RidgewayGirl Reads Some Books in 2021 -- Second Quarterish

Spring is here, sort of, yours truly has had her first shot of the vaccine, I have a new and entirely functional laptop, and things are looking up, mostly!

Recently, I read Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell's excellent novel, which reminded me of a time, twenty years ago, when I lived for six months in Warwick, England in a row house (called a cottage) on Bridgend, a small road that faced onto the back of the Warwick castle gardens. The house was built in the late sixteenth century, so we'd visit the Shakespeare Trust properties in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon and find out about it. I also took a series of falconry classes at Mary Arden's farm, where a very large owl named Jessica taught me how to handle her. So my theme this year is in honor of Jessica the owl.



It really was a ridiculously beautiful place to live.

Currently Reading



Recently Read



Books Acquired



Reading miscellany:

Owned Books Read: 22

Library Books Read: 35

Netgalley: 4

Books Acquired: 22

Rereads: 2

Abandoned with Prejudice: 1

Category One.



The Global Owl: Books from around the world


Create Your Own Visited Countries Map

1. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses (Argentina)
2. Prayer for the Living by Ben Okra (Nigeria)
3. Come On Up by Jordi Nopca, translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem (Spain)
4. The Gate by François Bizot, translated from the French by Euan Cameron (France)
5. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones (Barbados)
6. Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique (Colombia)

Category Two.



We Need Diverse Owls

1. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
2. Memorial by Bryan Washington
3. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Category Three.



Expat Owls, Immigrant Owls and Owls in Translation

1. The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina
2. Sansei and Sensibility by Karen Tei Yamashita
3. Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
4. Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han
5. Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee

Category Four.



The Owl is a Lady: Books by Women

1. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
2. The Harpy by Megan Hunter
3. Monogamy by Sue Miller
4. Lord the One You Love is Sick by Kasey Thornton
5. Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
6. Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

Category Five.



CATs and My Book Club

1. Figuring by Maria Popova (February HistoryCAT)
2. Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (February RandomCAT)
3. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (April GenreCAT)
4. Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman (April Book Club)
5. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell (May GenreCAT)
6. Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye (June HistoryCAT and June RandomCAT)

Category Six.



The Rooster: Books from the Tournament of Books (the tournament, the summer reading or the longlist)

1. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (2021 Competitor)
2. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (2021 Competitor)
3. Telephone by Percival Everett (2021 Competitor)
4. Red Pill by Hari Kunzru (2021 Competitor)
5. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2021 Competitor)
6. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (2021 Competitor)
7. We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry (2021 Competitor)
8. Deacon King Kong by James McBride (2021 Competitor)
9. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021 Summer Camp)

Category Seven.



The Ominous Owl: Crime Novels and True Crime

1. Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession edited by Sarah Weinman
2. No Exit by Taylor Adams
3. Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green
4. Exit by Belinda Bauer
5. Crimson Lake by Candice Fox
6. Lightseekers by Femi Kayode

Category Eight.



I Brought This Owl Home, Now What Do I Do? Books I Own

1. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh
2. The River by Peter Heller
3. No Dominion by Louise Welsh
4. Life Class by Pat Barker

Category Nine.



(art by Kenojuak Ashevak)

The Electronic Owl: Ebooks

1. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
2. The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken
3. The Portrait of a Mirror by A. Natasha Joukovsky

Category Ten.



A Familiar Owl: books by authors I've read before.

1. Mother May I by Joshilyn Jackson
2. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
3. Summerwater by Sarah Moss
4. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Category Eleven.



I Like New Owls: Books Published in 2021

1. The Divines by Ellie Eaton
2. No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
3. A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion
4. Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton
5. Sophomores by Sean Desmond

Category Twelve.



(by Albrecht Dürer)

Extra Owls: The Overflow

1. The Paris Hours by Alex George
2. Girl A by Abigail Dean

BingoDOG






1. The River by Peter Heller
3. Monogamy by Sue Miller
4. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
7. The Paris Hours by Alex George
8. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
9. Lord the One You Love is Sick by Kasey Thornton
11. Come On Up by Jordi Nopca
12. Lightseekers by Femi Kayode
13. Figuring by Maria Popova
14. Deacon King Kong by James McBride
15. Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman
16. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
17. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
18. The Harpy by Megan Hunter
19. Unspeakable Acts edited by Sarah Weinman
20. Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
21. Memorial by Bryan Washington
22. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
23. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh
24. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
25. The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

(I've modified this quite a bit because I wanted to.)

1. A book published in 2011.

2. An Afrofuturist book.

3. A book with a heart, diamond, spade or club on the cover.

4. A book with a gem, mineral or rock in the title.

5. A book where the protagonist works at your current or dream job.

6. A book that won or was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. -- No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

7. A book with a family tree. -- The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

8. A book published in the 1990's.

9. A book about forgetting. -- Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

10. A book you've seen on someone else's thread. -- Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

11. A crime novel in translation.

12. A genre mash-up.

13. A book set mostly or entirely outdoors. -- The River by Peter Heller

14. A book with something broken on the cover. -- Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

15. A book by a Muslim author.

16. A book about a fresh start. -- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

17. A book with magic realism. -- The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

18. A book set in multiple countries. -- Memorial by Bryan Washington

19. A book set in a country you'd like to visit. -- The Gate by François Bizot (Cambodia)

20. A book starting with "Q," "X" or "Z."

21. A book about a social justice issue. -- How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

22. A book set in a restaurant.

23. A book with a black and white cover. -- Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han

24. A book by an indigenous author.

25. A book with the same title as a song.

26. A book about something you are passionate about.

27. A book from a Black Lives Matter reading list.

28. A book your best friend would like.

29. A book about art or an artist. -- Life Class by Pat Barker

30. A book over 600 pages. -- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

31. A book you meant to read last year.

32. An ARC. -- Prayer for the Living by Ben Okri

33. A book by a Latinx author. -- Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

34. A book bought at an independent bookstore. -- Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman

35. A book written in German.

Welcome to the new thread, everyone. Pull up a chair, there's tea and wine and I'll even bake some cookies if I don't get distracted by a book first.

In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

I initially picked up Aftershocks, a memoir by the far-too-young-to-be-writing-memoirs Nadia Owusu, because she had spent her childhood living in different places. Her father worked for the UN and so the family was posted to places like Italy, Tanzania and Ethiopia. I was initially interested in her experience of living a childhood moving from place to place. And she describes that world beautifully, the experience of living in a privileged bubble even in the center of countries being torn apart by war and famine, of never feeling centered in one place. But there's a lot more to this memoir than that; her parents, one Ghanaian, one Armenian-American, divorced when she was young and her mother only visited sporadically and briefly, and when her father died when Owusu was fourteen, her mother refused to take her and her younger sister in, leaving them with their stepmother, a woman with whom Owusu had a contentious relationship.

Owusu ends up, like so many rootless people, in New York. Despite her privileged childhood, she is struggling to get by and running up against the harsh realities of the American dream and her own unresolved trauma from being constantly abandoned. There's a lot of uncomfortable honesty in this memoir and if Owusu doesn't exactly emerge in a secure space, there's the feeling that she will probably manage to find her way. I look forward to seeing what she writes next.

Happy new thread! And hurrah to vaccine doses and working technology.

>20 Helenliz: I am grateful for both of those things!

I'm still loving the owls. O,O

Congratulations on your vaccination!

Happy new thread - what a joy to see the owls again! And hooray for your vaccination!

Happy New Thread and yay for the vaccination and the laptop! A great way to start spring!

