What are you reading the week of August 21, 2021?

Sorry, I overslept this morning. I'm about a third of the way through Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record. After you get past their terrible chapter on stratigraphy, it's not too bad. But it's still leaves a lot to be desired for a textbook.

reading the orphan collector by Ellen Wiseman for book club.

Still mostly not really reading The Mists of Avalon, Ancestral Night, and Victories Greater Than Death.

In striking distance of finishing Piranesi and 75% done with Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914. Also reading Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution.

Also expect to be starting the Generals' War: Operation Command on the Western Front and Blackburn Buccaneer.

Finished listening to the disappointing Leave The World Behind.

Next up for listening is Hello Darkness My Old Friend by Sanford D. Greenberg .

>1 fredbacon: Oversleeping on a Saturday is a good thing!

I'm still reading The Regulators by Richard Bachman. It was a busy week so I didn't make much progress, but hopefully I'll have more time for reading in the next few days.

Enjoying this Audible/Kindle combo ~

Cross Her Heart (Bree Taggert, 1)
by Melinda Leigh

Friends Like Us – Lauren Fox
Book on CD performed by Amy Rubinate
3***

From the book jacket: For Willa Jacobs, seeing her best friend, Jane Weston, is like looking in a mirror on a really good day. Strangers assume they are sisters, a comparison Willa secretly enjoys. They share an apartment, clothing, and groceries, eking out rent with part-time jobs. Willa writes advertising copy, dreaming up inspirational messages for tea bags, while Jane cleans houses and writes poetry about it, rhyming “clog of hair” with “fog of despair.” Together Willa and Jane are a fortress of private jokes and shared opinions, with a friendship so close there’s hardly room for anyone else. But when Ben, Willa’s oldest friend, reappears and falls in love with Jane, Willa wonders: Can she let her two best friends find happiness with each other if it means leaving her behind?

My reactions
I really enjoyed this exploration of friendship and the choices one makes as one matures. I remember close friends I had in my twenties … how we’d hang out at each other’s apartments, sometimes spending the night, watching movies, sharing PB sandwiches, taking a walk to the park or a Saturday matinee. And, like the characters in Fox’s novel, we’d create terrible puns and inside jokes that, looking back, were truly dreadful, but which made us feel clever and bright and “in charge of our destiny.”

While I’ve never experienced the kind of implosion that this trio is headed for, I have witnessed (and been part of) break-ups that hurt so badly you wondered how you would ever survive. And I recognized how a best friend can say just the right thing to help you through what you believe to be the darkest moments. So the relationships between these people and their emotions were completely relatable to me, even though I am more than twice as old as they are.

Willa narrates, and so we get more of her internal dialogue and exploration of her feelings about what is happening between her and Ben and Jane. I would have liked to have heard more from both Jane and Ben’s perspectives.

I loved all the references to local establishments. I don’t often read books set in Milwaukee, and the setting contributed to my easily relating to the book’s characters and plot. There’s also a very interesting subplot involving Willa’s brother, Seth.

Amy Rubinate does a fine job performing the audiobook version. There are many scenes where the two women have quick back and forth banter and I was never confused about who was speaking.

I'm having fun reading the 1930s "Crime Club Selection" mystery Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight, published in 1935. It is fun and well written. The Crime Club description on the book's first page tells us that Knight is "destined to take her place along with Mignon G. Eberhart, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Dorothy Sayers among the leading women writers of mystery fiction." I'm not sure that happened, necessarily, though folks who are more knowledgeable about the mystery writers of this era might have more to say about that. LT tells me that this book is the first of a 16-book series, although only 9 of those books are actually listed on LT. I assume folks have been working from a Fabulous Fiction or Goodreads list. Anyway, I'm still not for sure whether I'll end up seeking out any more books from the series, as I'm currently in the middle of several other series of different sorts.

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles
4/5 stars
After the Russian revolution in 1922, aristocrat Count Rostov is punished by the Bolshevik tribunal and loses his rooms where he lives. He is then put under house arrest at the Metropol Hotel and is forced into smaller accommodations and eventually ends up working there. However, his life brightens up when a young girl alone stays with him and they become a family. Wonderfully written and hard to put down!

Finished listening to the very interesting memoir Hello Darkness My Old Friend.

Next up is Outlawed by Anna North.

Starting on Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach

Just finished reading the novel NEWS OF THE WORLD by author PAULETTE JILES.

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I finished the book Big Friendship, part memoir, part treatise on friendship, its importance and joys. Its primary point is that any close friendship will go through rough patches that will have to be addressed for the friendship to last. The authors are young (30's) and their friendship has lasted 10 years so from my vantage point being in my 70's, their experience seems small. Nonetheless, many of their points do resonate.

