Stott kept her balls in the air for most of the book. Had she kept going a little longer, took a little more time to wrap up the various stories and allowed a bit of breathing room, it might have been a stronger book. In the end, it was disappointing to have a rushed ending, with so much impact softened because events happened off-screen, were summarized by another character or sped through.

107katiekrug
Jun 26, 2011, 12:44 am

I have Ghostwalk and was initially really excited about it , too, until seeing some "eh" reviews. But yours give me hope that I will enjoy it - at least a little bit.

108RidgewayGirl
Jun 29, 2011, 8:20 pm

Trail of Blood by Lisa Black is the third and, hopefully, last book of bestsellery suspense I'll read this year, but I doubt it. With me, hope trumps experience pretty much every time. It wasn't a bad book, just one carefully written to obey all the rules of American Suspense novels aimed at a primarily female audience. It was actually better than the two previous books I've recently read of this kind, but being the third, there was no surprise left anywhere.

After reading the excellent The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen, I've had a sort of pavlovian response to anything set in the 1930s. Yep, in writing a novel full of poverty, Hoovervilles and desperation, Mullen made the Great Depression attractive to me. Tremendously attractive. And Trail of Blood has as a part of the plot a revisiting of the famous Torso murders in Cleveland, the crime that Eliot Ness himself was unable to solve. Black does do a credible job of the part of the book set in the thirties. The book begins well, but fades as it goes, so that by the final third, it was just an exercise in getting enough pages for publication, with plausibility and plot thrown to the winds.

109lkernagh
Jun 29, 2011, 10:12 pm

I continue my hunt for the Firefly Brothers. I loved Mullen's first book The Last Town on Earth. For some reason, my local library system never did get in a copy of The Firefly Brothers but I am on the list for when his third book The Revisionists arrives.... it is currently on order.

110RidgewayGirl
Jun 29, 2011, 10:29 pm

I'm waiting for The Revisionists, too. I have a copy of The Last Town on Earth, but I'm doing my best not to read it, if that makes sense. I like to have a small stack of unread books by favorite authors for when I need a sure thing.

111cammykitty
Jul 1, 2011, 12:31 am

I've decided next year's category challenge needs a "wishlisted" category so I actually do get around to the Firefly Brothers. It does sound really interesting.

112RidgewayGirl
Jul 1, 2011, 9:35 pm

You know, with The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers I just can't tell if I just had some sort of visceral response to it, or if it was an exceptionally fabulous book. Hopefully, both.

113VictoriaPL
Jul 1, 2011, 11:31 pm

Hopefully. I'll be starting on it soon!

114auntmarge64
Jul 2, 2011, 9:49 am

Just stopping by to catch up on your thread and say how useful I find your reviews. :)

115RidgewayGirl
Jul 4, 2011, 10:56 am

So, in case I have not mentioned this enough; I really liked Midnight in Paris and I'm declaring it my favorite movie of the year. Mainly because it was my own personal fantasy of a movie. Ok, it was a little weird to be played by Owen Wilson - I'll have to ask Mr. Allen about that casting choice when I see him - but since his job was mainly to stand around with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging cartoon-style, he did a great job.

I also really liked The Redbreast. I think it was DeltaQueen who said that it was important to read The Redbreast first, so I requested it from the library, already owning the next two.

The Redbreast is exactly what a crime novel should be. The main character, Harry Hole, is a wonderful creation; a large man with sticking out ears and badly fitting clothes (the paragraph describing his consternation at his high school graduation suit no longer fitting is worth reading more than once). His best friend is his partner, Ellen, who keeps him from returning to the bottle. At the beginning of The Redbreast, Harry is put in charge of securing the American president's route through a section of Oslo. Things go awry and the powers that be are eager to cover things over, causing them to promote Harry and stick him alone in an office at the end of a corridor.

The plot concerns everything from skinheads to arms smuggling to Norway's role in WWII. It's a wild ride that holds together to the very end. Harry's a great main character. He's a mess, but he's a sensitive and hopeful mess, with an appealing awkwardness. I'm looking forward to finding out what he does next.

116DeltaQueen50
Jul 4, 2011, 1:12 pm

I'm looking forward to finding out what Harry does next too! Luckily I've got the next two waiting on my TBR shelves. That's the only drawback to excellent mysteries, nine times out of ten they lead to more book purchases.

117lsh63
Jul 4, 2011, 3:15 pm

I'm loving The Redbreast also. I am impressed that you've finished it already!

118RidgewayGirl
Jul 6, 2011, 6:32 pm

The Road by Cormac McCarthy was a difficult read. Not because of the writing, but because of the content. But, oh, the writing is brilliant. McCarthy has pared down everything, from the language to the punctuation, to reflect the barren land the man and the boy are traveling through. The story is horrible, but beautifully told.

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendered. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their their crozzled hearts.

119Bcteagirl
Jul 6, 2011, 8:37 pm

The Road is one I will be reading later this year as well, so thank you for the review.

120katiekrug
Jul 6, 2011, 9:51 pm

I am planning to read The Road this month. Good to know you liked it.

121mstrust
Jul 7, 2011, 12:46 pm

Ah, I've found you!
Lots of good things here and I especially liked your review of Swamplandia.

I've been a fan of Brian Moore's early books (The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Emperor of Ice Cream) for many years, but I've always avoided Black Robe because Moore became religious in his later years. Still don't know if I'll tackle it but I appreciate your review. And I'm sorry to hear you didn't like The Private Patient. I have that one waiting on the shelf.

122RidgewayGirl
Jul 7, 2011, 10:05 pm

I feel like I've already reviewed Down River by John Hart, having discussed it on the Group Read thread. I think it's a well-written and well-plotted mystery that didn't let me down at the end. I'm looking forward to reading this author's other books.

123pamelad
Jul 7, 2011, 10:09 pm

Just ordered The Redbreast. Thanks for the review.

124RidgewayGirl
Jul 9, 2011, 1:23 pm

Mongolians don't believe in wasting any of their beloved sheep. Everything was in the bowl, floating in a sort of primeval ooze: lungs, stomach, bladder, brain, intestines, eyeballs, teeth, genitals. It was a lucky sheep dip; you were never sure what you were going to pull out. I fished carefully, not too keen on finding myself with the testicles. My first go produced an object that resembled an old purse dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant canal. I think it might have been an ear. I had better luck with the intestines, which were delicious, and once brought to the surface, went on for quite a while.

That's why we read books like A Moveable Feast, which is sub-titled Life-changing Food Adventures Around the World, isn't it? For the startling meals we would never have thought of as edible, let alone the company-best casserole, written about by people with a willingness to do anything as well as a good sense of humor. This anthology put out by Lonely Planet is, as with every anthology, a mixed bag of the fantastic, the heart-warming, the pretentious and the slightly boring. The count is loaded towards the fantastic, with the best story of all by Tim Cahill, The Rooster's Head in the Soup, which manages to be instructional, touching and very, very funny. Other stand-outs included a story about Kansas City barbeque by Doug Mack and a short bit by Andrew McCarthy (yes, that Andrew McCarthy) set in Thailand, about how a meal among friendly strangers can ease loneliness.

125ivyd
Jul 9, 2011, 1:47 pm

>118 RidgewayGirl: It's not often that a writer can, with every word and every stylistic device, so thoroughly evoke in the reader the emotions that the character is experiencing. The Road is not pleasant, but it is indeed brilliant.

126RidgewayGirl
Jul 10, 2011, 1:04 pm

Stewart O'Nan is slowly becoming one of my favorite authors. He's not showy, his plots aren't shocking or convoluted; he just writes with heart-breaking clarity about the ordinary lives of people living in the rusting, industrial towns of the North East.

In The Good Wife, Gary and Tommy burgle a house they believe to be empty. It all goes horribly wrong and they are arrested and charged with the murder of an elderly woman. Patty, Tommy's wife, is pregnant at the time. Astonished by the crime and arrest, she has to navigate the criminal justice system, and later the penal system, even as she has to raise her son and provide for them alone.

The Good Wife is a book about a woman who has to endure a difficult situation not of her own making and about how the system is not designed to comfort or support the families of the arrested or imprisoned. Patty was always the quiet one, the one who was a bit passive. With her husband's arrest, she is forced into speaking for herself, to making major decisions herself and into persevering when she would rather quit. This is a quiet book, but a very good one.

127DeltaQueen50
Jul 10, 2011, 2:20 pm

Another book and author for the wishlist.

128RidgewayGirl
Jul 10, 2011, 2:22 pm

If you've never read Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels and Last Night of the Lobster are good introductions.

129DeltaQueen50
Jul 10, 2011, 2:23 pm

Thanks, I will start there.

130katiekrug
Jul 10, 2011, 2:38 pm

I agree with Kay. Stewart O'Nan is excellent.

131RidgewayGirl
Jul 12, 2011, 10:30 pm

Anchee Min is an author to watch. She grew up in China's Cultural Revolution and wrote an astonishing memoir. She followed that with a novel, Katherine, about an American teaching English in China. So I was quick to pick up a copy of Becoming Madame Mao, but slow to read it. Generally, I prefer my historical novels to concern ordinary people.

Becoming Madame Mao tells the story of Jiang Chiang, Mao's wife and leader of the infamous "Group of Four", but not in the form of a straightforward historical account. Min moves back and forth from the first person to a very close third person and restricts herself to following Madame Mao. She's an interesting, but difficult woman to follow, constantly concerned with positioning herself and with getting the attention she feels she deserves.

The writing style worked perfectly with Min's subject. Told from the first person only, the book would have been too claustrophobic to read, in the third person, I would have missed out on who she was. An actress, Madame Mao was adept at projecting the face she wanted to towards the world. Becoming Madame Mao is a fascinating picture of a time, place and person I knew very little about.

132japaul22
Jul 13, 2011, 7:50 am

Anchee Min looks like an author I'd really enjoy. Have you ever read Wild Swans or Mao by Jung Chang? Her books are fantastic. I wonder how their writing compares since they write about similar topics?

133RidgewayGirl
Jul 13, 2011, 8:25 am

I've read Wild Swans and enjoyed it. Min is by far the better writer, while Chang is straightforward in her storytelling. I'd recommend Red Azalea if you liked Wild Swans, since it's also a memoir of that time. Min really makes you feel what it was like to suffer under the Cultural Revolution.

134japaul22
Jul 13, 2011, 12:06 pm

Thanks for the recommendation - I'll definitely check it out!

135DeltaQueen50
Jul 13, 2011, 12:43 pm

I have just received Pearl of China by Anchee Min as an ER, so I am very happy to see her praised here. I also have Empress Orchid on by TBR shelves.

136cammykitty
Jul 17, 2011, 10:33 am

Yikes - sheep dip - before breakfast! You've done some brave reading recently.

137RidgewayGirl
Jul 18, 2011, 9:51 am

I'm on vacation! There is a beach outside the window and the house is full of nieces, nephews and children who actually belong to me. I brought eight books with me, which is more than I can read, but I am feeling the lack of choice. There's an unforeseen consequence of an overly large TBR - the way I miss it when it's not accessible.

Three Seconds by Roslund and Hellstrom is a relentless thriller of a book. Piet Hoffman is a police informer who has worked his way up in the Polish mafia as it seeks to take over the drugs trade in Sweden. Shortly after he watches a man be shot at close range, he is introduced to the top members of the criminal group and is given a job by them that will allow the Swedish police to close down their Swedish activities. He is to go into a high security prison as an inmate and take over the drugs trade for the Polish mafia. This will provide the Swedish police the chance to catch the bad guys and to destroy the drug supply to the prison. The problem is that the detective assigned to solve that initial murder is getting close to the truth, which would expose a lot more than the identity of a murderer.

The book then follows Piet, as he navigates increasingly perilous waters and Grens, a troubled but relentless investigator. The success of one means a failure for the other, but I was rooting for both of them. The plot is intricate, but doesn't rely on coincidence or leaps of logic. Lastly, the book itself was bound with unusual care, with decked edges, smooth, high quality paper and beautiful end pages. It was a pleasure to read.

138thornton37814
Jul 18, 2011, 5:56 pm

I know what you mean, Alison. I only took my Kindle with me when I went earlier this month to my Dad's. It wasn't long before I'd hit a bookstore and begun reading the paperback. My excuse was that I was using the book for a TIOLI challenge. (It was one that was already on my TBR list and was not available at my local library.) I also hit the Goodwill bookstore while I was there and added a few more things to my huge TBR pile.

139auntmarge64
Jul 18, 2011, 6:48 pm

Vacation - nice! Where did you all go?

140lindapanzo
Jul 19, 2011, 1:37 pm

Enjoy your vacation!!

141RidgewayGirl
Jul 21, 2011, 9:42 am

The Devil's Highway was written by Luis Alberto Urrea seven years ago and should be required reading today. It describes how undocumented workers get to the farms, motels, fast food restaurants and factories of the United States and why they undertake that perilous journey through the story of a typical group of men who attempted to cross the Arizona desert on foot. It's brilliantly and humanely written, showing everyone from the Border Patrol to the coyotes who guide the group so disastrously wrong in a critical, but compassionate way.

As the political rhetoric heats up here and we have successfully renamed the people who pick our oranges and cook our Big Macs illegal aliens, as though they were non-human and essentially evil, this book is more important than ever. While Urrea does have a bias toward compassion and understanding, he doesn't flinch from addressing the costs to everyone of the issue of workers crossing illegally to work in the north. He also illuminates both the reasons people would be driven to undertake an expensive and potentially deadly journey and the ways American immigration policy has created unforeseen consequences.

If every article or book written on this topic were as well-researched and free of hyperbole, I think the national debate on immigration would be both more reasonable and more productive.

142RidgewayGirl
Jul 21, 2011, 5:57 pm

I have enjoyed every one of Benjamin Black's dark mystery novels set in 1950s Dublin, and A Death in Summer is no exception. The fourth book in the series featuring the pathologist Dr Quirke with his complicated and troubled life. This time, he is called in at the suicide of a rich and powerful man, only it's not suicide and nothing is clear or easy. Meanwhile, we learn more about Quirke's ambitious assistant.

For the first two-thirds of the novel nothing seems to fit together or to be going anywhere. Plot lines lead to apparent dead ends in a meandering sort of way, but Black's writing is always so enjoyable I was willing to wander wherever he wanted to take me. Of course, in the final third of the book things get going, in churning, gut wrenching fashion, in which he pulls everything together at the last possible moment. Atmosphere is the star of this novel, with scenes described evocatively in very few words. I'd recommend beginning this series at the beginning, with Christine Falls, but if you've been following Quirke along his lugubrious way, you won't be disappointed with this one.

143RidgewayGirl
Jul 24, 2011, 4:28 pm

He walked away, and then suddenly everything was dust and ashes in his mind again. What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood pulp and lampblack, were nothing -- without a mind to use them.

George R. Stewart's Earth Abides was published in 1949, and it's interesting to compare it to modern post-apocalyptic novels. Ish is staying in a cabin for a few weeks outside of San Francisco. He doesn't have a radio and is busy enough that he doesn't notice when the usual scant flow of traffic dies out. When he does drive out, he finds an empty world. He eventually finds a newspaper and discovers that a pandemic has swept across the world. He may be the only survivor. Over time, he does find a few survivors as he watches nature retake the towns and cities.