Love the owls (again!) and the memoir sounds rather tempting.

>19 RidgewayGirl: Interested to see that you have read Aftershocks. Friday evening I heard Ms. Owusu on zoom at the virtual Virginia Festival of the Book. She and Louis Chude-Sokei, author of Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, spoke about their memoirs. Both had lived in various cultures and had had unsettled home-lives growing up. They were both excellent speakers. The program was excellent, and made me want to obtain both books.

Happy New Thread, Kay! Hooray for your shot! (I'm getting my second one next Sat) And you're doing great on your Bingo card.

Happy new thread! I love those owls!

Happy new thread! Owls are lovely!

Happy new thread! Glad to hear you've received your first shot of the vaccine and that you have a shiny new laptop!

This year I bought a calendar of Inuit art, and Kenojuak Ashevak's "Preening Owl" is the featured painting for June :)

Happy new thread, Kay, and congrats on the vaccination. It's great to hear.

Thank you, all! I'm happy the owls still entertain, and happier still about my vaccine.

>26 sallylou61: Oh, that would have been very interesting to see. I'm hoping that the Decatur Book Festival is in-person this year. It's not until Labor Day weekend and they are recruiting volunteers for a physical festival, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

>30 rabbitprincess: I bet the calendar is beautiful, even for the months without any owls!

Abandoning We Can Only Save Ourselves by Alison Wisdom. A story that's been told before, with characters out of central casting and some annoying stylistic tics. Writers, you don't need to get fancy. Don't use the first person plural when the traditional third person omniscient narrator would do a better job! Blech.

Happy new thread! Looking forward to the book bullets.

Your Bingo card is filling up nicely.

The owls are worth a second or even third look!

Congrats on the vaccine! Happy new thread and glad to have a chance to see some owl photos again. :)

Thanks, all. Here's a bonus owl just walking along.

>37 RidgewayGirl: "I'm always walkin'
After midnight, searchin' for whoo-oo-oo..."

Josephine is one of The Divines, girls attending an expensive boarding school in England. In her fifth year, however, things go badly wrong, beginning with her sharing a room with an unpopular girl, which jeopardizes her social standing and ending in mayhem and tragedy. Going back and forth between this pivotal year and Josephine as a married adult, Ellie Eaton tells the story of what happens when over-privileged girls are kept together with too little supervision and what happens when a girl who has always been a follower is put in a position where her values are tested.

I'm a sucker for a school story, especially one set it such a different world, but this one ultimately pulled its punches in ways that left me dissatisfied. I did like how Josephine was passive in her own story, how she was unable to parse the motivations of others, or even understand herself. Feeling left out of her friend group had her willing to make friends with a townie, a girl who both encourages Josephine to take a new look at her privileged life and who has her own motivations for hanging out with her. Josephine as an adult is not that different from Josephine as a teenager. She's contemptuous of her previous life, but also fascinated and eager to find out what happened to her former schoolmates.

This is my second time reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, so I'm not going to review it, but I am going to say that this is a book worth rereading. I bought a copy of The Mirror and the Light right before everything shut down last March and it's been sitting on my shelf for a year as I've dithered about either rereading the first two books in the trilogy or just diving right in to book three. I'm glad I finally decided to do the reread as I am enjoying it so much. I turned the last page in Wolf Hall and immediately started Bring Up the Bodies.

>41 RidgewayGirl: :D

>41 RidgewayGirl: - Best one of those memes I've seen yet!

>41 RidgewayGirl: Ouch! Totally relatable!

>41 RidgewayGirl: LOL good one!

>41 RidgewayGirl: Haha, I feel seen!

I made it here! Aren't you proud of me? LOL
I haven't made categories yet. I feel it will take me all of 2021 to make the lists for 2022. Always good to have a goal...

I knew that I'd find people who understand here. I'll state for the record that I like my tbr and enjoy it every time I get to choose another book from it and have SO MUCH TO CHOOSE FROM. Imagine being someone who is able to wail, "but I don't have anything to read!"

>47 VictoriaPL: Yay! And I bought a novel set in Paris during WWII last week!

>48 RidgewayGirl: a loaner for certain!

>48 RidgewayGirl: Imagine being someone who is able to wail, "but I don't have anything to read!" My imagination fails me utterly here. Such people would be like an alien species.

>48 RidgewayGirl: I may have uttered "I have nothing to wear", but "nothing to read" has never passed these lips!

Oh. I may have a large TBR shelf but have sometimes thought "there's nothing I want to read right now". But I'm going to argue that's a slightly different thing. I have loads to read, just nothing that quite suits the mood. The feeling usually passes.

Yes, I'm with Helen. Often not sure what I want to read next!

>49 VictoriaPL: Absolutely!

>52 Helenliz: Helen, I did that the other night. Grabbed the next book on the stack and wasn't feeling it. Luckily, the right book was on the shelf, though.

>53 charl08: Having too much choice is a very different problem!

No One is Talking About This is a novel by Patricia Lockwood. Told in short segments, the first half is about her life centering around the Portal, a stand-in for twitter. She went viral once and has been speaking and making appearances with other people who are twitter-famous. Then something real happens to a family member.

Lockwood wrote the funny, heart-breaking and perfect memoir, Priestdaddy, and this novel is similar in tone and with characters who largely correspond to her family members. But while Priestdaddy is a book you could pick up in a decade or two and enjoy, No One is Talking About This is for this moment in time, being a snapshot of life during the Trump Presidency and of that moment of extremely on-line culture. Lockwood is a poet and it shows here.

Ben Okri's short story collection, A Prayer for the Living, feels like a series of dreams, some full of wonder and discovery, unexpected twists of fate, and some read like nightmares, sharper and more terrifying than life. The stories travel through the world, set in London and Istanbul, Africa and the Americas.

There's a story about Don Quixote in an African printer's shop, a story about a father and his two sons trying to get their broken-down car home in Lagos, several brief, horrifying stories involving the Boko Haram, and a fairy tale involving an enchanted doll house. A London detective uses his intuition to find the culprit, a lonely man dreams of Istanbul, a curious man witnesses the power of a magical mirror held by a cabal of Rosicrucians and, in the titular story, the living envy the dead.

I enjoyed my first encounter with this Booker Prize-winning author.

>56 RidgewayGirl: Maybe I should try this one. I've never been able to get very far with his books, despite good intentions. The magical realism thing is a big part of that.

I saw upthread that you listed another of Percival Everett's books in "Books Acquired". I revisited your review of Telephone after finishing it myself, as I'm curious about reactions to the different endings. My version's ending wasn't what I expected, but I loved the book. It was definitely a 5-star read for me. Strangely, looking at the LT ToB list, you and I were the only ones giving it a high ranking. :)

>57 charl08: Charlotte, I think I started The Famished Road years ago, but abandoned it within a few pages. Short stories was an easier introduction for me.

>58 mathgirl40: Paulina, I'm glad you liked Telephone. I thought it was fantastic. I became a fan of Everett's after reading So Much Blue for an earlier ToB.

So how to review a perfect collection of short stories? Elizabeth McCracken's The Souvenir Museum is such a book and I am at a loss for words. Nevertheless, here are a few.

McCracken's strength lies in her characters. Quirky and grounded, willing to combine both whimsey and harsh reality. I know that sounds dreadful, but McCracken pulls it off. A young man has his parents' permission to run away to sea for a few weeks, but he fails to return, instead running away to London to become a ventriloquist. An aging actress with a role in a children's game show watches an entertainer make balloon animals on a ferry during a storm. A man discovers that parenthood involves going places, like a German-themed waterpark, that he would never normally visit. And there are stories that link together in the best ways. I can't point to a weak story or a clunky phrase in the book. I loved it.

>41 RidgewayGirl:

This made me smile. There are always more books to read for the first time on my shelves than I will ever get to.

>60 RidgewayGirl: Sold! (Again) I've added it to the wishlist. I like linked stories.

>61 hailelib: I like the image of us as brave little bulldozers, valiantly removing one book from the tbr at a time.

>62 charl08: Charlotte, it's so good!

Libby's big, messy Irish-American family is falling apart. Her Dad is dead, her mother spends her time, when she is home, in her room with the door closed. With her older siblings busy with their own lives, Libby feels the pressure to keep everything safe. One evening, during an argument, her mother kicks Libby's twelve-year-old sister out of the car a few miles from home. This event becomes a catalyst for larger changes to this family and especially to Libby, whose constant fear and vigilance are not necessarily good for her or anyone around her.

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion is set in suburban Valley Forge, Pennsylvania during the summer of 1980, when parental supervision was negligible and the adults were far too busy destroying their own lives to worry about the children. Libby is an interesting character to follow as she gets so much wrong along the way. This is a coming-of-age story structured chronologically, with a lot of details of suburban America during that time. It doesn't cover any new ground or do anything differently than any of the many similar novels out there, but it's well-written and is an enjoyable book to read.

Pickard County, a rural area of farms and very small towns in Nebraska, is not an easy place to live. Harley Jensen works as a sheriff's deputy, patrolling the lonely rural highways and abandoned farmhouses at night. Pam Reddick, who married and had a child before she was ready, is slowly drowning, isolated in a trailer with a very young child she wishes she wasn't responsible for, as her husband works long hours for far too little money. They're both restless, but what pulls them together is the Reddick family and the tragedy that defines them. When the three Reddick boys were young, the oldest boy disappeared and his body was never found. Harley is haunted by the one case his department never solved and Pam, married to the middle son, lives with the after effects of that event and how it formed her husband.

Set over a few days, Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton explores the tragic roots of old sorrows and how they affect the living. There's a lot of dark roads, messed up families, repressed feelings, drugs and hopelessness in these pages. Everyone knows your family's secrets and are eager to spread word about any bad behavior, distances are measured in how much gas you have left in the tank and a body can lie hidden for decades.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about this one. The imaginary Pickard County is richly imagined, but often described in ways someone without that visual map in their heads had no way of following. The characters were nuanced and vivid and the ending was very well done, but the story was sometimes self-indulgent, like a story turned over a few too many times. Still, I'm always happy to find a new author writing in a noir-like vein and I'll take a look at whatever she writes next.

Someone without a visual map in their head... like me! 😂 I’ll stay clear of that one.

>66 VictoriaPL: Seriously. If you keep mentioning specific roads and intersections, throw up a map for your readers! It's a fictional county. I know because I spent some time on google earth trying to figure out where things were in relation to each other.

>65 RidgewayGirl: Pickard Country Atlas has intrigued me and I am adding it to my list. Seeing the phrase "noir-like vein" totally grabbed me.

When the time came to choose a new book to read, the stack of books I choose from looked unappealing. But I had a copy of The River by Peter Heller, that I'd picked up because the men in my family like this kind of thing and they are also lazy and expect me to keep books on hand for them. And, in that moment, it looked like just the kind of book I wanted to read. And it was.

The River is the story of two college friends who are on a wilderness canoe trip in Canada. Partway through, two things happen that irrevocably alter a fun trip into something far more dangerous. First, they discover that a large forest fire is moving in their direction. Without any means of calling for help, their only hope is to reach the settlement on the shore of Hudson's Bay before the fire. Second, they meet a man canoeing alone and he tells them his wife is lost in the woods.

This is an adventure story told in a straight forward, Hemingway-esque way. The sentences are clear and direct and unadorned. The two young men are likewise straight forward guys, healthy young men who enjoy the wilderness and have the skills to make this kind of trip. And there is a lot of enjoyment to be had from a good story, well-told.

>69 RidgewayGirl: I'm glad you enjoyed The River.

>70 DeltaQueen50: Loved it. Thanks for putting in on my radar!

I reread Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies in preparation for reading The Mirror and the Light. I had forgotten what a quick read it is -- just action-packed until the inevitable conclusion. I may have enjoyed this more on reread, but as I gave it five stars back then, maybe not.

This is what life with cats looks like.



He did it to himself. He did it twice, showing that he was not going to learn from experience.

>73 RidgewayGirl: LOL

>73 RidgewayGirl: :D

>73 RidgewayGirl: fabulous!

>73 RidgewayGirl: - That must have been a good flavor.

>73 RidgewayGirl: I feel like doing that myself some days!

>77 dudes22: Betty, it was Ben & Jerry's salted caramel core. My son claims it's the best flavor. Homer was just making his own mind up.

>78 clue: Ice cream consumption in this house has risen dramatically in the past year for some reason.

>79 RidgewayGirl: - One of my favorites. Your cat has good taste.

>73 RidgewayGirl: hilarious.

Hurrying home from Colorado on Christmas Eve, Darby hopes to beat the snowstorm over the mountains. Instead, she takes shelter at an isolated rest area off of the highway. Inside, are four other stranded travelers and outside, in the back of a van, is a girl in a dog crate. After Darby discovers the girl, she has to find a way to protect herself and the girl, while figuring out which of the other travelers is the kidnapper and how to notify the police on a mountain, in a storm and without cell phone service.

No Exit by Taylor Adams is the kind of thriller that is published in quantity, the kind of book that is read quickly and forgotten almost as fast. But when all the parts come together as they do here, it's more than what it is intended to be. It's solidly written, solidly plotted, has a few genuinely surprising but logical twists and has characters who, while never especially nuanced, are three-dimensional. And the novel's heroine is not a particularly nice person, or even a good one. It's just that when she's thrust into the middle of a crisis, she finds the will to try to do the right thing. The setting, a mountain in a snowstorm, is pretty fun, too. I don't read many thrillers of this kind, but if they were all as well executed as No Exit, I would read more of them.

>82 RidgewayGirl: I don't generally seek out thrillers, but this one sounds really good - adding it to my list. Thanks for the great review!

>82 RidgewayGirl: - And it's currently only $1.99 on Kindle! I snapped it up.

>83 scaifea: Lisa (Ish63) recommended it on her thread, so that's how I heard about it.

>84 katiekrug: I saw that. This is a good one to hold on to for when you want a very distracting page turner.

>82 RidgewayGirl: A BB for me, too! It's an intriguing premise and I like thrillers with snowy settings!

In the mid-nineties, bodies were being discovered dumped in out of the way places outside of New York City. There were similarities in how they were dumped and all of the men were gay. At a time when AIDS was at its peak and homophobia rampant, the disappearance of a few gay men didn't make the news. In Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, Elon Green focuses on the stories of the victims and of the lives they led and the gay piano bars of midtown Manhattan where they met the murderer.

This is a well-written and researched work, where the emphasis stays on the lives of four ordinary gay men, whose life paths were very different. It's a snapshot into a time and a place not that long gone, done with respect and empathy. If this is the future of true crime writing, bring it on.

>87 RidgewayGirl:, That's a definite bb for me. Thanks for taking the time to review it!

I have also taken a hit for No Exit but unfortunately it's not on sale on Canadian Amazon so I have added it to my library list.