There's a thoughtful pace to this book. Ish is an academic, more comfortable observing than doing and he is often passive. The author is less interested in the causes of the end of civilization or in the immediate aftermath than in what such an event would do to the survivors emotionally and in what would happen in the decades following. Stewart forms his characters very much in keeping with his time, which is different that those basic archetypes found in current novels. Here, men are less divided into good and dangerous as in stolid, capable but incapable of abstract thought and the intellectuals.

While very much rooted in the past, Earth Abides is a thoughtful book that approaches a now common theme in a different way.

144cammykitty
Jul 24, 2011, 9:19 pm

Interesting review. I just finished reading a 1950s dystopia too, and yes, very different.

145RidgewayGirl
Jul 26, 2011, 4:43 pm

I'm on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on vacation. On a recent outing to Ocracoke, I found a fantastic small bookstore called Books to be Red. In the interest of supporting independent bookstores, I walked out with a stack, three of which were for me.

She is preaching in the park with her mother when suddenly Wes is standing in front of her. Mother thrusts a pamphlet into his hand. Wes glances at Birdie, not recognizing her at first. Then there is the moment when his eyes slowly narrow, like a gear turning inside him. He stares, comparing, she knows, this girl with the other one. She didn't tell him about this life, but doesn't everyone have two? There is the life you live for your parents and then the life for you.

Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe is Jenny Hollowell's debut novel. It concerns Birdie, a young woman who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household in Virginia, marrying at a young age the man chosen for her by her parents. She runs away to save herself, only to find that that escape wasn't an ending but a beginning. Despite leaving, she's still tethered to her past, even as she doubts her future. Los Angeles is wearing her down, not only with the endless auditions, but also with the need to pretend, to laugh at jokes that aren't funny, to smile at parties she'd rather not attend. It's changed her.

Now the phone is Lewis, wondering if she wants company. She is unsure of her answer, of what would be easiest. Lewis is better than most diversions because he doesn't seem bad for her, at least not in the way that drinking is bad for her or married directors are bad for her.

The writing in this book is gorgeous, both melancholy and comic. There were several passages, especially of dialogue, which I read more than once, Hollowell puts her sentences together so carefully that they appear as effortless as the life Birdie longs for.

Mother once told her never to pick up the phone on the first three rings. It makes you seem desperate, she said, like you're just sitting around waiting for someone to call you. Like you have nothing better to do. And so when the phone would ring Mother would stare at the jangling receiver, counting the rings until she was certain that whoever was at the other end of the line would not think she needed them.

146GingerbreadMan
Jul 26, 2011, 6:12 pm

Catching up on your thread as my vacation is coming to an end. A really good review on Earth abides, I'll have to check that one out for sure.

147thornton37814
Jul 26, 2011, 7:19 pm

I keep saying I'm going to head to the Outer Banks on vacation, but I haven't had time because most of my vacations the last few years have been spent taking care of aging parents. I'll have the next couple of weeks off, but I have some things I want to get done around the house, and I think I'm going to take a couple of short day trips. After I read the NetGalley of the book set at the Carl Sandburg home over near Asheville, I really want to make that one of the day trips. Apparently the farm tours are free and the home is a $5 admission. I think it's worth that just to see the 12,000 books they say are in the house!

148RidgewayGirl
Jul 28, 2011, 9:56 pm

Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon was better than the previous Inspector Brunetti mystery, but it wasn't a patch on her earlier novels. I think that Leon is a bit weary of the series.

149thornton37814
Jul 29, 2011, 8:20 am

Sorry to hear that! I've enjoyed the Brunetti mysteries I've read. I've got one lined up to read next month, but it is one of the earlier ones. I haven't read the series in order. I've just read them as I came across them at the used bookstore or at the Boys and Girls Club "box sale."

150RidgewayGirl
Ago 2, 2011, 4:36 pm

Hemingway: The Paris Years by Michael S. Reynolds is the perfect companion volume to A Moveable Feast. It takes Hemingway's memoir and puts it in chronological order, explains Hemingway's many jabs and offhand comments and corrects where Hemingway either embellished the story or made things up. What emerges is the story of a developing writer, a man desperate to both escape his upbringing and to impress the folks back home, a man quick to toss out an insult, but even quicker to take offense. Arriving in Paris, Hemingway was a mediocre writer of sentimental stories, but in just a few, intense years, he had made himself into one of the best writers of a very fertile time in American writing. Of course, he had help along the way, in the form of friendship and support from the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and even Ford Madox Ford, who supported Hemingway despite of Hemingway's scorn and his own preference for traditional 19th century writing. Hemingway needed help, even as he wanted to be a self-made man, leading him to form intense friendships that never lasted long -- Hemingway was not given to gratitude and preferred to burn his bridges once he had walked over them.

Reynolds discusses Hemingway's writing during that time in detail. I was interested to find that my favorites of Hemingway's many short stories were written during his years in Paris. He worked tirelessly at his craft, and when he was doing well, he wrote quickly. He was also able to edit his stories down; removing everything that didn't need to be said, leaving no unnecessary scenes or even words. A disastrous trip to Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls was the inspiration for The Sun Also Rises.

Reynolds' also puts Hemingway within his time and place, explaining the events of the time as well as providing a vivid picture of Paris in the 1920s.

It was a thrill to read that when Hemingway went to New York to negotiate the publishing contract for The Sun Also Rises he hung out at the Algonquin, spending time with Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, both of whom would accompany him on the ship back to Paris. I would have liked to have been on that boat.

151Bcteagirl
Ago 7, 2011, 6:14 pm

Catching up on your thread! I especially enjoyed the review of Earth Abides and look forward to reading this one. :)

152RidgewayGirl
Ago 7, 2011, 7:52 pm

Well, it is on its way to you!

153Bcteagirl
Ago 7, 2011, 11:42 pm

154RidgewayGirl
Ago 8, 2011, 10:00 pm

Lizzie and Evie have been best friends for forever. They're next door neighbors and have shared everything for as long as Lizzie can remember. Evie's family is perfect, too, from her charismatic father to her queen bee older sister. And then Evie disappears and Lizzie is left to wonder what happened, while feeling that she should know, that the clues must all be there since she and Evie were closer than sisters and told each other everything.

In The End of Everything Megan Abbott has crafted a tense and finely tuned book about loss and growing up and the way memory can turn on you. Lizzie's determined to get her friend back, to put that golden family next door back together, even as she learns that nothing is perfect.

155RidgewayGirl
Ago 9, 2011, 9:26 am

My summer vacation was spent at the beach. There were two excellent independent bookstores in the area. If you ever find yourself on Ocracoke Island, NC, please visit Books to be Red. The bookstore portion of the old house is not large, but the selection is amazing. I've found half as many interesting books at my local B&N megastore. The other parts of the house were filled with local pottery, vintage aprons, quirky jewelry and art supplies. So, on both visits (I dragged several family members along for the second trip) books were purchased. The other independent was in Buxton, and was strictly a bookstore, albeit one with an eclectic greeting card selection. Buxton Books also had a friendly and knowledgeable owner and a few more books were obtained. Here, the books were shelved in a sort of organic way, with little attention paid to divisions like "fiction" or "cooking". Which was fun to browse and it was clear that the owner could tell you exactly where each title was shelved.

I picked up Close to Shore, Michael Capuzzo's account of the 1916 shark attacks in New Jersey, at Buxton Books as it seemed to be the perfect sort of end of vacation reading. Returning to the splendid joys of Discovery Channel's Shark Week, I enjoyed reading Close to Shore quite a bit, especially since I am now safely inland.

Close to Shore is much more about what life was like along the Jersey shore a hundred years ago than it really is about those famous shark attacks. No one is bitten until almost a hundred pages into the book. And Capuzzo has the annoying habit of breaking off just when the shark stuff gets really going to provide a chapter about something or someone only tangentially related to the subject matter at hand. As far as an interesting book about the social history of New York and New Jersey in 1916 goes, this book is interesting and informative. If it's shark attacks that grab you, better just spend an hour watching one of the excellent documentaries about historic shark scares on the Discovery Channel.

156ivyd
Ago 9, 2011, 12:28 pm

>150 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for the excellent review of Hemingway: The Paris Years! I just re-read The Sun Also Rises and sometime soon I want to read A Moveable Feast (read so long ago, it will be like new) and The Paris Wife. It sounds like this book will be a perfect complement to them.

157DeltaQueen50
Ago 9, 2011, 2:30 pm

Very clever of you to wait to read Close To Shore until the end of your vacation. Doesn't sound a book to be reading while you are still wading knee deep in the ocean!

158RidgewayGirl
Ago 10, 2011, 1:02 pm

Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger has a great setting; a Minnesota town up near the Canadian border, on the edge of a lake that is shared with a reservation, during the cold, dark days before Christmas. There's a lot to the plot, too. Politicians, Native Americans running a casino, homicidal loners, a right wing militia that's a bit better funded than it should be and an ex-sheriff who was kicked out of office and who subsequently went off the rails a little, losing his family before he was able to come up for air. There are some interesting, fleshed-out characters, too. In addition to the ex-sheriff, who's the protagonist of the novel, there's a priest who prefers a hands on, active life, an Anishinaabe casino manager who was previously an AIM activist and the current sheriff, who is contorted with worry for his wife, who is slipping into dementia. The books begins with a bang and manages to keep boiling along at a furious pace.

I didn't like it. Oh, for the setting and many of the plot elements I kept reading, but ultimately the author ended the book using as many old-fashioned cliches as possible. Beautiful younger woman with a bad reputation and a heart of gold who is selflessly there for the hero? Check. Betcha can't guess what happens to her. Shrewish wife who falls for the wrong man? Check. And the bad guy? Clearly indicated from the early page. I kept reading, thinking that it couldn't possibly be that obvious. It was. I might have enjoyed the novel had it been written sometime before 1950, but it's much to current a novel to get away with such a tired ending and such old-fashioned views of womanhood.

159VictoriaPL
Ago 10, 2011, 1:39 pm

Thanks for giving Iron Lake a go. I was hoping I had a winner there to balance your excellent recommendation of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. I'm looking at the bright side - at least there won't be any competition between us at the library for the rest in Krueger's series.

160GingerbreadMan
Ago 10, 2011, 3:32 pm

159 I always feel kind of guilty when friends takes me up on a recommendation and then dislike it. Then again, one of the things I really like about this group is that it is very casual about people having different tastes. Much more so than many of my real life book friends! BTW: are you two close enough to share a library? Neat!

161VictoriaPL
Editado: Ago 10, 2011, 3:54 pm

@160 Thanks Anders. I agree, we have a great little group here. Even if someone doesn't like a book you love, it's still cordial. I just started watching LOST season Three, which starts out with a book group where one member disparages another's favorite Stephen King novel. It gave me a good laugh. And yes, we are both patrons of the same library system, though not the same branch. I'm lucky to have an LT friend so close by.

162RidgewayGirl
Ago 10, 2011, 5:18 pm

I'll still listen to your recommendations, Victoria. You led me to Sarah Addison Allen after all. And Megan Abbott, for that matter.

163lsh63
Editado: Ago 10, 2011, 5:31 pm

Now I really want to read Iron Lake to see what I think of it. But I have it designated for next year. In a way, I'm hoping that I don't get caught up in yet another series, but we'll see what happens.

164thornton37814
Ago 10, 2011, 9:46 pm

Iron Lake was not on the shelf when I went to the library last week. It says it is there now so I'm hoping it will still be there when I go tomorrow.

165RidgewayGirl
Ago 13, 2011, 11:55 am

What Is Mine is the first in a series of crime novels by Norwegian author Anne Holt. It introduces an overweight and over-worked detective, investigating a series of child abductions that have Oslo in a panic. He enlists the reluctant help of a criminologist who is involved in her own investigation. Both stories were well plotted and interesting, while the characters were complex and believable. I'll be reading more by this author, and soon.

166cbl_tn
Ago 13, 2011, 12:04 pm

I just added What Is Mine to my library TBR list. I have several Scandinavian crime novels on my TBR list, but I haven't managed to work more than a couple of them in to my reading plans. Maybe I need to think about a Scandinavian crime category for next year's challenge.

167thornton37814
Ago 13, 2011, 12:17 pm

What Is Mine sounds interesting. Our library has it in ebook format, but it won't work on my Kindle yet. I understand that some of these are supposed to work later this year, so I'm optimistic that I can read it that way eventually.

168RidgewayGirl
Ago 13, 2011, 12:38 pm

I went on a Scandinavian crime novel binge last year, culminating suddenly when I read a bad one. Now I'm careful as to which ones I read, and Anne Holt will be one of those.

169RidgewayGirl
Ago 17, 2011, 2:18 pm

Popular Crime is an odd book. The subtitle promises reflections on the celebration of violence, which does make it into the book as a sort of afterword. Bill James usually writes about baseball statistics and this background reflects into this book about the true crime genre. Roughly organized around crimes that caught the notice of the American popular press, chronologically arranged, James segues into all sorts of random topics, from how to make the justice system more reliable by assigning numerical values to all the various possible clues, to his own theory about the Kennedy assassination.

James is an entertaining author, if an inconsistent one. His musings about the criminal justice system and the history of the popular press are sometimes fascinating, but often bloated and boring. He's that guy, the one you meet who controls the conversation with his own theories on everything. In book form, it's easy to skip the boring bits (does anyone want to read another theory on who killed JonBenet Ramsey?) and to enjoy the wit and intriguing ideas. James is intelligent and well-read and had he written a book about the ways that various famous crimes were reported on, investigated and how these cases changed American law, it would have been a fantastic book. As it now exists, Popular Crime consists of summaries of widely varying lengths of famous crimes interwoven with sometimes insightful, sometimes nonsensical segments on history, judicial process and personal theories based on his intensive reading of true crime books.

The meat of the book is really his summaries of famous crimes and how they impacted American culture, both at the time and how they changed laws and attitudes. And those bits are excellent. I wish that all the digressions had been omitted, leaving only a well written social history of crime and the media.

170RidgewayGirl
Ago 22, 2011, 10:21 am

I'm not that interested in the whole wild west theme. Yes, I spent several years living in Phoenix, Arizona and so read a few books of local history, including And Die in the West, which is about the gunfight at the OK Corral, but it's not one of the historic times or places that grab my attention. But Doc, an historical novel about Doc Holliday, grabbed my attention when two LTers whose opinions about books I value raved about it.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell is, quite simply, one of the best books I have read this year. Following the life of Doc Holliday, the infamous dentist gunslinger, Doc concentrates on his year in Dodge, where he fell in with the Earp brothers. The historic detail is both impressive and fascinating, but what makes this book is Russell's skill at creating complex and conflicted characters.

Decisions--genuine, deliberate decisions--were never John Henry Holliday's strong suit. In youth, he'd sought the advice and consent of his large family. In manhood, poor health and a poor economy had dictated his plans, such as they were.

Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.

171katiekrug
Ago 22, 2011, 1:29 pm

Doc is not a book I would normally be interested in, but like you, I've heard such great things about it, it's now on my wish list.

172-Eva-
Ago 22, 2011, 2:20 pm

I'll join in the not-normally-my-type-of-book, but I too keep hearding such great words about this one it needs to go on the wishlist. Great character-writing will always win me over, so I have high hopes for it.

173dudes22
Ago 22, 2011, 2:49 pm

I'm part of the not-normally-my-type-of-book group too, but I had heard the author being interviewed on NPR one morning and she made it sound very interesting.

174mstrust
Ago 22, 2011, 3:00 pm

Yep, you got me too. Good review! And I never read stories placed in Arizona for the reason that I do live here.

175GingerbreadMan
Ago 22, 2011, 3:21 pm

I'm already planning for Lonesome dove for next year's challenge, and this sounds very good too. Who knows, I might end up a western buff in a few years?

176RidgewayGirl
Ago 22, 2011, 4:59 pm

The author had the skill of being able to make even the most unlikeable of characters understandable. There were huge differences in personality between Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but she made both characters sympathetic even as their reactions to a situation were completely different.

I suspect I'll be thinking about the people in Doc for some time to come.

177thornton37814
Ago 22, 2011, 5:34 pm

I'm not usually a "western" reader, but Doc does sound interesting.

178RidgewayGirl
Ago 24, 2011, 10:43 am

My son and I read The House of a Million Pets by Ann Hodgman together. It's a memoir of the author's large and varied collection of pets, from the run of the mill cats and dogs, to more exotic animals like sugar gliders and an unhappy bulbul.

The House of a Million Pets was enjoyable for both of us, with my middle school-aged daughter joining us for several chapters. Because each chapter was the self-contained story of a specific animal, it was perfect for summertime reading, when there are lots of interruptions. And the stories were honest, some amusing and some heart-breaking. Hodgman begins her adult life collecting all those exotic pets that parents automatically say no to, and she's honest about how fun it was to get to know about them first-hand, but also how much work it is to care for an animal that isn't really a housepet and how they would be happier in their natural environments. She has also adopted a fair number of animals rescued from unhappy situations and there's a heart-breaking chapter about putting a beloved cat to sleep that had both my son and I crying a bit (this chapter is difficult to read, but should be read by anyone who has a pet they love and it sparked a great discussion about the cat we have buried in the woods). Mostly, what comes through the pages is how much joy Hodgman gets from her menagerie and how each animal is an individual (well, except for the pygmy mice and the finches, who tend to be mistaken for one another).

179RidgewayGirl
Ago 24, 2011, 5:04 pm

Miyuki Miyabe is a popular author in Japan who has won several awards there. Her novel, All She Was Worth, is clearly by an assured, experienced writer. It tells the story of a detective, who is on leave from the police as he recovers from a gunshot. He is visited by a distant nephew who wants him to find his fiancee, who disappeared soon after she was turned down for a credit card. Soon there are questions about who she is to add to the question of where she is.

All She Was Worth deals with identity theft and with Japanese attitudes toward credit, bankruptcy and family. The plot moved forward relentlessly, but the most interesting thing about this book was the glimpse into a culture with a different way of looking at things.

180cbl_tn
Ago 24, 2011, 6:50 pm

>179 RidgewayGirl: That one sounds intriguing. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

181RidgewayGirl
Ago 28, 2011, 12:10 pm

I'm having trouble marshaling my thoughts in regards to Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl, Susan Campbell's account of growing up within a rigid brand of Christianity and how that shaped her adult life. When I was sixteen, my family moved and the new church we attended was unlike what I had been used to. For a while I fell in with this new brand of American Christianity until the cognitive dissonance did me in and I had to walk away. From there it's hard to turn around and find a place for faith in my own life. Campbell's experiences were similar -- her church differed in some ways from mine, and I'm sure we would have been equally certain that the other was probably not really saved, but on the larger themes, it could have been the same place.

When my Catholic friends who are lackadaisical or worse about their Bibles call their chuch the "one, true church," I sit silently. If they knew their Bible, they'd know that that title belongs to my church, not theirs. I know they are in for a big surprise come Judgment Day.

Dating Jesus is a humorous account of the odd things Campbell believed growing up and her dawning conviction that even though she was a girl, that she wasn't designed to be secondary; a submissive helper to the men allowed to hold the power and make the decisions. But the book is also a history of the evangelical church in America and how changed drastically over the years, and the story of how Campbell was able to come to a qualified truce with her upbringing.

I was impressed with how Campbell managed to present her story in a humorous way, without downplaying its effect on her or allowing the narrative to become bitter. I loved this book, but wonder if it would be comprehensible to someone who hadn't experienced something similar. On the other hand, with radio talk show hosts and politicians embracing the brittle, angry rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity, it's more important than ever to understand where their ideas come from and to engage in a reasonable dialog on the subject.

182RidgewayGirl
Ago 28, 2011, 3:41 pm

I've never read anything by Cynthia Ozick beyond a short story or two, so I thought to remedy this with Foreign Bodies. Set during the 1952, Foreign Bodies is the story of Bea, whose life has been on hold since her husband left her years earlier. She goes on a trip to Europe and her brother orders her to find his son and to bring him home. She fails, but is now enmeshed in the life of her brother's family. Her brother is a blow-hard who has estranged every member of his family and it's not hard to see why, but those family members aren't very nice themselves and it's hard to see why Bea is willing to involve herself in all that drama. Bea, through all the family drama, wakes up and begins to take an active role in the lives of those around her, finding that while it's difficult to change one's own life, it's relatively easy to have an impact in the lives of others.

Oddly, while I liked none of the characters and disliked several of them, and wasn't gripped by the plot, I could not stop reading this book. It's written in an old-fashioned style, which suits it's post-war setting and has a fearsome momentum that left me turning pages, uncertain of what lay around the bend.

183cbl_tn
Ago 28, 2011, 6:37 pm

>181 RidgewayGirl: I've been interested in that one ever since it appeared in one of the Early Reviewers lists. I've added it to my TBR list for the public library. My local branch has a copy.

184sjmccreary
Ago 28, 2011, 6:58 pm

#181 I saw in the connection news on the homepage the other day that you'd rated this book, and I've been waiting for your comments ever since. I wasn't raised in a fundamentalist church, but it seems they are becoming more and more predominate here within the Christian community. That causes us difficulties since we are traditionalists and don't even feel comfortable in a Baptist church (far from fundamentalist, in most cases). I'll be glad of a chance to learn more about this side of the faith in order to try to understand them better - thanks for the recommendation.

185cammykitty
Ago 28, 2011, 11:06 pm

Dating Jesus goes on the WL!

186RidgewayGirl
Sep 3, 2011, 1:38 pm

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff is a fascinating soup of a book. Taking place in a fictional version of Cooperstown, the book starts off with the illegitimate offspring of a descendant of the founder of Templeton, returned home pregnant after a disastrous affair with a professor and adds to that a monster, a ghost, a Greek chorus in the form of a group of joggers, a woman who can start fire Stephen King-style with her mind, a sexy tow-truck operator and a mother who was once a free love hippie and is now a hobnailed cross-wearing Christian. There are dashes of murderesses, pinches of wolf-boys and a Mohican or two as well.

There's just a few too many elements here to allow for coherence. Plot elements and characters are scattered all over the place, with some forgotten and others given a quick wrap up at the end. That said, The Monsters of Templeton kept me reading, and if I would have liked to have known more about one story-line, well, there was another interesting one a few pages away. Some elements of the book were so compelling that I'm interested to see what this author does next.

187VictoriaPL
Sep 3, 2011, 3:37 pm

Thanks for giving The Monsters of Templeton a go!

188cammykitty
Sep 3, 2011, 7:33 pm

Interesting review on The Monsters. I'm curious, but not sure if I'm curious enough to bite. At first, it almost sounds like an early Pedro Almodovar movie, but he would've left out the monster.

189RidgewayGirl
Sep 5, 2011, 3:36 pm

I'm not the type who can exclude people socially just because they operate under some bad habits.

Tomato Red is by Daniel Woodrell, who wrote the novel on which the movie Winter's Bone is based. It can be best described as hillbilly noir, with a protagonist who is sure to make the wrong choice and get caught doing it. Sammy Barlach has just moved from a tiny place in Arkansas to a small town in Missouri, where he gets a job at the dog food factory. On a lonely Friday night he finds a party of sorts going on in a near by trailer park and by Sunday morning, he's pretty much messed up his life once again.

What makes this book unique is Sammy, who narrates the story of his involvement with Jamalee and Justin Merridew. He knows the deck is stacked against him and how the world sees him as an uneducated redneck, but he has a bit of charm and enough optimism to keep going. He uses language in a way that reminds me of a Coen brothers movie.

The weather didn't help. The weather kept picking at us--nothing but heavy wet heat, sweat, heat, sweat, bugs, bugs, and bad whipped moods. The weather stayed in that attitude of weather where you can't help but wonder just who it is you've pissed off so.

190DeltaQueen50
Sep 5, 2011, 4:34 pm

Sounds like my kind of book!

191GingerbreadMan
Sep 5, 2011, 5:39 pm

And mine!

192mstrust
Sep 5, 2011, 6:51 pm

Hillbilly noir? This is so going on my list.

193clfisha
Sep 6, 2011, 4:52 am

Now I loved the film of Winters Bone, I take it the books worth trying as well. Good news :)

194RidgewayGirl
Sep 6, 2011, 10:27 am

It's always a surprise to see what books elicit a response. I would have thought calling it hillbilly noir would have narrowed its readership. I have put all of Daniel Woodrell's books on my wishlist and will have to watch Winter's Bone -- but after I've read the book.

195RidgewayGirl
Sep 6, 2011, 10:39 am

22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson tells the story of the Nowaks, Silvana and Janusz, who were living in Warsaw with their baby, Aurek, when Poland was invaded. Janusz goes to join up with the Polish army and they end up separated for the duration of the war. Janusz eventually reaches England, after a long stay in a French farmhouse, while Silvana has a much more traumatic experience, ending up surviving in the forest. Janusz works hard to find his family and to build a new life in Ipswich, but both Janusz and Silvana hold secrets and sorrow and guilt, and are now different people from the young couple beginning married life in Warsaw so long ago.

This novel has interesting things to say about loss and survivor's guilt and how the joyous reunion is only the beginning of the story, rather than the end. There's a lot going on, between everyone's wartime experiences and their new life in Ipswich, so the characters remain opaque. Still, the story is hard to put down, even if the "big secret" is pretty clear, at least to the reader, from early on. Not a great book, but a good read that approaches a familiar theme from a slightly different angle.

196-Eva-
Sep 6, 2011, 2:27 pm

I'm with the others, "hillbilly noir" sounds great - count me in! :)

197RidgewayGirl
Sep 11, 2011, 2:21 pm

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

This darkly comic western is a stylish foray into an old genre. From the eye-catching cover art to the strong interior graphic design, this book shouts for attention. Cleverly written, deWitt tells the story of Eli and Charlie, the infamous Sisters Brothers, as they travel from Oregon territory to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. They are killers-for-hire, although one of the brothers is decidedly less blood-thirsty than the other. Eli is worried about his weight and he discovers the joys of dental hygiene along the way. He longs to settle into a quiet life, with a wife and a store to tend, and to leave his current life far behind him.

My attitude about this decision was that it would be the last bit of bloodshed for my foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life; I told Charlie this and he told me that if the thought brought me comfort I should embrace it. "But," he said, "you're forgetting about the Commodore."
"Oh, yes. Well, after him then."
Charlie paused. "And there will likely be some killing related to the Commodore's death. Accusations leveled, debts owed, that sort of thing. Could be quite bloody, in fact."
I thought, Then this will be the final era of killing in my lifetime.

The Sisters Brothers is full to the brim with colorful characters and situations. There's certainly never a dull moment as the brothers make their bloody way south. My only quibble with this book is that it lacked depth and substance, but the shiny outer layer was sure pretty.

198GingerbreadMan
Sep 11, 2011, 3:00 pm

Neat review! Still sounds great, despite your reservations.

199RidgewayGirl
Sep 11, 2011, 4:22 pm

I was confused as to whether my ambivalence toward this book was due to the book itself or to it making the Booker Prize shortlist. It was a fun, zippy book, but not Booker Prize material. The judges, who include Susan Hill and Stella Rimington, have said in interviews that they were looking for books that were readable, not too long and easy to zip through instead of, say, literary excellence. I am disappointed in this year's shortlist, where many substantial, innovative novels were excluded.

In the past few years, I have had strong opinions over which book should win and I've enjoyed reading books from earlier years' shortlists. This year, I'm dragging my way through a few of the shortlisted books, but I'm more drawn to books that didn't make the list. I hope that next year's group of books returns to the Booker's usual level of excellence.

200GingerbreadMan
Sep 11, 2011, 5:02 pm

I know too little about the Booker prize. What are the criteria?

201RidgewayGirl
Sep 11, 2011, 5:27 pm

It's a British literary prize open to novels written by citizens of the Commonwealth countries. It's a mark of distinction to be named to the shortlist and, according to the Booker website, recognizes the finest books published in English. It is a prestigious award, aimed at rewarding the very best in literary fiction. The Booker has, in years past, brought to my attention many new authors who, while having written excellent books, have escaped wide recognition. Generally, the Booker shortlist has been a fantastic mix of new, avant garde authors, authors from the less celebrated countries of the Commonwealth, masterpieces from well-established authors and books from authors who have something new to say, or say it in a new way. The choices are sometimes difficult reads, for what they are saying or how they choose to say it, and last year Wolf Hall won -- a fantastic book, but a long and challenging read.

202lkernagh
Sep 11, 2011, 7:09 pm

I have watched the Booker Prize with the same interest over the years that I have watched the Canadian Governor General Prize for Fiction and the Canadian Giller Prize. All three have exhibited tendencies, in varying forms over the years, towards shortlisting and awarding prizes to novels that would generate the 'What the ****" comment. I am always open to the odd confusing winner but it is starting to be come more of the norm where one shakes there head to think that 'that' book won the Prize. The winner of the Man Booker Prize - as mentioned by Ridgeway Girl, is recognizes as the finest books published in English and the winner receives a cash prize of 50,000 British Pounds.

The fact that the current Booker Prize judges are looking for 'readable' books given the Booker's mandate to recognize the finest books published in English and the cash prize at the end of the tunnel makes this look like a farce. But that is just my opinion.

Sorry for jumping into your thread with this rant RidgewayGirl, I just have no stomach for prizes of financial value as the Booker is, and of the mandate of the Booker, to think 'readability' should be the main determining factor, which I take this year's Booker jury is using as there benchmark. I am avoiding the Booker threads right now for the same reason.

Rant ended. ;-)

203RidgewayGirl
Sep 11, 2011, 7:21 pm

Boy, your rant sounds like my rant. :)

There's always next year. Unless they completely jump the shark and just award the Booker to the newest Lee Child thriller.*

*I heartily enjoy the Jack Reacher novels; I just don't confuse readability with literary quality.**

**That Tom Cruise is slated to play Jack Reacher in the movie fills me with almost as much sadness and dread as this year's Booker shortlist. Although Cruise is exactly who one thinks of when considering who to play a tall, muscular, blond, anti-social loner whose only grooming product is a toothbrush, I somehow think he'll ruin the whole thing.

204lkernagh
Sep 11, 2011, 7:31 pm

Although Cruise is exactly who one thinks of when considering who to play a tall, muscular, blond, anti-social loner whose only grooming product is a toothbrush

Having never read the Jack Reachernovels by Lee Child, I can totally relate to your comment..... could they get any farther from the Jack Reacher character, as described?!?!?

LOL!