>82 RidgewayGirl: Hi Kay I thought I had commented here, but see I didn't. I'm glad that you took a chance on No Exit. I was pleasantly surprised by it.

>88 whitewavedarling: It's very good!

>89 DeltaQueen50: I hope you run across a copy, although I wonder if it will be cold enough for a Canadian? I mean, the main character doesn't even have snow tires.

>90 lsh63: Thanks for reviewing it, Lisa!

In personal news, a yellow jacket came into my house, walked across my foot and stung me. I murdered him purely for vengeance, but now he's comfortably dead and my ankle still stings an hour later.

>91 RidgewayGirl: Ouch!!! I hope you feel better soon!

Fun fact: I didn't know the term "yellow jacket" (being a wasp) and had to google it. When I started reading your sentence I pictured a watchman or traffic policeman or someone like that! LOL :-))

So this Hemingway guy is kind of a polarizing figure. He's undeniably one of our greatest literary giants who had this kind of larger-than-life image whose writing style still has a significant impact on literature. He was a thin-skinned, petty man who treated his friends and romantic partners abominably and he was obsessed with appearing masculine, to the point of hurting those around him, and factored into his own death.

Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman doesn't really stick to its subtitle. Instead, it's a straightforward biography, with a strong emphasis on Hemingway's relationships with women. And it's a history of the Cuban Revolution, with an emphasis on Cuban-American relations and an emphasis on events that would have affected Hemingway, who had a house there. The biography half is told chronologically and is a good basic account of Hemingway's life, with a little added detail around a long-term relationship with a Cuban woman he kept secret. The Cuban history half is a mess. Feldman clearly knows his history well, but was unwilling to omit details that were both outside of Hemingway's story and the interest of most readers. There are a lot of lists of the names of people in the room where meetings happened, lists of names of revolutionaries/functionaries/administrators who were in the room when decisions were made, descriptions of events that made the papers but were not central to the story of the revolution. If Feldman had stuck to a clear timeline with a few colorful stories, he would have had a very good book on his hand.

Hard to visit your thread without adding to my wishlist. Here are my additions:

>69 RidgewayGirl: The River by Peter Heller
>82 RidgewayGirl: No Exit by Taylor Adams
>73 RidgewayGirl: & >79 RidgewayGirl: Ben & Jerry's salted caramel core – this one should have been top of the list!

>94 VivienneR: LOL!

Come On Up is a collection of short stories and the first work of Spanish Catalan author Jordi Nopca to be translated into English. Each story is set in one of the neighborhoods in and around Barcelona. While most of the characters have college degrees, most of them are dealing with economic insecurity, whether they've managed to find work in a restaurant or as a journalist. Things are precarious, relationships falter under the weight of unemployment. But the stories aren't depressing, Nopca's characters are a resilient lot. And while, on the whole, the stories themselves were not extraordinary, the setting and the culture were and I really enjoyed getting a glimpse of how ordinary Barcelonians live.

>96 RidgewayGirl: I'm sure the setting would be the thing I enjoyed most.

It's 1987 and the Malone family is falling apart. Pat has MS and is intent on drinking himself to death. When he is laid off, he has time to really devote himself to drinking. Dan is fifteen and working hard to fly under the radar when he is inspired by an English teacher with unusual teaching methods to excel. He's got a solid group of friends and he really likes this one girl. While his home life is not great, his focus is elsewhere. And then there's Anne, who is doing everything to keep her family going. She works as a substitute teacher and all of the housework, childcare and cooking fall on her, even when her husband sits home all day. When her non-communicative husband loses his job, she works harder, clipping coupons and switching to cheaper brands. When she is called to serve as a juror for a high-profile murder trial, Anne's mental energies are focused on that, and while a juror has a responsibility to do a thorough job, she may have crossed a line when she begins to drive through the Dallas neighborhood where the crime took place late at night.

I found Sophomores by Sean Desmond to be a frustrating book to read. His suburban Dallas setting is well-depicted. It's very well-written and Desmond really nails the world of a sullen teenager stuck in bland suburbia and longing for something more authentic. How wonderful it was to hang out with your friends and maybe even talk to that person you like. The simultaneous desire to be recognized and to not be noticed. And his portrayal of an alcoholic unable to look past himself to the family he's destroying is compassionate and nuanced. But the most interesting character in this novel is left one-dimensional. Anne is viewed not only by her family as a cold, nagging housekeeper, but also by the author. There was so much more to be said about this intelligent woman stuck in the role of the faithful and submissive Catholic wife and how being a juror might have changed her, had her character been afforded the same development as Pat and Dan.

Felix Pink is a retired widower whose experiences have led him into becoming an exiteer, a volunteer who keeps the terminally ill and dying company when they decide to end their own lives, saving their families from legal jeopardy and providing comfort, but no physical assistance. The day Felix is paired with a new young partner named Amanda, things go badly wrong and the wrong man dies. Felix sees that the police are getting nowhere and he realizes that he will have to step in and figure out who set them up, while protecting both his one-time fellow volunteer and keeping a promise he makes to the man who should have died.

Exit features the same detectives as Belinda Bauer's Booker-nominated novel, Snap, but as in that novel, they are secondary to the story being told. This read, to my utter delight, a lot like a Jackson Brodie mystery, only without Jackson Brodie. There's that same sense of a tangle of threads being eased apart and that moment when everything falls into place. Bauer has written some very engaging characters and interjected humor into the story without sacrificing verisimilitude or the impact of a murder on the people affected. Felix is a wonderful protagonist, a cranky octogenarian who misses his wife deeply and brings his dog Mabel along with him wherever he can. He's determined to do the right thing but isn't really sure what that is, and until he figures that out, he'll rectify the smaller harms.

>99 RidgewayGirl: You know this one is going on my wishlist!

The Portrait of a Mirror by A. Natasha Joukovsky centers on two beautiful, expensively educated couples and what happens when they fall for each other's partners. Gorgeous Wes Range, whose ownership of an of-the-moment tech company befits his upbringing, is married to Diana, an equally beautiful and high-powered management consultant. Things are stale, they tend to annoy each other more than they delight each other, but there's no question they look good together and share the same values, which is to say, they know the right place to be seen skiing or own a third home. While on an exclusive tour of a new exhibition at the Met, Wes sees Vivien, who attended the same expensive school he did, and parlayed her money and connections into an enviable position as a curator. He had had a crush on her in school, and now she's even more gorgeous than before. Meanwhile, his wife is sent to Philadelphia, where she is partnered with Dale on a high-profile project. Dale is engaged to Vivien, but it doesn't take long before he is smitten with Diana.

It is, of course, perfectly fine to write about rich, beautiful, successful people who have everything. It is, however, a lot more difficult to make the reader care about their tender feelings and inner pain. But the author isn't asking us to empathize, or even get to know her characters. She's mocking them even as she's lovingly describing their every meal, their every shopping trip, their every perfectly insouciant outfit, painstakingly put together to imply carelessness. With the exception of far too many Linked In profiles, emails and text messages, this novel was well-written, but the humor often felt forced. Still, this will be fun for those who like to watch rich people being made fun of as they blithely continue with their lives as wealthy, beautiful, expensively educated people with connections and easy success. It felt pointless to me.