It is times like this where I wish I lived on an isolated island with nothing by food supplies and crates full of of books!

205mathgirl40
Sep 11, 2011, 9:31 pm

I've also been hearing about the Booker controversy, including the comments about readability, but I guess I'll reserve judgment until I've read some of the books on the shortlist. The Sisters Brothers still sounds like a very worthwhile read.

206cammykitty
Sep 12, 2011, 2:27 am

Most people in the U.S. haven't heard of the Booker prize, and the ones that do know about it expect them to be "heavy" books. People often say British taste and US taste just isn't the same, and then they brag about how they understand the British and like the Booker prize books. LOL

That said, readable is one thing. Life of Pi is quite readable. It is also thought provoking on many levels. You could have daily discussions on it for a week without running out of subject matter. The Sisters Brothers sounds like a great read. I don't usually like westerns, but your quote makes me laugh. The fact that you say this My only quibble with this book is that it lacked depth and substance, but the shiny outer layer was sure pretty. should knock it out of the running for a Booker though. Should! That doesn't mean it will.

207RidgewayGirl
Sep 12, 2011, 7:30 am

Remember Vernon God Little? It won the Booker, despite being a trite and forced satire on how tacky Americans are. It was topical, but there was nothing there to give it staying power. The other books on that list, though, were uniformly fantastic, and included Oryx and Crake and Brick Lane, among others.

I don't think liking the Booker Prize means that I think that I understand "The British", especially given that the Booker awards Commonwealth writers, not British ones. It simply closely reflects my own reading taste, which has less to do with being English, or whatever, and more to do with simply bringing to attention the finest writers working in the english language.

All of the Booker winners are "readable". I enjoyed Wolf Hall and The Children's Book much more than The Sisters Brothers, but will give the current judges this; that The Sisters Brothers was zippier and shorter, two criteria they have mentioned.

208dudes22
Editado: Sep 12, 2011, 7:34 am

>206 cammykitty: - You're right about most people in the US not knowing of the Booker prize; I had not heard of it until I started reading the threads here. I have read a few of the books that have been awarded prizes and as I have an awards thread in my challenge for next year, I hope to fit in a few more that are on my shelves already.

ETA: Left out a word

209RidgewayGirl
Sep 13, 2011, 2:21 pm

The Leftovers begins with an interesting premise. Suppose the rapture happened, but the people who disappeared were not the expected ones, but a seemingly random collection of people from around the world? Tom Perrotta creates a world a few years after the "Sudden Departure" and shows how people are dealing with their grief, without being able to blame a disease, terrorist or manufacturer.

Nora lost her family, all of them, her young children and her husband. She's stuck in the past, living in her old house, watching SpongeBob Squarepants, like her son used to do. No one disappeared from Kevin's family, but his wife was affected enough to leave them to join the Guilty Remnant, a cult-like group that disrupts public activities Westboro Baptist-style to remind people that there is no recovery from their loss. His son drops out of college to join another religious group, this one surrounding a messianic guy called Holy Wayne and his daughter is distancing herself from everything she once valued. Kevin's coasting, trying to keep the town he's mayor of moving forward, trying to reconnect with his daughter, worrying about his son.

Perrotta had a lot to work with here, and he chooses, like in his other novels, to focus on the ordinary people trying to get on with their lives. He's an empathetic writer, generating sympathy for both the mother who left for a cult and the broken family she left behind. He's even sympathetic to the wilder reactionaries in this story, while retaining a sense of humor about their activities. Perrotta never explains the Sudden Departure, leaving the reader with the same sense of bewilderment felt by those left behind.

210cammykitty
Sep 13, 2011, 11:50 pm

Have you read any of the Left Behind series? Is this kind of a spoof on that? Good review. Looks like another book bullet. ;)

211RidgewayGirl
Sep 14, 2011, 7:18 am

Oh no, the Left Behind books are a parody of themselves; badly written, mean-spirited and with truly dubious theology. There are quite a few people in the US, however, who are waiting for the rapture -- remember that pastor who predicted the end of the world a few months ago?

Mainly, The Leftovers was about continuing after catastrophic loss.

212Bcteagirl
Sep 14, 2011, 4:42 pm

The Leftovers sounds great, and thank you for the review of The Sisters Brothers. I have noticed a trend towards 'dumbing down' literary awards that I am finding disturbing.

213mstrust
Sep 15, 2011, 12:50 pm

That's one for my list as it sounds too bizarre not to check out. Good review!

The change in the Booker Award sounds tragic. "Let's all lower our standards so nobody feels left out".

214RidgewayGirl
Sep 15, 2011, 1:44 pm

There's a lot of that these days. Jennifer Weiner was outraged that Jonathan Franzen's new novel was more critically praised than her chick-lit (which, I love an occasional chick-lit, but Weiner's have become near to unreadable vats of indulgent treacle), and Nicholas Sparks compared his novels to those of Ernest Hemingway and bemoaned his lack of critical acclaim.

IMO, there's a place for both fun, escapist reading and literary fiction that pushes the boundaries and causes the reader to think about things in a different way. One is paid in bundles of cash and fame, the other is, occasionally, given a small award that is noticed by very few people. And yet, the first is jealous of the second. I'm sure the literary writers would like more cash, but either know enough to not complain in public or aren't listened to when they do.

215DeltaQueen50
Sep 15, 2011, 7:55 pm

Some of today's "pop" writers should take a lesson from Mickey Spillane. He said things like:

"I'm a commercial writer not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. And she only wrote one book."

or

"Hemmingway hated me. I sold 200 million books and he didn't. Of course, most of mine sold for 25 cents."

216Bcteagirl
Sep 15, 2011, 9:13 pm

Love it!

217lkernagh
Sep 15, 2011, 10:04 pm

Second the "Love it"!

218pamelad
Sep 16, 2011, 1:04 am

In fact, Jonathan Franzen was appalled to be endorsed by Oprah, which is going to the other extreme!

I don't mind a bit of well-written disposable fiction: there's a place for writers like Janet Evanovich and M. M. Kaye on my shelves, but not on the Booker prize shortlist.

219RidgewayGirl
Sep 16, 2011, 8:24 am

Borkman's Point is a solid police procedural by Hakan Nesser. Here, Inspector Van Veeteren is sent to the Swedish coastal town of Kaalbringen to assist local law enforcement when two men are killed with an axe-like weapon as they are walking home at night. The media shows up and the citizens of Kaalbringen are terrified, but Van Veeteren pursues the Axeman with dogged determination. He's assisted by the affable local police chief, one of his own detectives and an ambitious Kaalbringen detective who throws herself into the investigation, determined to make a name for herself.

The story is well put together, with no sudden surprises, although the eventual revealing of the Axeman's identity did surprise me. Van Veeteren is not flashy; his one conceit is that the sound system in his rusty Opel is worth much more than the aging car itself. He does solve the case, of course, but with a strong reliance on the value of ordinary police diligence than on being a super-detective.

220thornton37814
Sep 16, 2011, 9:05 am

We have The Inspector and Silence (by Nesser) at the library right now. It looks like I should try to read the one you just read first!

221AHS-Wolfy
Sep 16, 2011, 12:50 pm

I do have Borkman's Point on the tbr shelves but I'm waiting until I pick up Mind's Eye before I start on that series though.

222RidgewayGirl
Sep 16, 2011, 1:09 pm

Borkmann's Point is the only one of the series that I've read. I did get the strong impression that it wasn't a series that needs to be read in order. Borkmann's Point focussed almost entirely on the crime and not on the detectives' personal lives.

223thornton37814
Sep 16, 2011, 1:30 pm

My public library does have Borkmann's Point so maybe I can pick it up to read before The Inspector and Silence. It's on my wish list of TBR books anyway.

224cammykitty
Sep 16, 2011, 5:01 pm

@214&215 Yes, totally agree!!!

225RidgewayGirl
Sep 18, 2011, 10:30 am

With a title like How to Become a Scandal, Laura Kipnis's book about public scandals and what they say about us begged to be read. Using four well-publicized examples; Lisa Nowak (the astronaut who drove to confront her love rival while wearing a diaper), Sol Wachtler, Linda Tripp and James Frey, Kipnis looks at different kinds of self-sabotage and then examines why we are so fascinated by them.

226mstrust
Sep 18, 2011, 12:40 pm

Gone on my wishlist immediately.

227GingerbreadMan
Sep 20, 2011, 6:05 pm

Still mostly elsewhere, but cathing up on a few threads tonight. Really liked your review of Leftovers, sounds like something I'd like.

228RidgewayGirl
Sep 28, 2011, 8:47 am

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson is a crime novel set in the far north of Sweden, where Finnish is the second language and there's still plenty of snow on the ground in late April. Rebecca Martinsson has come to live in the house her Grandmother owned and to work as a police prosecutor. She loves the wild, remote area, where many places can't be reached by car and doesn't regret her move from Stockholm.

The story begins with a hair-raising account from the point of view of a murdered girl. She and her boyfriend were out scuba diving on a remote lake when things go terribly wrong. She's a presence in the rest of the book, pulling our attention toward different characters. Since the reader knows who the victims were before the police do, and the perpetrators are identified fairly early on, the suspense rests on the motivations for the crime. There book looks at Sweden's role in WWII, a less neutral position than one would think, and how, even decades later, there are secrets to be kept.

I really enjoyed this novel. The investigators were all fully developed, with relationships and conflicts already underway. The location was beautifully described, from the remote lake houses, accessible only by snowmobile to the dying northern villages, with their populations aged and dwindling. There's more here than a crime story.

229RidgewayGirl
Sep 28, 2011, 1:17 pm

Hang your head, Tom Dooley,
Hang your head and cry;
You killed poor Laurie Foster,
And you know you're bound to die.

Sharon McCrumb bases her newest novel on the known facts of that famous murder. The Ballad of Tom Dooley is set in Wilkes county, North Carolina, a hardscrabble area near Asheville, during the years just after the Civil War. Tom Dooley was a Confederate veteran who returns to his Appalachian home determined to work as little as possible. His childhood sweetheart, Ann Melton, married a more dependable man with a farm and willingness to work it, but she and Tom pick up their relationship soon after he returns. Her husband seems resigned to her infidelity, but local gossip has Ann nervous. Into this volatile mix comes Pauline Foster, a young woman who will do just about anything to survive and who nurses grievance and resentment. She comes to live with the Meltons as a servant and she sets a string of unfortunate events into motion.

There's not a likable character in this bleak story of survival. The hills and hollers of the Appalachians have always been a difficult place to get by in, but the years of war and their aftermath made things even worse. McCrumb draws an evocative picture of a beautiful, harsh place that created harsh, insular people with their own sense of morality. It's not a pretty story, but it is a compelling one.

230VictoriaPL
Sep 28, 2011, 1:30 pm

I enjoyed reading Dooley with you and you've captured it well! Guess that means I need to write my own review now... thanks for the nudge.

231RidgewayGirl
Sep 28, 2011, 2:01 pm

American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell's book of short stories, is set on the bleak fringes of society. Each story tells of despair, addiction, self-destruction, simple survival and a very small amount of hope in a Michigan devoid of good jobs. Campbell's writing is perfect here, with a sparse descriptiveness that puts the reader right in the middle of desperate lives. From a silent girl out compulsively hunting, to the nephew of the victim of a violent crime, Campbell makes even the most dysfunctional life believable and tragic. The story that I'm still worrying about is the very short The Solutions to Brian's Problem, in which a man plans what to do about his meth addicted wife.

232Bcteagirl
Sep 28, 2011, 3:57 pm

228: Plenty of snow on the ground here in late April too :P

233RidgewayGirl
Sep 28, 2011, 7:25 pm

Yeah, I remember that shady areas still held some snow as late as June in Edmonton. Also, there was a layer of snow mold over the lawns when it finally melted

234thornton37814
Sep 28, 2011, 10:00 pm

Adding Until thy wrath be past to my wish list. It sounds like a good one. The Ballad of Tom Dooley is on my radar already. We've got a copy in our library, and I'll get to it eventually. I've seen so many somewhat negative reviews of it which kind of surprised me because McCrumb is usually such a good writer. I think your review helped me understand a little of where the negativity is originating -- mainly in the dislike of characters. I've been to Wilkes County several times. I even have ancestors from there. (They did, however, move away from there around the end of the 1700s.)

235GingerbreadMan
Sep 29, 2011, 3:49 am

Interesting it should take an American to raise my interest in Åsa Larsson! (In my defence: I don't read much crime fiction.) I'm really enjoying my short story category this year, and American Salvage sounds like something I'd likely enjoy. Thanks, yet again!

236cammykitty
Sep 29, 2011, 9:12 pm

Until Thy Wrath be Past sounds good. Another book bullet!!!

237RidgewayGirl
Oct 2, 2011, 3:31 pm

I first discovered Ruth Rendell sometime in the late eighties with The Bridesmaid. What a treat it was to discover this master of psychological suspense had dozens upon dozens of books already written. I devoured her earlier books and settled in for a long friendship, secure that she'd provide me with at least two excellent books a year (she also writes under the name Barbara Vine)A.

And then, in the past few years, something happened. She lost her subtlety and the compassion that she gave even the least likable of her characters. Rendell has lost nothing of her writing ability or her agility in crafting interesting stories, but the sensitivity to nuance is largely gone. I keep telling myself, at the end of each frustrating novel, that that was the last time I would read her, and with each new release, I find myself unable to leave it well enough alone.

The Vault takes place after Inspector Wexford has retired and now spends most of his time in London. He is asked to consult in a case in which four bodies were found in an old coal hole that had been covered by a manhole. He is uncomfortable with his new non-status in the police force, but so pleased to be detecting again.

The story is, as usual, interesting, with threads going every which way, to take in a famous painting, prostitution, illegal immigrants, wife battering and gay bashing, among other things. There were so many fascinating characters. But it's with her characters that Rendell had lost her footing. There's just too much of she was the kind of woman who and they were the sort of people that, followed by sweeping value judgments of the sort she would have never voiced before she lost her filter. I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that Rendell does not approve of very many people and her book is full of instant disapproval of clothing and make-up choices, interior decorating decisions, body shapes, accents and nationalities.

I'm pretty sure that I'll pick up this author's next novel, however reluctantly. I wish she'd stop writing, actually, as her newfound cynicism is beginning to color how I view her earlier books.

238katiekrug
Oct 2, 2011, 4:05 pm

I've never read any of Rendell's books, but I have a few on my TBR shelves. I'll have to see if they are more recently published, and if so, temper my expectations accordingly!

239DeltaQueen50
Oct 2, 2011, 4:08 pm

I wonder if aging has a lot to do with her value judgements. I find older people (like me) seem to either become much more liberal in their outlook or go the other way, more narrow and judgemental. I too, have long been a fan of Ruth Rendalls' but lately I haven't been as enamoured with her books as I was. I gave up the Inspector Wexford books some time ago and these days I mostly concentrate on her Barbara Vine novels.

240RidgewayGirl
Oct 2, 2011, 4:44 pm

I had a discussion with my father, in which he talked about how some of his friends have lost their internal filter and how jarring it can be to hear a dignified person who had always been very circumspect say things about the people around them, often within their earshot, that were, well, rude. And my father discusses things with me now that he would never have brought up a decade ago.

Ruth Rendell has an amazing career behind her. She's written a massive number of books, each inventive and non-repetitive. Some of the things she did in The Vault fit well with an aging protagonist, and she's clearly uncomfortable with younger characters (in her last book, Tigerlily's Orchids, she carefully explained how the meaning of the word "gay" has changed, and in this book there's evidence that cultural changes have confused her).

Katie, all she's written up until about 2005 is seriously fantastic. I envy you getting to discover her. She can write about the inside of a deranged mind like no one else.

241dudes22
Oct 2, 2011, 5:45 pm

I decided to read a couple of her books based on the good things you and others have said about her writing. I only have one on my shelf right now and since I usually like to start at the beginning of a series, it might be a while before I get to it.

242RidgewayGirl
Oct 4, 2011, 7:33 pm

The Devil All the Time is Donald Ray Pollock's second novel set partially in the rural Ohio town of Knockemstiff. Set in the years after the Second World War, this profane novel is peopled with serial killers, corrupt cops, prostitutes and preachers, both obsessed and amoral, all looking for victims in the hardscrabble Appalachian hills. Pollock does a fantastic job of creating outrageous characters that are sympathetic and believable even as they engage in the most horrific activities.

Alvin's mother is brought home to die of cancer in a rented farmhouse while his father prays for her recovery and sacrifices animals at a small clearing in the woods. Two revivalist preachers discover that faith is not enough, although the one in a wheelchair already knew that. A young waitress meets an unusual photographer who leads her from a life of prostitution into something unspeakably worse. There's nothing boring about this book, but you may not want to think too deeply about certain parts of it.

243RidgewayGirl
Oct 5, 2011, 8:40 pm

The End of the Wasp Season is Denise Mina's second book featuring Glasgow detective Alex Morrow. Here she's in charge of investigating the brutal death of a young woman in her own home. Morrow's previous partner and rival, Bannerman, is now her boss and he's managed to alienate all the officers he now oversees, so that they are intent on doing as little as possible. Morrow has a difficult case on her hands and she's having trouble getting the men to care about the death of a rich prostitute with no relatives. She's also pregnant with twins, which is making it harder for her to be as badass as she usually is.

Morrow also discovers an old school friend, Kay Murray, worked for the murdered woman. They were once close, but Morrow left the council flats and joined the police and Kay is a single mother to four teenagers, scraping by as a house cleaner. It's with Kay that Mina shows how very good a writer she is. Kay looks older than her age, working menial jobs while raising children alone. She's tough and honest and tired and determined and very, very likable. And Morrow's in a better place than she was in Still Midnight. She's still hard as nails, but she's determined to understand the victim and to navigate the shoals of poisonous office politics.

She took a bite of her apple and tried to imagine allowing herself to be fucked by an unattractive stranger in an unfamiliar room. She found it hard to imagine allowing someone to even touch her without seeing herself punching a nose.

I didn't entirely warm to Alex Morrow when she appeared as the protagonist in Still Midnight. She was prickly and defensive and lacked the spark that animated her previous heroines. But she's come into her own with this book and I'm eager to see what she does next.

244dudes22
Oct 6, 2011, 1:04 pm

Well - in as much as I don't need another series - I still went and added it to the wishlist. You've made it sound intriguing. Is this good enough to stand alone or does the previous book lay a good foundation?

245RidgewayGirl
Oct 6, 2011, 1:27 pm

I think it would do just fine on it's own. Of course, then you'll have to get Still Midnight and read it, but it's good on it's own.

246RidgewayGirl
Oct 6, 2011, 1:44 pm

It would do just fine as a stand-alone.

247RidgewayGirl
Oct 6, 2011, 2:00 pm

Arnaldur Indridason writes crime novels set in Reykjavik about a detective named Erlendur who is repressed even for an Icelander. In Voices, the doorman of a large hotel is found murdered in his basement room. He's wearing a Santa costume and a condom and he was stabbed. Erlender is sent to lead the investigation but it's hard for him to even get out of bed. He takes a room at the hotel, one with a broken radiator, chosing to stay there rather than in his own apartment through the holiday season. His estranged daughter visits him regularly as she fights her own demons and asks him over and over, why he never contacted her or her brother after his divorce from their mother.

Erlendur's a fascinating character. He doesn't engage in small talk and he avoids all emotional entanglement. There are good reasons for this, which are explained, and you can't help feeling for the guy. In this book, he attempts to form a relationship with a woman, but it's not so easy for a guy who can't make conversation and who doesn't want to divulge anything personal.

The mystery of who killed the doorman is interesting in the way it paints a bleak picture of a friendless world, but the linchpin of the case is just not that believable for a book written in this century, but never mind that; the atmosphere and the intriguing detective more than make up for the lack.

248cbl_tn
Oct 6, 2011, 5:29 pm

>247 RidgewayGirl: That's a series I intend to get to one of these days. I thought I might read one for my Iceland book in the Europe Endless Challenge, but I just finished reading a Halldor Laxness book for Iceland. Now I'll have to look for another excuse.

249thornton37814
Oct 6, 2011, 6:10 pm

I just ordered his latest, Operation Napoleon for our library. I've got several options of Iceland books, and I'm not sure which one I'll end up using for Iceland in the challenge Carrie Beth mentioned. I'm glad to know that the Indridason series is good.

250RidgewayGirl
Oct 8, 2011, 5:38 pm

Who would have thought that Iceland would have been an easy country to find books for the Endless Europe Challenge! I was happy when I found a book set in Greenland, myself.

251RidgewayGirl
Oct 11, 2011, 11:37 am

The Revisionists is the newest book by Thomas Mullen, who wrote my favorite book of the year (so far), The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. This was completely different, being a dystopian thriller where Zed is a revisionist; his job is to travel back in time to stop hags (historical agitators), who travel back to disrupt key events and so to change history and jeopardize The Perfect Present, a world where there is no war or ethnic conflict, but where there is also no history.

Zed's been sent to a somewhat contemporary Washington, DC, where he works to not prevent or delay The Great Conflagration, which was an admittedly bad stretch of time for people, but it led to The Perfect Present, and so must happen.

Leo used to work for the CIA; back when he was finishing graduate school, 9/11 happened and he joined in a fit of patriotism. He worked to infiltrate terrorist groups in Indonesia and he hasn't been back in Washington long. He's now working in the private sector, doing essentially similar work, but targeting American dissidents and agitators. He meets by happenstance an Indonesian maid to a family of South Korean diplomats. She's been abused, and is being treated as a slave. Sari's lonely and happy to hear her own language spoken by this seemingly trust-worthy man.

Tasha lost her brother. He was serving in the military and she's not satisfied with the sketchy details she's been given about his death. She meets Zed at a candlelight vigil and they connect. She's also connected to Leo, who's tailing her because of her friendship with an activist who runs a wikileaks-type of website that is embarrassing some of the corporations doing security work for the government.

The plot of The Revisionists is complex and always changing direction. It's never simple, just as the characters are never entirely pure. Their motives are usually good, although this leads them to often act at cross purposes. How can you find out what the right thing to do is, when everybody lies, especially the good guys? And is it worth sacrificing the past to make a better future?

252VictoriaPL
Oct 11, 2011, 12:20 pm

I'm glad you enjoyed The Revisionists! It sounds a little more complex than Firefly Brothers.

253cammykitty
Oct 13, 2011, 7:35 pm

The Revisionists looks like another book for the wishlist!

254RidgewayGirl
Editado: Oct 17, 2011, 11:11 am

May we discuss book covers for a moment? I picked up a copy of Laura Rider's Masterpiece entirely because of the cover art. There are two fifties-style illustrations, both set on a stack of old paperbacks, set with the page ends visible. It's eye-catching and gorgeous. There have been some beautiful and well designed book covers released recently and I can't imagine that it doesn't help sell the book. Think of the cover for The Sisters Brothers. Many reviews cited the excellent graphic design as a factor in their enjoyment of the book.

Why, then, are there so many lazy book covers? Had I not read a long description of The Ballad of Tom Dooley ahead of time, I would never have chosen this book. It has the laziest and most overdone of covers. If I describe it as having a woman in old-fashioned clothing facing away from the viewer against a landscape, I'm thinking that you'll have trouble finding it, specifically, at your local bookstore. There will simply be another dozen book covers with the same description. I have a copy of February, which I am eager to read, based on several glowing and enticing reviews, but when I pick it up, what I see is the back of a woman's head, artfully photographed. Just like another dozen books within immediate reach. It's just so very boring! Give me a cover with some thought and design thrown at it, please.

255RidgewayGirl
Oct 17, 2011, 11:21 am

Maybe her very own Charlie Rider was the man for the twenty-first century, a new model. A male who was not the slacker type, not a slob on a sofa making crass jokes but a man who was serious. A man in earnest about being submissive by day and a conqueror by night. A man who, when he went to war, would make the enemy laugh, a man who tried to become one with the chipmunks, a man who was at home in the universe, a man who loved his own sperm--one million and one, one million and two--because they were such good swimmers, and because nearly all of them died for nothing.

Laura Rider is a woman with determination. She married a guy who most people in her small town thought was useless and probably gay, and gave him purpose. Through hard work and strength of will, she created a thriving landscaping and plant business. Now, in Laura Rider's Masterpiece, she has her eye on her next great accomplishment. Jane Hamilton tells an odd but witty story about intentions and secrets. Can Laura force two people into a relationship through her own force of will? And to what end? It's not entirely clear what Hamilton's getting at, but her writing remains light and pitch-perfect to the end, as she describes the insanity and inanity of romantic love and how it make fools of us all.

256mstrust
Oct 17, 2011, 1:44 pm

I'm with you on the book covers. My weakness is for the really campy pulp covers like your Hamilton or Somebody Owes Me Money. I also really like the stylized re-issues of Bloomsbury Group, like Let's Kill Uncle.

I think the covers you hate, like February, are supposed to represent understatement. That's all I can come up with.

257DeltaQueen50
Oct 17, 2011, 2:37 pm

I think book publisher's chose book covers the way TV networks chose programs. If it works once, then repeat ad nauseum. For awhile you couldn't pick up a historical fiction book that didn't feature a period dress on the cover. Check out Shields of Pride, The Luxe, Mistress of the Sun, Cleopatra's Daughter, The Other Boleyn Girl just to show a few.

258VictoriaPL
Oct 17, 2011, 3:17 pm

Didn't we used to have a game on LT that involved tagging covers?

259GingerbreadMan
Oct 17, 2011, 4:40 pm

>255 RidgewayGirl: reminds me of Gombrowicz' masterpiece Pornografia, about two elderly gentlemen who during a visit to the country decide that they are going to make a couple out of the milk maid and the stable boy no matter what, because it would fulfil their fantasy of young rural love - kind of sexuality by proxy. Did you read that?

Cover art: as part of my wrapping up the challenge when finishing (not happening this year, I'm afraid) I have been choosing best and worst cover. There really are books you cringe picking up in public. Last year's winner for me was the circa 1990 cover of the Swedish edition of Jazz, with rainbow letters and a pretty bad, non-descript photo.

260-Eva-
Oct 17, 2011, 4:48 pm

->258 VictoriaPL:

Looks like we still do. :)

http://www.librarything.com/coverguess

261lkernagh
Oct 17, 2011, 9:41 pm

Yay, a discussion about book cover art! I am one of those readers that for authors I don't know I am drawn first by the cover art and then by the story. My last LTER book was one I requested almost entirely based upon the cover art:

Loved this cover as poetic in nature... the book, not so much. Cover art is "haiku 204" by the artist Zuzanna Orzel - more of her art can be seen here: http://www.artflakes.com/en/s?search=Orzel. Lazy covers don't attract me, and I don't even understand, given the wealth of amazing art out here, that we even have to suffer with boring covers. I will tolerate them for classics or books on philosophy but other than that, it really is a negative strike against the book. But that is my rant...... ;-)

Off to go investigate coverguess - thanks Eva!

262RidgewayGirl
Oct 17, 2011, 10:22 pm

I have purchased books because of their covers, and picked up new copies of books I already owned because the cover art was more interesting.

What gets me is when the cover art is disconnected from the book, like the woman whose head we get to see the back of, has the wrong color hair. How hard can that be?

263sjmccreary
Oct 17, 2011, 10:30 pm

Love the discussion about cover art. I'm planning a cover art category next year for the 12-12 and have begun to think about what covers appeal to me and why. I have a feeling that "good" cover art will be as personal as good music. Browsing through my catalog, I think only about 10% or so of my books have covers that I consider really attractive.

Judy, I think you're right about the publishers copycatting the unique or popular covers - just like TV and movie productions.

264RidgewayGirl
Oct 18, 2011, 8:25 am

There are covers that are inventive and interesting, but that don't appear to me, personally. But that's different than the lackluster stuff that covers most books, which is most egregious for historical novels and for fiction aimed at women.

And this pales in significance to the horrible covers put on children's books. Most of the time, if the book is worthwhile at all, the cover illustration (and inside blurb) is marketed toward parents and educators, not to the intended audience. With so many other distractions, why would a child or teenager pick up a book with boring cover art?

265dudes22
Oct 19, 2011, 6:17 am

I usually check out what's being published each month on fantasticfiction.com and, with so many books to look at, if the cover art doesn't catch my interest (or if there's none), I usually don't bother to look at a description of the book.

>262 RidgewayGirl: - you'd think that would be obvious, wouldn't you?

>263 sjmccreary: - I'll bet your choices for your cover art category will provoke lots of discussion. I'll be checking it out

266mathgirl40
Oct 19, 2011, 9:47 pm

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on Ruth Rendell. I'd read a number of her early books but haven't picked up any of her recent ones. I agree that she can convey the thoughts of a deranged mind in a seriously scary way.

267RidgewayGirl
Oct 20, 2011, 4:33 pm

Now this is what I'm talking about! Blacklands by Belinda Bauer is about a boy who lives with his nan, his mother and his little brother in a sad, fractured family. His uncle was murdered and the body buried somewhere up on Exmoor, which Steven can see from his bedroom window. His nan is angry and spends her days waiting. His mother is a single mother whose own mother has be emotionally absent from her life since her brother disappeared. Steven just wants a family that loves each other, a grandmother who would pat him affectionately on his head, happiness in his home. He hatches a plan to find his uncle's grave, reasoning that if his nan had his uncle's body to bury, she'd stop staring out the front window. He begins a correspondence with the murderer who in prison, asking for the location of his uncle's grave.

This book is so emotionally charged, I felt exhausted reading it. Steven is such a well realized character that everything that happens to him felt so real. And Steven's life is hard. He longs for affection, he has to deal with being the poor, smelly kid at school, he's bullied and his attempts to win the love of his family are so heartfelt and unappreciated. Bauer also makes the rest of his family understandable, each operating in the fog of their own unhappiness. I'm adding this book to the best books I've read this year. It never hits a false note, even when incredible things are happening, even when nothing much is going on.

If nothing else, this book has made me overly sensitive to anything that might hurt my children's feelings. They are sincerely tired of being hugged so often this week.

268dudes22
Oct 20, 2011, 7:26 pm

Wow! What a great review. And a great sounding book. Onto the wishlist it goes.

269thornton37814
Oct 20, 2011, 7:27 pm

>267 RidgewayGirl: I never got around to reading that one before we sent it back on the lease book program. I think it is still available at the public library though. It sounds more interesting than I remember thinking it would be. I may have to add it to my ever-growing TBR list.