A rainy August at a loch-side holiday park in Scotland. Stuck in the small cabins, the vacationers watch each other and the rain. Each chapter of Summerwater by Sarah Moss follows a different person stuck waiting for the rain to stop, from a girl and her brother annoyed by another girl interrupting their play, to the teenager so bored with being inside that he goes kayaking and discovers that he may have overestimated his abilities, to the young mother who jogs early in the morning to escape all the demands on her time. Moss is a wonderful writer, able to create complex characters in just a few paragraphs, and the picture she draws of this vacation site is one that appears stagnant, but that is teeming with life. This is a gorgeous and not entirely benign novel that is maybe just a touch shorter than it needed to be.

>102 RidgewayGirl: "maybe just a touch shorter than it needed to be"

Well, that's not the usual complaint about length. :D

>103 spiralsheep: I admire what she's doing - how she's paring things down to just the essential and leaving it to the reader to fill in the blanks, but also I would have liked a few more paragraphs and a few extra chapters. Ending a novel at the right place is difficult and so many authors go on far longer than they need to, carefully wrapping things up. That I think Moss ended a little early is me nitpicking a brilliant novel where the author clearly did exactly what she wanted to.

>102 RidgewayGirl: I think I'm taking a book bullet on that one.

ETA: Knox County library owns it in audiobook format and in print. I'm hoping the Morristown library will add it because I don't really want to borrow a print book from Knoxville because that means driving there and being around more people. (It's bad enough in Morristown.) I did recommend it for the e-book collection at TNReads, so maybe they'll acquire a copy that way.

>105 thornton37814: I think you'll like it, Lori.

My semi-annual Marie Kondoing of All the Books is currently underway. I never get rid of more than a couple, but I do love holding each one and either remembering how much I love it or discovering again how much I want to read it. Having tidy shelves is also a bonus.

Does anyone else love reorganizing their books or going through them for whatever reason?

>107 RidgewayGirl: I do love reorganizing my books! It's been a couple years since my last declutter, so I'm probably overdue. I'm trying to be a lot choosier about the books I keep, only holding onto the ones I think I'll read again, or the unread books that I still genuinely want to read. But it's always a wrench to part with them!

The Chengs of Plano, Texas are not okay. Somehow they've stopped being a family and are just individuals on their own. There's Liang, who takes on the housework and childcare while nominally supervising his photography business, whose past, as a child with a mother who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution, has scarred him in ways he's not dealing with. And there's Patty, whose green card got them all to the US, who is working long hours and has no space left to check on her family's well-being. Annabel, the daughter, who was born in the US, is struggling to find her place in the private elementary school she's attending and having trouble in how she interacts with others, And, lastly, there's Jack, who was born in China and left behind with his grandparents until his parents were settled. He's quiet and careful and is doing his best to hold his family together. And then a crisis hits them all. It will either finally bring them together or destroy this precarious family.

Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han is the story of an immigrant family in which the fact that they are immigrants is important, but not the focus of this novel. Instead, it's about the factors that make a family and how failures to communicate and failures to understand can build up over time.

I liked what Han is doing here and how carefully he built up each character and treated them all with such love. It's interesting to see suburban Texas chosen as the setting for this story and I enjoyed Han's descriptions of it, and how he incorporated how much of each day is spend driving around into the novel. I'm interested in what he writes next.

>102 RidgewayGirl: I'm waiting patiently for my turn at the library for this one.

>107 RidgewayGirl: I don't have many physical books left to reorganize these days. When I moved a few years ago, I took breaks from my packing to see what physical books I owned to see if they were in the library catalog and I donated them. They were happy to get them and honestly, with my aging eyes and occasional carpal tunnel, the Kindle allows me to read more these days.

>110 lsh63: eReaders are great for tired eyes and book storage. I thought I'd be doing most of my reading on my iPad by now, but I just prefer the physical presence of books, both in the experience of holding them and turning the pages, and in seeing them on the bookshelves. It is certainly a lot easier to read a larger book on kindle and I have a few books whose print is too small for me to read in the evenings when my eyes are tired, which is not a problem one has with an ebook.

>107 RidgewayGirl: I love to go though my books. I usually look them over sometime during each winter when I'm stuck inside.

Trying to catch up on some threads. You’ve been reading some good books since I last came by. I’ve put The River and No Exit on my list to get from the library this summer.

As my reading likes have changed a bit over the last few years, I think my next "purge" might actually be somewhat more of a "purge than usual. I've been holding off waiting until the clubhouse at our new condo place is finished hoping that there will be a "library" where I can donate some books. I already have a few bags from my reading over the last couple of years cluttering up my closet floor.

Any reordering of bookshelves I do is usually down to my laziness in putting books away in the proper place once I've read them! They're at the point again where books just get put anywhere there's a vague space they can be shoved into, and it's probably time for a sort out again.

I buy nearly all ebooks these days as my dodgy wrist means holding books, particularly hardbacks, gets uncomfortable really quickly, and like many of us my eyesight isn't what it once was. But I wouldn't want to be without physical books on shelves, I love the look of them and I love that people who visit can browse them and maybe find something interesting. And if a book is picture/photo-heavy then I will definitely get the paper version. The only books I tend to get rid of (usually when we have a trip to Barter Books on our way to see family down south - which is a double-edged sword as then I get credit for more books so it doesn't do a huge amount for the decluttering) are duplicates or ones that I didn't like and know for sure I'll never read again and wouldn't want anyone I know to have to sit through them. I might not reread many of the books on my shelves, but I do like having them there and knowing I could reread them if the fancy ever took me.

>108 christina_reads: Christina, book rearranging is something I do often enough that I sometimes look at my books and realize that it's not time yet, I have to wait. This cycle I've shelved the crime novels and short stories on their own shelves.

>112 clue: When COVID first hit and we were all in lock-down, the first thing I wanted to do was to rearrange the books, except I'd just done that in February.

>113 hailelib: Both are excellent summer books. I've pulled out two novels set in the polar regions for our annual beach trip.

>114 dudes22: I have a few boxes filling up of read books for donation. The place I usually donate my books to hasn't been accepting them, but if they haven't opened up to donations again yet, I do know that my local Friends of the Library is taking books again. It will be nice to clear them out of the house.

>115 Jackie_K: I'm also a fan of seeing my books on their shelves. One of the Marie Kondo tips I like best is the idea that if you have a collection of something, you should have it out where it can give you pleasure every time you see it. And I'm reading The Mirror and the Light right now and when the cat claims my lap, I'm stuck holding it above him and I realize that heavy books do have their drawbacks.

Not so much a comment on rearranging, but more about Jackie's comment on hardcovers - My brother-in-law mostly buys brand new hard cover books so whenever we go to see him, my husband comes home with some. We haven't seen him in quite a while and last week when we finally got a chance to go, we came home with 3 large paper bags of books. Now to find somewhere to put them.

The Gate is François Bizot's account of his final months in Cambodia in the mid-seventies, first as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge and then of the days in the French Embassy in Phnom Penh as foreigners and Cambodians took shelter there and how they managed to leave.

Bizot was in Cambodia researching Khmer Buddhist traditions and was traveling around the areas being taken over by the Khmer Rouge with two Cambodian assistants when he was taken by the Khmer military and sent to a prison in the countryside, really just a makeshift camp in the jungle where the prisoners were kept locked in ankle stocks and lying in rows. Because Bizot was too large for the shackles and to keep him isolated, he was chained up near the entrance to the camp. His main interactions were with the camp leader, a man who would later be infamous for being in charge of torture, but with whom Bizot formed a sort of relationship, one that led to him finally being released a few months later. Back in Phnom Penh, he takes shelter in the French embassy and given his fluency in Khmer, he soon took on a leadership position. He's also one of the few willing to venture out of the embassy in search of the foreigners who chose not to come to the embassy earlier or to search for supplies. Eventually, a risky exit is planned, a logistical nightmare involving moving over a thousand people through Khmer-held territory into Thailand.

Bizot is not a likeable man and it's to his credit that he makes no attempt to make himself so. He's arrogant and he holds attitudes and ideas about the Cambodians, and especially a fetishization of the women, that he might be encouraged to examine and rethink today, but that doesn't change the value of this document of an important and terrifying time in history.

It feels as though there are a lot of novels being published currently by young Irish women writing about relationships. And, honestly, I've liked one of the three I've read so far. Yet, here I am, picking up another one, like that rat in the cage, pushing on the bar, hoping for a treat.

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan is a novel about an Irish woman's volatile relationship. The novel's narrator is desperately insecure and wants nothing more than to fall in love, so when she meets Ciaran, she is ready to submerge her life into his. And, for awhile, this seems to work. But Ciaran disapproves of much of what she does and becomes cold at the slightest infraction. His coldness just pushes her into trying harder to be the perfect girlfriend, even as he becomes more exacting and even when he makes it clear that he's still emotionally involved with his last girlfriend.

The first part of the novel reads like many other stories about a young woman and how she becomes trapped in an abusive relationship with a manipulative man. But as the novel progresses, Nolan complicates the story in ways that reflect real life. This was a far more interesting novel than it initially seemed and I'm looking forward to what this author writes next. Definitely stay far away from Ciaran, though.

>119 RidgewayGirl: Which one was it that you liked? I did like Normal People but I haven't felt any kind of rush to pick up other ones!

>120 charl08: I liked Conversations with Friends, Rooney's first novel. To me, Normal People felt thinner than her first book and more myopic.

In a Barbados unseen by tourists, two Barbadian women struggle with the aftermath of a violent event. Mira married a wealthy Brit, but their yearly vacation is destroyed by a home invasion that ends in a death and Mira is left to deal with her sorrow and loss. Lala runs off and marries Adan when she is still a teenager and soon after has a baby. Raising the baby in a small and rundown house is difficult and it's made more difficult as Adan turns abusive and controlling. When their baby dies, Lala is left to hold together what she can.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones is a novel willing to lean hard into misery. Moments of grace or simply relief from the unrelenting poverty, crime and misery these women experience are rarely seen. There was certainly a lot going on with this novel, from rapist grandfathers, to dead babies, to violent sociopaths, but I think that the misery would have had more impact if it had been leavened with with grace and hope now and again. Jones's writing is assured and full of life, and there's no question that she has a bright future as a writer.

No Dominion by Louise Welsh is the final book in a trilogy about what happens when a virus kills a lot of people suddenly. This novel picks up several years in the future, as the people left on Orkney Island and the people who flee there, looking for a safe place have created a self-sustaining democratic small community. The island's few teenagers, those found as lone, surviving children, often in grim circumstances, have grown bored with island life and when strangers arrive telling stories of how exciting Glasgow is, it's not difficult for them to be persuaded into running away and bringing an infant with them. Two islanders, Magnus and Stevie, are appointed to attempt to bring the children back, but what they find on the mainland means that just surviving will be a challenge.

Welsh has created a very interesting dystopian world and I've enjoyed this trilogy quite a bit despite not generally being a fan of the genre. Each book falls into a different genre, the first, A Lovely Way to Burn, a crime novel where Stevie, a young woman working as a presenter on a shopping network, tries to find out who killed her boyfriend, as the world collapses around her and no one has any interest in a simple murder. The second, Death is a Welcome Guest, follows Magnus, an up-and-coming comedian who finds himself being mistakenly arrested and instead of being released the next day, is trapped in a cell while the world convulses outside. This final book pulls together the characters from the first two novels and provides a larger picture of what happened while bringing together the characters of the first two books for a sort of grim adventure. It's a worthwhile trilogy that showcases what an excellent writer Welsh is.

>123 RidgewayGirl: I am looking forward to reading this third entry.

>124 DeltaQueen50: The whole trilogy was just such a wonderful surprise.

So thrillers are more miss than hit for me, except when I'm getting recommendations from you guys. This one was mentioned by Judy (DeltaQueen50) and the last one I read, reviewed by Lisa (Ish63), and both were fantastic. Just going to rely on you all from here on out.



In Crimson Lake by Candice Fox, Ted Conkaffey is a cop with the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few minutes after he was seen parked at a bus stop and talking to a girl by people driving by, that same girl is abducted and harmed. After his arrest and the media frenzy, it hardly matters that the prosecutor didn't have enough to take to trial. Ted is released into an Australia that believes him to be a violent pedophile. Taking shelter in a small town outside of Cairns in an old house facing the croc-infested river, he does his best to lie low. But he does need a job and the one person who will hire him is the local (and only) private investigator, a woman with her own lurid past. And his first job is to assist her in investigating the disappearance of a bestselling author.

There's a lot to like about this book. The characters are complex, even the bad guys, for the most part, receive more nuance than is usual. And while this is on the grittier end of things, there's a charm to the writing. Ted rescues a goose and her goslings and is reluctantly stuck with them until there is a moment of danger and his first thought is to get the geese to safety. It's a sweet little detail to humanize a guy working hard to be callous. And his new boss, Amanda, is a fascinating woman. Ted goes back and forth on wondering whether her past makes her a bad person or if she is reliable or not in an entirely predictable way, even given his own recent past. Fox also makes the setting of the Australian rainforest and mistrustful locals a colorful part of the story. I'm looking forward to reading the second book in the series.

>126 RidgewayGirl: I'm having a good run with great Australian crime fiction, so think I'll add this one to the library wishlist! Thanks for passing the parcel with the recommendation.

ETA LT record tells me I read it in 2017. Goldfish bowl memory.

>126 RidgewayGirl: Glad you enjoyed Crimson Lake. I am looking forward to the next one as well.

>123 RidgewayGirl: >126 RidgewayGirl: Ouch. Multiple hits.

>127 charl08: In your defense, neither the title nor cover art are at all distinctive in any way.

>128 DeltaQueen50: Yes, and my library has the next two.

>120 charl08: Ha! I look forward to finding out what you think about them someday!

>126 RidgewayGirl: I enjoyed all three of these. By the end I'd had enough of the geese, but that's a quibble.

You might like Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic.

>131 pamelad: So far, I love the geese. I've added the Viskic to my wishlist. Thanks!

>123 RidgewayGirl: The Louise Welsh trilogy sounds really good, although I may try to wait until after the pandemic before reading it.

>133 rabbitprincess: rp, I know exactly how you feel. There are books now being published about the pandemic and my whole body screams, "Too soon! Too Soon!"

So The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez was a wonderful surprise. I've liked the translator, Megan McDowell's choices of books to translate in the past and when this one showed up on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, I thought it looked interesting enough, and boy, was it. This is a collection of horror short stories that are thought-provoking and odd. In the opening story, a woman is haunted by a decomposing baby, which pretty much sets the tone for the book. If you are a fan of Samanta Schweblin, were an emo kid, or just like weird and off-beat stories, then you'll love this.

Hilary Mantel completes her trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell with The Mirror and the Light. Again written from the point of view of only what Cromwell experiences himself, there's a rising sense of things swinging out of control, of the precariousness of Cromwell's position and yet still manages to surprise with the suddenness of the final events (no spoiler here -- the events have been part of the historical record for some centuries.) Eight years separate the publication of Bring Up the Bodies and this novel, so if you read the first two books within a few years of their publications, I can recommend a reread of the first two books. I found that reading the trilogy as one long book was both immersive and rewarding.