270DeltaQueen50
Oct 20, 2011, 9:57 pm

I'm so glad that you enjoyed Blacklands, it'd definitely one of my favorite books of the year. I was so totally absorbed in that book while I was reading it.

271sjmccreary
Oct 20, 2011, 11:35 pm

#267 That one sounds very good. It sounded good when Judy read it, too. Hope I can get to it soon.

272RidgewayGirl
Oct 21, 2011, 8:15 pm

It was your review that put it on my wishlist, DeltaQueen.

273DeltaQueen50
Oct 22, 2011, 1:32 pm

I'm glad I was able to do so after all the great books you have brought to my attention!

274RidgewayGirl
Oct 22, 2011, 7:57 pm

I watched the first episode of Case Histories on Masterpiece Mystery and thought it was very well done. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. And I totally think that Atkinson intended Jackson Brody to be shirtless much of the time.

275katiekrug
Editado: Oct 22, 2011, 8:08 pm

I have Case Histories on my DVR. I'll be recording the others but I haven't read the books yet so I suspect those will sit on my DVR for a while.

ETA: ahhhh, shirtless...

276GingerbreadMan
Oct 25, 2011, 6:54 am

Blacklands sounds great in an Iain Banks-ey, Mari Strachan-ey way. Definitely goes on my list!

277RidgewayGirl
Oct 30, 2011, 3:32 pm

The Woman in White isn't a ghost story, but rather a tangled soap opera of greed and mistaken identity. The heroine of the novel isn't the mysterious woman in white, or even the hero's love interest, Laura Fairlie, but rather an independent and entirely appealing woman named Marian Halcombe. She's resourceful and intrepid and I can't think of anyone I'd rather rely on in a time of trouble.

The story itself concerns Walter Hartright, a young drawing master who takes a job at Limmeridge House and there meets Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie. He falls in love with Miss Fairlie and, because of his lower social status, he leaves and joins a dangerous trip to South America in an attempt to forget her. Laura is married to the nefarious Sir Percival, who is, naturally, only after her money. Included in this tale is a desperate woman Walter meets one night as she escapes from a mental asylum and whose fate is tied to Laura's. There's also a colorful Italian Count, who is the most interesting and villainous of men. And present every step of the story is Miss Halcombe, who protects Miss Fairlie, solves the mystery, fascinates the Italian Count, thwarts the bad guys and keeps Walter Hartright pointed in the right direction.

There's something to be said for those wordy, Victorian authors. The Woman in White is the most suspenseful novel I have read in a long time. Wilkie Collins takes his time setting the scene, and then he slowly increases the tension, never allowing the reader the easy satisfaction of a quick resolution. Rather, the reader endures what the characters must; long moments of uncertainty, hours trapped without knowing if all was yet lost. It is a credit to Collins' writing that this strategy stands the test of time. Even in our era of instant gratification, I was more than willing to allow this book to hijack my days.

278sjmccreary
Oct 30, 2011, 7:13 pm

#277 Another of the books that I'd never heard of before joining LT. And here, it is universally loved. It's already on my wishlist and I'm looking forward to it.

279cbl_tn
Oct 30, 2011, 10:05 pm

>277 RidgewayGirl: Great review of one of my favorite books! You've made me think it's time for me to consider a re-read.

280RidgewayGirl
Nov 1, 2011, 7:58 am

The Affair is the sixteenth book in Lee Child's series about Jack Reacher, but it goes back in Reacher's history to tell of the events that caused him to leave the army and begin his life as a wanderer, armed only with a travel toothbrush and his atm card.

If you like the series, this is one of the better ones (although Child has been remarkably consistent). If you haven't experienced the ultimate in fun, escapist reading, this could be a good place to start.

It's 1997, and Reacher is sent to a small Mississippi base town to shadow the cops investigating the murder of a young woman. The army base is on lock down, so he has to solve the crime (and a few other irregularities that pop up) without any information from the inside.

281VictoriaPL
Nov 1, 2011, 8:20 am

I'll be reading this one next year, so I only skimmed your review with one eye shut. From what I saw you seemed to have enjoyed it... good to know!

282sjmccreary
Nov 1, 2011, 11:16 pm

Congratulations on the #1 Hot Review for Woman in White! Well done!

283RidgewayGirl
Nov 2, 2011, 8:41 am

I was very surprised to see how high up it was. I'm very pleased, and am feeling my head swell.

284cammykitty
Nov 3, 2011, 9:15 pm

LOL! It is a really good review. I'm one of those thumbs. I didn't even know how to begin to review it myself.

285RidgewayGirl
Nov 6, 2011, 1:14 pm

The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton by David Lawday is the best book I have read about the French Revolution. It's not the most detailed or complete, ending as it does with Danton's death, but it combines a relentless forward momentum with a clear description of the factions, policies and events of the time. Not only could I only put the book down reluctantly, but I now can also tell you the names and activities of the various factions, from Les Cordeliers and Les Feuillants to who pushed for the establishment of the fearsome Committee for Public Safety and which generals were secret royalists. That's an accomplishment. It was confused time, with internal strife competing for attention with the foreign powers who immediately invaded France.

France was ready for revolution long before it began. With a system that gave all of the power to a small percentage of the population, the Church and the Nobility, and then exempted them from all taxation, and an empty treasury, it took only a bad harvest or two to send the people into the streets, ready to die fighting instead of waiting to starve. The small middle class were the children of the enlightenment and proved willing to call for reform.

As things simmered, a young man named Danton came to Paris to become a lawyer. The book focuses tightly on Danton, which simplifies the story enormously, for all that he was one of the two towering figures of the Revolution. Danton was gigantic in everything he did. Larger and uglier than everyone else, he had a voice that carried and a talent for public speaking. He also was free of the blind ideology that sent so many of his contemporaries into dead ends. What did him in, in the end, was his out-sized personality which both threatened and annoyed his rivals, as well as his realization that the Terror had to be limited.

286japaul22
Nov 6, 2011, 1:23 pm

Great review! That will definitely go on my TBR list.

287RidgewayGirl
Nov 6, 2011, 2:28 pm

japaul, it's really good. Lawday did that thing that is so difficult -- he wrote a serious, informative history book, and gave it this horrible forward momentum. He focused on the relationships between the factions and the politicians, which gave it an immediacy that something drier might have lacked, while not sacrificing content.

Ok, that just made it sound boring. It wasn't.

288sjmccreary
Nov 6, 2011, 3:18 pm

Your review makes the French Revolution - a topic I've never been able to wrap my head around - sound interesting. Thumbs up. The book is going onto the wishlist.

289bruce_krafft
Nov 6, 2011, 8:36 pm

>285 RidgewayGirl: - I put this book on my wishlist. I have wanted to read more about the French revolition ever since I read David Weber's books.

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

290japaul22
Nov 6, 2011, 10:51 pm

>287 RidgewayGirl: No, you didn't make it sound boring, I think know what you mean. I just read the Washington biography by Chernow, and he kind of lost the forward momentum for me, so I'm looking forward to reading something that is paced well.

291RidgewayGirl
Nov 7, 2011, 7:08 am

Lawday had a great advantage over Chernow -- Danton goes to the guillotine while Washington got to get old. It's hard to lose momentum on the way to an execution.

292japaul22
Nov 7, 2011, 7:17 am

True! Plus, Washington was a little too good at crafting his public persona. Seems like he internalized it to the point where you only get glimpses of the real him, even in an 800 page book!

293RidgewayGirl
Nov 9, 2011, 10:05 am

The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison centers around Anna Sands, who is evacuated from London at the start of the Second World War and sent to live in a great house in Yorkshire called Ashton Park. It's been turned into a refuge and school by Elizabeth Ashton, whose husband was struck by polio soon after they were married, leaving him in a wheelchair. The story moves between Anna's adjustments, her mother left alone in London, her father in the army, her new schoolmates, teachers and the unhappy Ashtons.

The Very Thought of You is Alison's first novel and it shows in the not quite three dimensional characters and a plot that veers between dispassionate summaries and high melodrama. I'll take a look at what she does next, but this story, which had so much promise, was clumsy and lacked nuance.

294RidgewayGirl
Nov 10, 2011, 11:28 am

Archipelago books is a not-for-profit literary press that publishes international literature. The books are beautiful. Have you seen them? Almost square trade paperbacks, with a very smooth, hight quality paper inside and the covers are made of an Ingres-like paper. They're just very pleasant to have and to read.

The Waitress was New by Dominique Fabre is published by Archipelago Books and concerns Pierre, an aging barman working in a small cafe-restaurant in a suburb of Paris. There's a new waitress, the regular one having called in sick, and the owner has taken off. This is a quiet book, beautifully written and full of atmosphere.

295dudes22
Nov 11, 2011, 8:08 pm

>293 RidgewayGirl: - doesn't it make you wonder sometimes, when you read a first novel that misses the mark, why their editor didn't give them better direction? Seems like some of the problems that this book had could have been corrected with proper editing.

296LauraBrook
Nov 12, 2011, 11:43 am

I've wanted to read The Waitress Was New for quite some time and recently took it off of my wishlist for no real reason. Thanks for the reminder to put it back! Hope you're having a good weekend!

297RidgewayGirl
Nov 12, 2011, 5:11 pm

Lost in the City of Light by Richard de Combray. Kevin Korlov is an American living in Paris in the mid-eighties. He moved to Paris after art school, but discovered that he had no talent for selling himself or his sculptures. He makes his living as an English teacher, a translator and on the radio. He has a studio up near the Porte des Lilas, but he rarely goes there. His girlfriend has just left him, telling him that he's no fun to be around, although she leaves him her aging dachshund, The General.

Somewhat adrift, he spends a drunken evening in a singles chat room on the early French version of the internet, the Minitel, and finds Lea, an enigmatic free spirit who is as different from him as it's possible to be. It's all bound to lead to disaster, but he jumps in anyway.

This book has been out of print and forgotten for awhile. I can't see it coming back, the story and the manner of its telling are interesting but dated. I enjoyed the descriptions of Paris, which were of the Paris I knew, having lived there in the early nineties, but I can't see many people wanting to read about a Paris that no longer exists but isn't yet old enough for nostalgia.

298RidgewayGirl
Nov 13, 2011, 11:04 am

I added up the books I've read and I only have nine to go. So I'm on track to finish on time and can relax a little.

299dudes22
Nov 16, 2011, 6:55 am

Good for you! Don't relax too much. Remember what happened to the hare :)

300GingerbreadMan
Nov 18, 2011, 6:38 pm

>291 RidgewayGirl: The dramaturg here nods in agreement - characters quietly growing old is never good for structure!

301RidgewayGirl
Nov 18, 2011, 7:25 pm

I know, right? And Danton was a larger than life character who never worried too much about how his words would be taken -- which didn't work out too well for him, but makes for a great story.

On the other hand, he didn't like to write things down, like speeches, and in an era when people wrote letters incessantly, he rarely did, making it more difficult to write a book about him.

302RidgewayGirl
Nov 18, 2011, 7:58 pm

It's growing increasingly difficult to find books that I can read to my two children. With one eight-year-old and a daughter in middle school, finding a book that appeals to all three of us is increasingly difficult. So finding a book all three of us look forward to is something to celebrate. This year, the clear favorite is The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall.

The Penderwicks tells the story of a family who goes to spend a few weeks one summer in a cottage on the grounds of a mansion. Their mother died a few years ago and their father is loving but involved in his botany, the four Penderwick daughters are independent and protective of each other. Rosalind is the oldest at twelve and serves as a surrogate mother to Batty, the youngest Penderwick. Jane is a dreamer and a writer, Skye sporty and mathematical. They meet the son of the big house, Jeffrey, and become involved in his life.

The Penderwicks has the feel of a classic British children's book, while being set in a modern United States. Birdsall manages to make the plot adventurous and action-packed while retaining that old-fashioned feel and keeping the events all tremendously realistic. My children were enthralled, and so was I.

303cbl_tn
Nov 18, 2011, 8:05 pm

The Penderwicks has been languishing on my TBR shelves for quite some time. I really must find time to read it soon. It sounds great!

304RidgewayGirl
Nov 18, 2011, 8:07 pm

You'll love it, Carrie. I promise.

305RidgewayGirl
Nov 18, 2011, 8:17 pm

Murder on the Eiffel Tower is a mystery set at the World's Fair in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower was on one of the exhibits. People begin dying of what looks like bee stings, but Victor Legris, a bookstore owner is suspicious that the deaths are actually murders. He's recently become involved with a new newspaper, the Passe Partout and is attracted to the pretty red-haired illustrator.

I'm not the right audience for this book. While it's set in Paris and is written by two French booksellers, it's too traditional for my tastes. The characters are not that well sketched out and I'm not sure that the plot works at all. It might, but I confess that I wasn't really paying attention.

306cbl_tn
Nov 18, 2011, 8:25 pm

>305 RidgewayGirl: I'm probably a better fit for it and I didn't much like it, either. I think you've characterized it perfectly: The characters are not that well sketched out and I'm not sure that the plot works at all. I read the ARC, and from what you've said, it sounds like the problems I noted with the ARC weren't fixed before publication. I haven't been tempted to continue with the series.

307thornton37814
Nov 18, 2011, 8:37 pm

>305 RidgewayGirl: I didn't like it either. I've purposefully avoided later installments of the series.

308sjmccreary
Nov 19, 2011, 1:27 am

#302 A series my son and daughter both enjoyed when they were in elementary and middle school (and still do, truth be told) was the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede starting with Dealing with Dragons. We read them aloud several times.

309AHS-Wolfy
Nov 19, 2011, 6:48 am

Alison, if you're still on your Paris trip then I'd recommend tracking down The Chalk Circle Man, the first of the Adamsberg series, by Fred Vargas. The leading character is certainly not a conventional Chief Inspector. I can't speak for the rest of the series as I've only read this one so far but it's one I'll certainly be heading back to at some point.

310RidgewayGirl
Nov 19, 2011, 1:05 pm

Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan is an interesting mash up of a traditional mystery novel and something darker. The man known as David Loogan lives in a house he's renting furnished. He writes a short story for a local mystery magazine, then a revised version, which gets him hired by the magazine as an editor. He becomes friendly with the publisher and begins an affair with the man's wife. One night, the publisher calls Loogan and asks for his help disposing of the body of an intruder that he has killed. Things take off from there.

The traditional part of the mystery concerns a series of murders of people involved in the mystery magazine. Within in this small group of people, Loogan is convinced that the murderer is hiding. The darker element concerns Loogan's own identity. Is he a criminal on the run, or something else?

This was an extremely well written first novel and I'm looking forward to reading more by Harry Dolan.

311sjmccreary
Nov 20, 2011, 12:34 am

#310 It sounds like you liked Bad Things Happen better than I did, but I enjoyed your review and how it reminded me about aspects of the book that I'd forgotten. Great review.

312LauraBrook
Nov 23, 2011, 5:45 pm

Hi Alison! I started reading the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series earlier this year, and it's one that I wish I would've read when I was younger. And the author, Joan Aiken, has written several series for children/young adults. I really enjoyed reading all of John Bellairs's books when I was 10-15 or so (and I still do, if I'm honest), they're nice mysteries with a ghost or two and some old-fashioned resourcefulness thrown in for good measure.