I see on your "currently reading" covers that you're reading Klara and the Sun. I just returned it to the library this morning. I liked it a lot - looking forward to your thoughts.

>137 dudes22: Betty, I checked it out from the library because it's one of the Tournament of Books Summer Reading books, and then intended to return it unread -- I'm so uninterested in the thoughts and feelings of AI -- but then I was stuck in a line and read the first few pages and ended up hooked.

>138 RidgewayGirl: - There is something about the way he writes that just draws you in. And I was just mentioning to someone that I was curious to see what would happen. Like you, I'm really not that interested in AI, but it was Ishuguro...

Crimson Lake is on my list of possible books to get from the library later this summer. I may need to put it at the top ...

>126 RidgewayGirl: Hi Kay! I agree with you, thrillers are hit or miss. Well you got me with Crimson Lake. Just that fast it was available at the library and it’s been downloaded. Uh oh I see that it’s a series, I must have missed that at first.

>139 dudes22: Yes, Klara and the Sun is immediately so interesting. I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far.

>140 hailelib: I'm planning to continue with the series and I'm happy to report that my library carries all of them.

>141 lsh63: Lisa, and the bad ones are unreadable! Why should I waste my time reading it when the authors clearly didn't put any effort into them?

In Jhumpa Lahiri's Whereabouts, a woman lives a quiet life in an unnamed Italian city. Each short chapter centers on a daily activity; going to the store to buy a notebook, spotting a friend arguing in the street, remembering her father's love of theatre. As the novel progresses, the woman seems less content with the life she has chosen.

This is a short novel full of gorgeous writing, the kind of writing that pulled me right in and I would have gladly read a much longer novel about this solitary, lonely woman going through her day.

Long ago, I heard about an art project involving cicada husks and so you can imagine the excitement with which I waited for the great cicada invasion of 2021. Only I'm too far south to get any of Brood X cicadas. I complained on twitter and a woman laughed and wondered why I'd want an infestation of cicadas. I explained and today a package arrived from Virginia. My art project is a go!

>144 RidgewayGirl: I'm in peak cicada territory, and part of me thinks "Wow, what a miracle of nature!" and the other part of me is like "GROSS." All I see when I go outside is their corpses on the sidewalk, so I'd say the "GROSS" side is prevalent. :)

>145 christina_reads: I know, but there are so many things you can do with the husks! I mean, look at what people are coming up with! And the husks are selling on eBay for $25 for fifty. It's a side gig if you're looking for one.

>146 RidgewayGirl: Wow, that wreath is...I have no words!

There's a seamstress on YouTube who does vintage and historical sewing. She has made an Edwardian (I think) bustle gown in a beautiful vibrant green silk that she call the Cicada gown. It's stunning.
Hard to reconcile that with your husks but if your project makes you happy, I’m happy for you. LOL

Inspired by the real life case of the Turpin family, Girl A by Abigail Dean tells the story of Lex, a successful lawyer who is called back to England when her mother dies, leaving a house and a small inheritance to divide among the surviving children. Her younger sister conceives of the idea of turning the house into a community center, but they need the rest of the siblings to sign off on the project, so Lex visits each in turn, which awakens her memories of what happened in that terrible house.

This novel was a lot stronger than I had expected, given that this is Dean's debut novel. It's well-paced and with nuanced characterizations of all the various family members, even the parents, who are guilty of egregious abuse. And Lex at first appears like a woman who has it all together, which turns out later to be true. This is a family where the surviving siblings are not okay and there are good reasons for that. I'm looking forward to seeing what this author does next.

>147 christina_reads: You want to make one for yourself now, don't you?

>148 VictoriaPL: Victoria, I'd like to remind you of your oyster shell wreath project.

>150 RidgewayGirl: I hear you.

>146 RidgewayGirl: I think "why" sums up my response...

>149 RidgewayGirl: that sounds good.

I have no desire to craft with or eat cicadas.

>151 VictoriaPL: I will be sending you play by play updates on my projects with pictures. Three weeks to Raleigh!

>152 Helenliz: I'm not sure why, exactly. I've always liked the idea of creating something beautiful out of things considered unsightly refuse. And Girl A is worth reading. Usually debut novels are far less polished and well-constructed.

>153 thornton37814: I don't want to eat them, Lori. Yuck!

>154 RidgewayGirl: I cannot wait (for Raleigh).

>154 RidgewayGirl: "I've always liked the idea of creating something beautiful out of things considered unsightly refuse."

I wish you well with your craft project! I used to make junk sculptures, although not out of shed skin... so far.... >;-)

The cicada project does sound a bit odd. I'm just fine with them being north of here.

>144 RidgewayGirl: I can't get my head round this. At all. But may it bring you many hours of crafting joy :-)

>143 RidgewayGirl: This I want to buy though.

>156 spiralsheep: Why did you stop making your sculptures? My own art has taken an extended break due to life taking over, but with the kids both heading off to university this fall (my daughter is almost done, my son is starting) the itch is returning.

>157 hailelib: Fair enough. There really are a lot of them.

>158 charl08: Charlotte, Whereabouts is quietly gorgeous. I'll be sure to pick up a copy for my own shelves eventually.

>159 RidgewayGirl: Less daily access to inspiring junk, mostly, but also no longer belonging to a physically creative social circle. I got hijacked by musicians. :D

>160 spiralsheep: Those musicians! But, yes, quite a bit is the encouragement of being among creative people.

>144 RidgewayGirl: Ugh! Whatever makes you happy!

I hope you treat us to a picture of your finished product, I am dying to see what you are going to make.

I'm curious as to what the finished art will be, but the thought of handling those husks is giving me the creeps a bit!

In Like This Afternoon Forever, Jaime Manrique tells the story of Lucas, whose mother left his violent father and managed to make a life for the two of them, and of Ignacio, son of indigenous subsistence farmers, both of whom showed an aptitude for learning which led to them being given the opportunity to go to a Catholic boarding school with the promise of being able to attend university and become priests. When they meet, they quickly become close friends, and then discover a love that would keep them together for the rest of their lives.

Colombia during the nineties and early 2000s was a violent place with many rural areas under the control of guerrilla groups and the military matching them in ruthlessness and corruption. As Lucas and Ignacio grow up in Catholic boarding schools and then go to university, Lucas grows stronger in his faith and Ignacio's fierce intelligence has him exploring the history of liberation theology. After they are ordained, they are sent into different neighborhoods in Bogota. Ignacio is sent to the most crime-ridden and poor parish, where he works hard to improve the lives of his parishioners and where he learns about the "false positives," and tries to get that story out into the world. Both his activism and his homosexuality put Ignacio into great danger.

This is a novel with a lot going on, so much so that it sometimes feels like a summary. The passages where Manrique slows down and describes the setting or the relationship between the men, the writing is beautiful and the story a lovely, if melancholic one.

>163 DeltaQueen50: I will post a picture of whatever it ends up being, Judy.

>164 Jackie_K: It's just dead insect skin, Jackie. (now I've creeped myself out!)

Having moved back to Lagos, Nigeria when his wife gets a teaching position at the law school, Dr. Philip Taiwo takes a job investigating the causes of mob violence in which three university students are brutally murdered. He's a psychologist who wrote his thesis on mob behavior in American lynchings so he is asked by one of the murdered student's fathers to find a reason for what happened. Sent to the town of Okriki, Taiwo is often out of his depth, but he has a good assistant and a woman he met on the plane is also eager to help. But are they both hiding motives of their own? Taiwo finds himself in the middle of a situation he doesn't understand and he quickly finds himself in danger.