313katiekrug
Nov 23, 2011, 10:35 pm

Ooh, I love both Aikens books and the Bellairs. Also the Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald might be fun if you haven't already discovered them!

314RidgewayGirl
Nov 24, 2011, 8:00 am

Those are some great ideas. I find that it's hit or miss, even with great books. They like nature and hiking, but are bored with survival or wilderness stories. Black Beauty was enormously popular. I just pull out a new book and start reading and if, after a few days, they aren't interested, I pick another.

315RidgewayGirl
Nov 25, 2011, 6:16 am

In Bent Road by Lori Roy, Arthur Scott moves his family out of Detroit and back to the Kansas farm country he left as a young man. 1967 may have been a time of change in Detroit, but in the rural community the Scotts move to social mores have not yet begun to change. Arthur had left the farm soon after his older sister was murdered, something his mother and remaining sister do not discuss. While the Scott's oldest daughter and Arthur himself soon adjust to their new life, the two younger children struggle to make friends and Arthur's wife, Celia, who was determined to make this change work, is stifled by the smaller world of the Kansas community and life with her in-laws. There is also the unspoken mystery surrounding Arthur's sister's unsolved murder and his younger sister, Ruth, is being abused by her husband and in this world, women do not leave their husbands.

Roy does a fantastic job of creating the world of a rural community in Kansas, a place where the coming political and social changes haven't even registered as anything but something happening somewhere else. It's a place with a lot of space, but with a stifling need to keep things as they always have been, even if that means returning a woman to the husband who knocks her around, even if that means never looking beyond the rumors that surround the Scott girl's death. And when a young girl disappears soon after the Scott family's arrival, the community is sure that the man they suspect in the first girl's death must have a hand in the other girl's disappearance.

This book was both a difficult book to read and a difficult book to put down. The crime story was interesting, but the real focus of the book was how difficult it was for a woman to leave a husband who wanted her to stay.

And as an aside, the cover art for this book has nothing to do with the book itself. It features the legs of two young girls. In Bent Road there is one school-age girl, but no very young children. With a book so rich in imagery, this cover is just lazy and does the book inside a disservice.

316katiekrug
Nov 25, 2011, 9:18 am

Excellent review of a book that has been on my radar. Thanks!

317RidgewayGirl
Nov 25, 2011, 9:23 am

The Last Nude by Ellis Avery tells the story of Rafaela, a seventeen-year-old American who ran away to Paris and who is surviving doing whatever she needs to get by when she meets the painter Tamara de Lempicka in the Bois de Boulogne. Rafaela soon becomes her model and lover. As she learns to navigate the ambiguous waters of the Parisian art world in the 1920s, she grows up a bit and finds uncertain love.

Avery has created a vivid picture of a specific place at a specific time. I've read a fair amount about the literary scene in Paris at that time and was eager to expand into the art world. And it was interesting; Tamara de Lempicka was a fascinating and controversial woman in her time, a serious and bi-sexual artist at a time when most women were restricted to the role of supportive wife and mother. The fictitious character of Rafaela is well developed; she combines the insecurity of a teen-ager with the strength of will to run away and dream of something better. She's fascinated with fashion and so the book also provides a look at how women dressed then.

On the negative side, the historical characters were muddied by the characters who were fictional but obviously based on historical figures. For example, Sylvia Beach is herself in the book, but there is a fictional character who plays an important role in the book who is obviously based on Ernest Hemingway and some of the characters from his books. Rafaela was partially based on Suzy Solidor, an entertainer who had a liaison with de Lempicka, but Suzy Solidor also appeared as herself in the book. So, while much of the book was based on historical figures and adhered closely to what is known about their lives, it also diverged in unnecessary ways. Still, The Last Nude provides an atmospheric look at a unique place and time and as long as the reader does not rely on this novel for their facts, it is an enjoyable and worthwhile read.

318VictoriaPL
Nov 25, 2011, 10:47 am

Ah, Paris. You have me itching to read another book based there. Or maybe another art book. Either way, excellent reviews.

319DeltaQueen50
Nov 25, 2011, 2:50 pm

I love reading about Paris in the 1920's.

You have really perked my interest in Bent Road however, I am definitely going to be on the lookout for it.

320RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 2011, 9:41 am

Bent Road is good, DeltaQueen. It's well written and interesting in the way it gives a picture of a time and a place and the characters are well drawn. Sometimes books like that end up being a little lazy, with comfortable stock characters, but not in this case.

321sjmccreary
Nov 30, 2011, 10:38 am

Great review of Bent Road - which turned out to be already on my wishlist.

322RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 2011, 12:11 pm

Tell Me Where It Hurts is veterinarian Nick Trout's modern version of James Herriot's books. Trout is a veterinary surgeon at a large Boston animal hospital, and his book tells about a day in his life, with plenty of asides and memories. While the setting isn't the Yorkshire Dales, what makes this book reminiscent of All Creatures Great and Small is the dedication and good-humor with which Trout cares for his patients and their owners.

Hark A Vagrant is a book of Kate Beaton's cartoons. If you haven't already bookmarked her website (http://www.harkavagrant.com/), then you are in for a treat. Beaton makes smart, funny cartoons about history and literature. From Dude Watching with the Brontes to fun with Sexy Batman to jokes at Burke and Hare's expense, this is a funny, intelligent book.

323jfetting
Nov 30, 2011, 2:01 pm

Kate Beaton is the best ever! I must own that book!

324RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 2011, 2:28 pm

You totally should. I visit her website all the time, but it was still a delicious experience to have Hark A Vagrant in book form. There's a funny, funny paragraph comparing Jane Eyre to a sailor too long at sea that I could not read it aloud to my SO for several minutes.

325RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 2011, 2:28 pm

326GingerbreadMan
Editado: Dic 4, 2011, 4:48 am

Loved your review on Bent Road! Interesting how you point out the bad cover art. I'm pretty sure bad cover art sometimes destroys books. For example, I would guess one of the big reasons that The curious incident of the dog in the night-time hasn't become a massive hit in Sweden is the first swedish hard cover edition, looking like your typical teenage love story.

327mathgirl40
Dic 6, 2011, 9:39 pm

Enjoyed your reviews of Bent Road and The Last Nude, especially the mention of cover art. The cover art really does make a difference in how people perceive books.

328RidgewayGirl
Dic 9, 2011, 9:50 pm

I got cocky and decided I had plenty of time to tackle a tome and still finish my challenge. Ha! A Place of Greater Safety is quite a bit more book than anticipated. I will probably still finish, but it will be a close thing!

329japaul22
Dic 10, 2011, 9:11 am

Can't wait for your review, whenever it comes! You've inspired me to read A Place of Greater Safety and Danton, a Life next year. Since I'm also doing a group read of The Count of monte Cristo, I even built a France category around those books. I'm really looking forward to it!

330RidgewayGirl
Dic 10, 2011, 5:07 pm

I think that my enjoyment of A Place of Greater Safety is increased by just having read Danton: Giant of the French Revolution. I can clearly see where Hilary Mantel altered things, or how she extrapolated from the known facts.

331VictoriaPL
Dic 12, 2011, 8:05 am

2 books to go!

332RidgewayGirl
Dic 15, 2011, 6:42 pm

And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewelers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night's hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Ile Saint-Louis, in a empty office, Maitre Desmoulins's son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours a day in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn, lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.

Robespierre and Danton are the two towering figures of the French Revolution. They were almost comically different; Danton living large, with enormous appetites, voice and zest for the challenges of leading a revolution, and Robespierre, tidy, precise and constrained in his personal and public life. They're great fodder for a many a book. In A Place of Greater Safety, however, Hilary Mantel does something different. She puts the spotlight on Camille Desmoulins, the stuttering lawyer whose speech in the gardens of the Palais Royale was the spark that set the revolution alight. Oh, Mantel spends plenty of time in Danton's head and narrates from the POV of everyone from Robespierre to both of Danton's wives, but the central focus remains on the volatile and scandal-prone Desmoulins. This does make excellent sense; Camille is the connection between Danton and Robespierre, close to both men, but Mantel is interested in Desmoulins for his own sake. This gives a new angle to a familiar story, although Mantel's writing is so fine that she hardly needs the boost.

Usually, it's clear who an author prefers, either Danton or Robespierre. Mantel treads a delicate path of showing both men sympathetic and abundant in faults. She also fleshes out the secondary actors in the Revolution, from Marat (a surprisingly positive portrayal) to Danton's teenage second wife.

Robespierre smiled his thin smile. he was conscious of the thinness of it. If he were remembered into the next generation, people would speak of his thin, cold smile, as they would speak of Danton's girth, vitality, scarred face. He wanted, always, to be different--and especially with Danton. Perhaps the smile looked sarcastic, or patronizing or disapproving. But it was the only one available to his face.

333lkernagh
Dic 15, 2011, 9:50 pm

Great review of A Place of Greater Safety Alison! Thumb!

334RidgewayGirl
Dic 18, 2011, 2:08 pm

Thanks for the thumbs, guys.

335GingerbreadMan
Dic 18, 2011, 6:42 pm

Another one from me - a very precise review, giving me a clear idea. Thank you!

336RidgewayGirl
Dic 19, 2011, 5:45 pm

If an author can write, I mean really write, then I'm willing to read pretty much anything they care to put out there. Elizabeth Hay can write. It's an odd writing style, one which features both worn-out phrases and metaphors so startling that you have to read them a few times, both for comprehension and for the sheer enjoyment of the pictures she paints.

For a while I was able to carry it all inside me, like a big bouquet of peonies, and then I couldn't anymore. The moist, plump peony heads got to be too heavy. They were like pounds of raw hamburger hanging upside down.

Alone in the Classroom concerns Connie, a brand new and very young teacher sent to a small Saskatchewan school in a farming community at the brink of the Great Depression. There, she tutors an older boy who can't read and is menaced in vague and uncomfortable ways by the school's principal. Her story is told by her niece, a woman who worships the strong, independent woman Connie later became and who has an unsatisfactory relationship with her own mother.

The first part of the book is perfect; an interesting story beautifully told and with a strong sense of the isolated prairie community. The book loses momentum as it continues on, so that the final chapters seem to be just treading water. However, Hay is such an accomplished writer that I found it pleasant enough to float around with her through those final chapters.

337dudes22
Dic 20, 2011, 12:39 pm

I'm going to be adding her to my wishlist group and check her out - she sounds like a great writer. There have been a few writers like that for me too. Two books that stand out for me are Middlesex and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I loved the writing. I might try to get one of her books before year-end since I'm going to try very, very hard next year not to increase my TBR pile very much.

338DeltaQueen50
Dic 23, 2011, 7:50 pm

Wishing you the best for the holiday season, see you over on the 12 in 12 Challenge in January.

339mathgirl40
Dic 24, 2011, 7:15 am

Great review of A Place of Greater Safety! Happy holidays and see you over in the 1212 group!

340dudes22
Dic 24, 2011, 8:11 am

Just stopping by to wish you a very Happy Christmas. I've got a few boxes of books I'll be mailing out soon.

341bruce_krafft
Dic 24, 2011, 11:26 am

I just had to go order A place of Greater Safety from Amazon. And it is all your fault!!! :-)
I am sure we will both enjoy it. That is if I can get the hubby away from the romance novels!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

342LauraBrook
Dic 24, 2011, 6:38 pm

Merry Christmas Alison!

343RidgewayGirl
Dic 25, 2011, 9:29 am

Merry Christmas, everyone! I did get the Kindle Fire! And LibraryThing was my first stop, along with downloading a book or two. Will they count toward myTBR?

344thornton37814
Dic 25, 2011, 10:42 am

I think that once you download a book, it automatically goes into your TBR pile.

345RidgewayGirl
Dic 25, 2011, 1:04 pm

On LT?

346thornton37814
Dic 25, 2011, 2:39 pm

Oh, no. I thought you were asking if counted as a TBR. I don't have a TBR collection on LT (although I really should).

347RidgewayGirl
Dic 25, 2011, 3:30 pm

Well, I've finally finished the 11 in 11, just in time to have a week to read whatever. And to get a running start on reading Moby Dick, which I'm hoping to read in January.

A Small Furry rayer by Steven Kotler was an Early Reviewer book. I'll have to put together a proper review soon, but let's just say that I liked the parts about how he and his wife learned to run a dog rescue in rural New Mexico, and I was less interested in his rambling thoughts on the meaning of life.

Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu by Stephanie Rosenfeld was a random choice from an independent bookstore. Usually, that doesn't work for me; I inevitably choose stinkers, but this one was an exception. Telling the story of a twelve year old girl learning to survive her mother's mental illness, it was believable and even upbeat, given the subject matter. Rosenfeld makes the mother sympathetic, even as she is clearly unfit to raise children.

348cammykitty
Dic 26, 2011, 12:25 am

Sorry to hear A Small Furry Prayer wasn't better. Dog rescue stories are always interesting, but always in danger of rambling thoughts on the meaning of life. I hate it when they get too sentimental!

Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu sounds good. Congrats on finishing the challenge & see ya on the 12 12 thread!

349AHS-Wolfy
Dic 26, 2011, 3:56 am

Congratulations on completing your challenge!

350dudes22
Dic 26, 2011, 7:31 am

Congratulations on finishing! See you in the new year!

351LauraBrook
Dic 26, 2011, 10:26 am

Wahoo - Congratulations!!!

352lkernagh
Dic 26, 2011, 10:51 am

Yahoo - Congratulations on finishing!

353ivyd
Dic 26, 2011, 1:29 pm

Congratulations!

354paruline
Dic 26, 2011, 2:15 pm

Congratulations!!!

355japaul22
Dic 26, 2011, 2:46 pm

Congrats on finishing! I've gotten many good reading ideas from your thread - looking forward to next year!

356katiekrug
Dic 26, 2011, 3:47 pm

Congratulations on finishing! Now on to 2012....!

357GingerbreadMan
Dic 26, 2011, 6:52 pm

Congratulations on finishing! Will you be doing some sort of summary before you go?

358VisibleGhost
Dic 26, 2011, 7:48 pm

Yay! The Fire showed up.

359christina_reads
Dic 26, 2011, 11:03 pm

Congrats, RG, and I'll see you at the 12 in 12!

360mstrust
Dic 27, 2011, 12:52 pm

Congrats, you did it! I look forward to seeing your list in 2012!

361VictoriaPL
Dic 28, 2011, 7:25 am

A hearty Congratulations, well done!

362sjmccreary
Dic 28, 2011, 11:04 pm

Congratulations on finishing the challenge! Very well done. Just in time to begin the 12 in 12.

363RidgewayGirl
Dic 29, 2011, 2:54 pm

As soon as I'm back home, and can use my laptop instead of my kindle, I'll finish the last few reviews and summarize this year's reading.

Looking forward to next year!

364RidgewayGirl
Dic 30, 2011, 8:02 pm

I've had an eventful holiday. The day after Christmas, my daughter broke her femur (technically it was a slipped capital femoral epiphysis) so we spent the evening at the emergency room while my daughter uttered Gettysburg battle side amputation level screams. The small hospital in Waccamaw couldn't do the surgery, so she and I got a midnight ambulance drive up to a slightly larger city. Her surgeon was Billy Bob Thornton's twin brother, so that was interesting, and as soon as she'd been cut open and pinned back together she was fine. She's already crutching her way around at a rapid pace. We're home again, although I feel oddly drained by the whole thing. Still, I did get to give my new Kindle Fire a workout and I do like it.

Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo was a delight from start to finish. The protagonist and narrator is a hit man for a crime syndicate who is sent all over the great cities of Europe. Then, a hit goes awry and the people he works for send him back to New York for a vacation, his first. He has an awakening of sorts, not to morality, but to art and architecture. He starts looking around, reading up on what interests him. Then, he's called back into service.

This was an unusual book. The hit man is just enormously engaging, approaching culture with an openness and a way of describing things that is just a lot of fun to read. He spends a fair amount of time meandering around, but the novel never feels directionless. The ending is fantastic.

365GingerbreadMan
Dic 30, 2011, 8:42 pm

A pretty funny account of what must have been a pretty un-funny experience. Glad to hear she's better. Happy New Year!

366cbl_tn
Dic 30, 2011, 11:17 pm

It's great that your Kindle found a use so quickly, although I would have wished a different reason for you. I made a few unexpected ER & doctor's visits last year and was very thankful to have my e-reader on those occasions. I hope your daughter's leg heals quickly, and I hope you regain your equilibrium soon.

367lsh63
Dic 31, 2011, 7:37 am

Oh my, I've had enough of the emergency room myself this year. When all the kids were playing roughly on Christmas after getting bored with their toys, I silently prayed that no one would split or break anything, and also thinking I should have my Nook with me just in case.

Hope your daughter is on the mend soon, and Happy New Year to you!

368dudes22
Dic 31, 2011, 11:11 am

Glad your daughter is on the mend already. Not the best way to celebrate Christmas. Glad you're enjoying your Kindle.

369japaul22
Dic 31, 2011, 12:48 pm

Sorry to hear about your daughter but glad to hear she's feeling better already.

So, do you like reading on the backlit screen on the Fire? That's the main thing that would hold me back from a Fire or Ipad. I love the regular kindle's e-ink.

370ivyd
Dic 31, 2011, 1:21 pm

Glad that your daughter is better!

371RidgewayGirl
Dic 31, 2011, 1:48 pm

She's adjusting so well. She wants to go to the mall tomorrow, so she'll s on a shorter outing now to see how long she can go.

I like the backlight, but would like it to go a little dimmer. It's not an ipad, but it fits in my bag and does more then I had anticipated. The kindle fire is more a mini tablet than an ereader.

372-Eva-
Dic 31, 2011, 4:01 pm

Indeed a very funny description of a horrid experience - good to hear she's doing OK. Have a great new years!

-Eva-
(formerly bookoholic13)

373lkernagh
Dic 31, 2011, 5:32 pm

Getting caught up here. Glad to read that your daughter is on the mend and already keen on going to the mall - always a good sign! Sounds like the Kindle Fire was a good gift to receive! I prefer an e-reader that fits nicely in my purse to a clunky Ipad any day.

374sjmccreary
Ene 1, 2012, 1:36 pm

Can totally relate to your Christmas ER visit - we've done the same thing more times than we care to remember. Glad the surgery went well and she's back on her feet - so to speak. Yay for the new e-reader!

375RidgewayGirl
Ene 2, 2012, 11:16 am

Year End Summary

And the Best of the Best were...

The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen. If I had to pick a single favorite among the books I read last year, this would be it. Reluctant, conflicted bank robbers, the Great Depression, family relationships and a twist that's both bizarre and oddly believable, made Mullen my new author crush.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin is a crime novel set in rural Mississippi. Of course it's more than that, examining racial relations both current and past, the dead end of rural, Southern life and a friendship between two boys, now men.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell. I'm not one for westerns as a rule, but this nuanced portrayal of the infamous Doc Holiiday's time in Dodge City, where he met the Earp brothers, was fantastic.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is a sensational thriller disguised as an old classic. Collins does things with the pacing that had me biting my nails and staying up late. He also created the best female protagonist in Victorian literature.

Hark a Vagrant is a collection of Kate Beaton's cartoons, which are based on historical and literary characters. From Dude Watching with the Bronte Sisters to Every Lady Scientist Who Ever Did Anything Till Now, these are cartoons for us.

A Place of Greater Safety. Hilary Mantel takes on the bloody sweep of the French Revolution.

The Ones I'd Rather Not Have Read

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni. This was badly written, with wooden characters who behaved erratically and the plot was just silly.

Shadow Man by Cody McFayden. All the female FBI agents were under five feet tall, with enormous bazoombas. All the men were at least six and a half feet tall. Weird, eh? And the guy what done it? Well, you knew who he was by the second chapter.

Blood Men by Paul Cleave. Drenched in blood, this book was just silly.

This was a great reading year for me. I'll see you over on the 12 in 12!

http://www.librarything.com/topic/125278#3043433

376sjmccreary
Ene 2, 2012, 3:42 pm

I've gotten so many great recommendations from you in the past, that I took your best of the best list and added all the titles to the wishlist that weren't already there. No questions asked. How did I miss some of these?

377GingerbreadMan
Ene 2, 2012, 3:46 pm

Great summary, your micro review of Shadow Man cracked me up - again!

378jfetting
Ene 2, 2012, 6:19 pm

I love Kate Beaton! I need to own her book asap. She is the best!

379mathgirl40
Ene 3, 2012, 10:43 pm

I enjoyed your year-end summary! Looking forward to seeing your 2012 reading.

RidgewayGirl's Categorical Challenge Part II

CharlasThe 11 in 11 Category Challenge

1RidgewayGirlAbr 7, 2011, 9:51 pm

2RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 15, 2011, 6:00 pm

3RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 25, 2011, 2:25 pm

4RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 14, 2011, 9:55 pm

5RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 17, 2011, 11:46 am

6RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 1, 2011, 1:58 pm

7RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 25, 2011, 2:23 pm

8RidgewayGirlEditado: Oct 2, 2011, 3:01 pm

9RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 1, 2011, 1:57 pm

10RidgewayGirlEditado: Nov 1, 2011, 7:37 am

11RidgewayGirlEditado: Nov 6, 2011, 1:15 am

12RidgewayGirlEditado: Dic 29, 2011, 2:57 pm

13DeltaQueen50Abr 8, 2011, 12:24 pm

14katiekrugAbr 8, 2011, 12:42 pm

15citygirlAbr 8, 2011, 3:52 pm

16cammykittyAbr 8, 2011, 9:42 pm

17RidgewayGirlAbr 9, 2011, 10:25 am

18bruce_krafftAbr 10, 2011, 8:30 pm

19BcteagirlAbr 10, 2011, 8:39 pm

20RidgewayGirlEditado: Abr 12, 2011, 10:23 am

21ivydAbr 12, 2011, 12:29 pm

22auntmarge64Abr 12, 2011, 12:40 pm

23katiekrugAbr 12, 2011, 1:20 pm

24DeltaQueen50Abr 12, 2011, 1:46 pm

25RidgewayGirlAbr 13, 2011, 9:47 am

26lkernaghAbr 13, 2011, 7:50 pm

27RidgewayGirlAbr 16, 2011, 11:50 am

28katiekrugAbr 16, 2011, 12:39 pm

29lkernaghAbr 16, 2011, 4:17 pm

30cammykittyAbr 17, 2011, 5:18 pm

31RidgewayGirlAbr 17, 2011, 6:52 pm

32RidgewayGirlEditado: Abr 19, 2011, 11:47 am

33DeltaQueen50Abr 19, 2011, 5:14 pm

34AHS-WolfyAbr 19, 2011, 7:22 pm

35RidgewayGirlAbr 19, 2011, 7:36 pm

36lsh63Editado: Abr 19, 2011, 8:16 pm

37cammykittyAbr 19, 2011, 11:49 pm

38RidgewayGirlAbr 20, 2011, 10:02 am

39cushlareadsAbr 21, 2011, 4:25 am

40RidgewayGirlAbr 21, 2011, 6:08 pm

41DeltaQueen50Abr 21, 2011, 7:01 pm

42dudes22Abr 21, 2011, 8:07 pm

43cammykittyAbr 21, 2011, 9:24 pm

44VictoriaPLAbr 22, 2011, 7:50 am

45lkernaghAbr 22, 2011, 10:59 am

46RidgewayGirlAbr 22, 2011, 1:24 pm

47RidgewayGirlEditado: Abr 23, 2011, 9:23 pm

48katiekrugAbr 23, 2011, 9:17 pm

49RidgewayGirlAbr 23, 2011, 9:24 pm

50lkernaghAbr 23, 2011, 9:44 pm

51RidgewayGirlAbr 24, 2011, 4:36 pm

52moneybeetsAbr 24, 2011, 8:12 pm

53BcteagirlAbr 25, 2011, 9:57 pm

54RidgewayGirlAbr 28, 2011, 8:32 am

55RidgewayGirlAbr 28, 2011, 8:36 am

56RidgewayGirlAbr 30, 2011, 8:17 pm

57lsh63mayo 1, 2011, 6:05 am

58RidgewayGirlmayo 5, 2011, 10:04 am

59christina_readsmayo 5, 2011, 11:54 am

60cammykittymayo 6, 2011, 11:49 am

61RidgewayGirlmayo 6, 2011, 5:02 pm

62citygirlmayo 9, 2011, 5:41 pm

63RidgewayGirlEditado: mayo 12, 2011, 8:39 am

64cammykittymayo 12, 2011, 9:22 pm

65GingerbreadManmayo 14, 2011, 2:58 pm

66cammykittymayo 14, 2011, 11:32 pm

67dudes22mayo 15, 2011, 10:21 am

68RidgewayGirlmayo 15, 2011, 3:08 pm

69GingerbreadManmayo 15, 2011, 4:19 pm

70Bcteagirlmayo 15, 2011, 8:38 pm

71RidgewayGirlmayo 16, 2011, 9:20 am

72katiekrugmayo 16, 2011, 11:32 am

73dudes22mayo 17, 2011, 12:16 pm

74RidgewayGirlmayo 18, 2011, 9:22 am

75RidgewayGirlmayo 21, 2011, 7:29 pm

76pameladmayo 22, 2011, 5:53 am

77RidgewayGirlmayo 22, 2011, 11:34 am

78bruce_krafftmayo 22, 2011, 12:16 pm

1RidgewayGirl
Abr 7, 2011, 9:51 pm

2RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 15, 2011, 6:00 pm

3RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 25, 2011, 2:25 pm

4RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 14, 2011, 9:55 pm

5RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 17, 2011, 11:46 am

6RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 1, 2011, 1:58 pm

7RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 25, 2011, 2:23 pm

8RidgewayGirl
Editado: Oct 2, 2011, 3:01 pm

9RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 1, 2011, 1:57 pm

10RidgewayGirl
Editado: Nov 1, 2011, 7:37 am

11RidgewayGirl
Editado: Nov 6, 2011, 1:15 am

12RidgewayGirl
Editado: Dic 29, 2011, 2:57 pm

13DeltaQueen50
Abr 8, 2011, 12:24 pm

14katiekrug
Abr 8, 2011, 12:42 pm

15citygirl
Abr 8, 2011, 3:52 pm

16cammykitty
Abr 8, 2011, 9:42 pm

17RidgewayGirl
Abr 9, 2011, 10:25 am

18bruce_krafft
Abr 10, 2011, 8:30 pm

19Bcteagirl
Abr 10, 2011, 8:39 pm

20RidgewayGirl
Editado: Abr 12, 2011, 10:23 am

21ivyd
Abr 12, 2011, 12:29 pm

22auntmarge64
Abr 12, 2011, 12:40 pm

23katiekrug
Abr 12, 2011, 1:20 pm

24DeltaQueen50
Abr 12, 2011, 1:46 pm

25RidgewayGirl
Abr 13, 2011, 9:47 am

26lkernagh
Abr 13, 2011, 7:50 pm

27RidgewayGirl
Abr 16, 2011, 11:50 am

28katiekrug
Abr 16, 2011, 12:39 pm

29lkernagh
Abr 16, 2011, 4:17 pm

30cammykitty
Abr 17, 2011, 5:18 pm

31RidgewayGirl
Abr 17, 2011, 6:52 pm

32RidgewayGirl
Editado: Abr 19, 2011, 11:47 am

33DeltaQueen50
Abr 19, 2011, 5:14 pm

34AHS-Wolfy
Abr 19, 2011, 7:22 pm

35RidgewayGirl
Abr 19, 2011, 7:36 pm

36lsh63
Editado: Abr 19, 2011, 8:16 pm

37cammykitty
Abr 19, 2011, 11:49 pm

38RidgewayGirl
Abr 20, 2011, 10:02 am

39cushlareads
Abr 21, 2011, 4:25 am

40RidgewayGirl
Abr 21, 2011, 6:08 pm

41DeltaQueen50
Abr 21, 2011, 7:01 pm

42dudes22
Abr 21, 2011, 8:07 pm

43cammykitty
Abr 21, 2011, 9:24 pm

44VictoriaPL
Abr 22, 2011, 7:50 am

45lkernagh
Abr 22, 2011, 10:59 am

46RidgewayGirl
Abr 22, 2011, 1:24 pm

47RidgewayGirl
Editado: Abr 23, 2011, 9:23 pm

48katiekrug
Abr 23, 2011, 9:17 pm

49RidgewayGirl
Abr 23, 2011, 9:24 pm

50lkernagh
Abr 23, 2011, 9:44 pm

51RidgewayGirl
Abr 24, 2011, 4:36 pm

52moneybeets
Abr 24, 2011, 8:12 pm

53Bcteagirl
Abr 25, 2011, 9:57 pm

54RidgewayGirl
Abr 28, 2011, 8:32 am

55RidgewayGirl
Abr 28, 2011, 8:36 am

56RidgewayGirl
Abr 30, 2011, 8:17 pm

57lsh63
mayo 1, 2011, 6:05 am

58RidgewayGirl
mayo 5, 2011, 10:04 am

59christina_reads
mayo 5, 2011, 11:54 am

60cammykitty
mayo 6, 2011, 11:49 am

61RidgewayGirl
mayo 6, 2011, 5:02 pm

62citygirl
mayo 9, 2011, 5:41 pm

63RidgewayGirl
Editado: mayo 12, 2011, 8:39 am

64cammykitty
mayo 12, 2011, 9:22 pm

65GingerbreadMan
mayo 14, 2011, 2:58 pm

66cammykitty
mayo 14, 2011, 11:32 pm

67dudes22
mayo 15, 2011, 10:21 am

68RidgewayGirl
mayo 15, 2011, 3:08 pm

69GingerbreadMan
mayo 15, 2011, 4:19 pm

70Bcteagirl
mayo 15, 2011, 8:38 pm

71RidgewayGirl
mayo 16, 2011, 9:20 am

72katiekrug
mayo 16, 2011, 11:32 am

73dudes22
mayo 17, 2011, 12:16 pm

74RidgewayGirl
mayo 18, 2011, 9:22 am

75RidgewayGirl
mayo 21, 2011, 7:29 pm

76pamelad
mayo 22, 2011, 5:53 am

77RidgewayGirl
mayo 22, 2011, 11:34 am

78bruce_krafft
mayo 22, 2011, 12:16 pm

79RidgewayGirl
mayo 22, 2011, 1:05 pm

80DeltaQueen50
mayo 22, 2011, 5:32 pm