The strength of Lightseekers by Femi Kayode lays less in the plot than in the setting and how by creating a protagonist who both is and isn't an insider, allows Kayode to explain the culture, history and events to western readers without inserting long explanations. The author based his novel on a real incident and used that basis to explain aspects of Nigerian culture, like the presence on university campuses of violent confraternities and the difficulties students have in finding housing. Taiwo was more an observer than a detective, but this novel was interesting enough for me to want to read the next book in this series -- it very much feels like the start of a mystery series.

>167 RidgewayGirl: - I've been debating whether to take a BB for this and I think I will - not that I need another series.

I see in your book list above that you've gotten a few books of interest to me also. My friend recommended Migrations to me and I see Whereabouts which is by a local author that I read. How will we ever get to all the books we want to read? I could read more if I gave up quilting, but I have too much fabric to use to do that either.

>168 dudes22: Betty, just the setting and how Kayode explains Nigerian culture is worth the read, that it happens alongside a decent crime novel is a bonus.

And we should hope to never get to the bottom of the fabric box, or to the last book on the tbr shelf. We'll have choices right through to the end.

Klara and the Sun is the first novel that I've read by Kazuo Ishiguro, but it won't be my last. The novel is narrated by Klara, an AI robot purchased to be a companion to a chronically ill girl. Klara isn't like the other Artificial Friends; she's more curious and empathetic than even the newer models. As Klara learns about the world, she describes her perceptions and experiences as she develops a more complex understanding. And as her bond to her owner grows, she is determined to do whatever is necessary to help her.

To be honest, I start yawning the minute AI is mentioned anywhere. So my expectations were low to start with. But Ishiguro writes in such a clear, engaging way that I was immediately pulled in to the world he'd created. He creates a complex world and then doesn't explain it, depending on the reader to pick up how things are as the novel proceeds. It was a fantastic method to use when the protagonist is also figuring out how the world works. That said, I didn't love the story and my heartstrings remained steadfastly unplucked. Which is to say, I enjoyed reading this novel because of the writing, the way Ishiguro developed his characters and for the way this fictional world was described, without really falling into the story. That may well be on me and in any case, I'm more than happy to pick up another by this author given that there are more than a few that are written about things that don't make me yawn.

The whole world belonged to them because they were on their way to die.

In the spring of 1914, Paul struggles at Slade, the London art school, especially in Life Class. Coming from a northern working class background, he feels removed from the other students. But Elinor, one of the few women students welcomes him into her group of friends, which include Kit, a successful artist, and Teresa, one of the life models. All of their lives are turned upside down when war is declared and Kit and Paul sign on as ambulance drivers, Teresa disappears and Elinor stubbornly continues with her art.

This is the first book in a trilogy and, as such, I should almost wait until I've read the other two to say anything. Here, the most interesting character disappeared partway through and was never heard from again. I'm hoping she reappears because Teresa, scrappy Teresa with the troubled, dangerous husband and a determination to life her life, is far more interesting than Elinor, the upper class golden girl who attracts all the men. Still, this is a fascinating novel, describing everything from art school to how wounds were treated on and off the battleground (a lot of detail here, so be prepared). Barker's research may be exhaustive, but she deploys it in such a natural way. Looking forward to the next book in the trilogy.

>171 RidgewayGirl: I'll be interested to see your reviews of the remainder of the trilogy.

>170 RidgewayGirl: - I've been waiting to see what you thought of this and you've said it much better than I did, although I think I liked it a bit more than you did. Our book club read The Remains of the Day last year (also a movie) and I've read Never Let Me Go too. His writing is what makes the stories and not the content so much. I'm looking forward to reading some of his others also.

>171 RidgewayGirl: - I'll be looking to see how it continues too before I take that BB.

>170 RidgewayGirl: we'll have to agree to disagree about Ishiguro Kazuo. But what is new? 😂

>172 spiralsheep: I'm eager to continue with it.

>173 dudes22: Betty, I like that idea of reading for the writing and not the contents so much. 74

>174 VictoriaPL: We'll have to discuss this on our road trip!

My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee is an episodic novel that, as the title suggests, centers a college student's trip to Asia with his mentor, a charismatic, energetic immigrant entrepreneur named Pong. But that event is recounted late in the novel, one that first describes what happens to Tiller beforehand; his childhood in a quiet, well-heeled town being raised by his father after his mother leaves them. The book goes off on various tangents, the most interesting is the account of the life of Pong's parents in China, and the heart of the book is what happens to Tiller after his adventure, when he meets a single mother in the witness protection program and her unusual son and joins them in hiding out in a suburban tract home in Plano Stagno, Texas. The events advertised in the title are the oddest and least impactful moments in this novel.

The writing is excellent and Lee has created a wonderful, complex character in Tiller, a young man who combines insecurity with a sense of humor, a clear-eyed view of his place in the world, a sweet heart, and a willingness to adapt to new situations. And the structure of the novel, which feels random, pulls together at the end to explain something that was burning under the surface the whole time in such a low key way and was beautifully executed. There's humor here and heart and if the story edges towards Grand Guignol there towards the end, it recaptures its footing soon afterward.

I'm somewhat interested in Lightseekers and Life Class and the public library actually has both. Don't know when I'll get to them though.

>175 RidgewayGirl: so ready! I'm hoping that I finish my current read, a door stopper of a book, so that I don't have to lug it along, LOL

>177 hailelib: That's my story -- either I'm requesting so many library books that I can't read my own or I'm just making note of the books that sound interesting and when will I get to them?

>178 VictoriaPL: Less than two weeks!

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is a messy soap opera of a novel. It's wild and full of drama, with conflicts aplenty. Reese is a kind-hearted, funny trans woman who is more than a little self-destructive. One day, her ex gets in touch with an outrageous proposition. He wants her to be a co-parent with his girlfriend who, having discovered that she's pregnant, demands that Ames either step up and be an equal parent or she will end the pregnancy and also the relationship. This is Ames's solid attempt to meet Katrina's need for a full partner even when he doesn't think he can do it. It's a messy, complicated solution, but Ames, for all his reticence, has some complications of his own. He was, after all, until a handful of years ago, not Ames but Amy and only detransitioned after becoming weary of the energy it took to deal with the hostility of every day life as a trans woman. And then there's Katrina, who reacts badly to learning about Ames's past, but finds herself wondering if it might not just work.

There is a lot going on in this novel and Peters never allows her characters to become noble representatives of trans women everywhere. They are simply themselves, and they are a mess. Reese is a fantastic character to read about, always entertaining or doing something to blow up her own life. I was worried that this would be an issue-of-the-moment book, but Peters is having too much fun throwing her characters into uncomfortable situations and celebrating their complexity for that to happen. This also didn't feel like a novel that was designed to educate and make the reader comfortable.

>170 RidgewayGirl: It irritates me so much when I go to my LT library and something that should be there isn't! This seems to be the case with Never Let Me Go, I read it at least ten years ago. While I was reading I would tell myself this could never happen. To any practical thinking person it couldn't but ten years later it comes to my mind occsionally with a shiver.

>181 clue: I usually have the opposite problem -- I'm sure I don't have a book, but my LT catalog says otherwise. And then, there it is, right on the shelf.

>182 RidgewayGirl: That happens to me a lot too - and there is the book with date finished, 4.5 stars, but not review!