Enjoying this audiobook via hoopla ~

Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Bridgertons Book 4)
by Julia Quinn

I finished the fun "Golden Age" mystery, Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight, the first entry in Knight's "Elisha Macomber" series, set on Martha's Vineyard. When copywriter Anne Waldron loses her job (it's the Depression, after all), she falls back to her cabin in the island town of Penberthy Village. Her friend, Hazel Kershaw (Kerch), a nurse also newly jobless, joins her there. In a nearby cabin, a famous playwright, Marya Van Wyck, is suddenly murdered. Anne and Kerch find the body . . . and off we go! There are lots of plot twists and strange goings on, here, that make the reading fun. The writing is crisp and there is a pleasing amount of sly humor, self-deprecating often, as Anne, our first person narrator, has plenty of opportunity to doubt her own credentials as a sleuth. So this was a good time.

I've written a bit more about the book, and about Knight, on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next up, keeping things light for the moment, will be The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell. This was a recent birthday present from my wonderful wife.

finished Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear. Meh. Started Citadel by Marko Kloos.

Just finished Mark Dunn's Welcome to Higby, which came nowhere the level of his debut novel, Ella Minnow Pea. Disappointed.

Started Sue Townsend's The Queen and I, which is a fantasy following the misadventures of Britain's Royal Family following the election of a political party dedicated to removing the monarchy. It's a fish-out-of-water comedy, I suppose, which could go off in any direction.

>10 JulieLill: loved this book, and I have a pre order on his new one, can't wait till I get it

Finished The short reign of Pippin IV France can't seem to form a government, so they try to being back monarchy. They go way back th Charlemange to find his great many times over grandson for the job. Hijinks ensue. And after 65 years Steinbeck mustve known people wouldnt change and so its very timely for today Lots of fun

The Secret Life of Violet Grant – Beatriz Williams
Digital Audiobook narrated by Kathleen McInerney
3.5***

Williams uses a dual timeline and dual narrators to tell this story of Vivian Schuyler, Manhattan socialite and wanna-be advertising exec in 1964, and her aunt Violet Schuyler Grant, who endured an unhappy marriage to pursue her dreams of scientific research in 1914 Europe.

I was quickly engaged and continuously interested in this story line. While I’ve grown tired of the dual timeline that is so popular these days with historical fiction, I thought Williams did a very good job of using this device.

I think I liked Violet’s story better, though I liked the character of Vivian more. Both women must fight for their dreams against convention and societal expectations (especially those of their matriarch mothers).

Violet’s husband is a total cad … evident from the first time we encounter him … but she does manage to gain the admiration of colleagues for her scientific work. The added espionage as Europe is headed toward The Great War (now known as WWI) sometimes makes the plot a little melodramatic, but it still held my interest and brought a surprise or two.

Vivian, meanwhile, is a sassy, assertive, “modern” woman. I loved her voice, her determination, and her loyalty to her friend. I also liked how she stood up for herself and was NOT willing to give up on her dream job for the sake of a romance.

Kathleen McInerney does a fantastic job of narrating the audiobook. I cringed every time she voiced Violet’s husband, Dr Walter Grant – what an oily villain! And I really loved the way she performed Vivian’s chapters.

Just finished the historical novel The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, an imagining of what happened behind Agatha Christie's 11-day disappearance in 1926. A compelling read about an event I'd never heard of, which Agatha Christie never spoke of thereafter.

Finished Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders. Sily-ish YA science fiction. Started The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny.

Lions – Bonnie Nadzam
3.5***

From the book jacket: A spell-binding story of a modern-day “living ghost town” on the brink of collapse, and a young couple faced with pursuing the promise of a new life elsewhere or – against all reason – staying where they are.

My reactions
Nadzam’s work reminds me of classic fables with tragic heroes, especially opening with a mysterious stranger and his little dog. Her characters are familiar and yet distant. I recognize some of their emotions and motivations: loyalty, inertia, longing, adventure, boredom, duty, wonder, love.

Gordon, in particular, struggles with the competing forces – an urge to leave this desolate, dying town for college and a bright future vs. a duty to honor tradition and continue his father’s (and grandfather’s) work. Leigh is similarly torn. She loves this boy, and yet she longs to go to a bigger, BETTER, place, to experience all that life offers rather than stay in this small town whose only claim to fame is the “ghost town” sign on the freeway exit.

I can always rely on my F2F book club friend to recommend interesting, “odd” books! Unfortunately, our meeting was postponed, and I had been hoping that our discussion would help clarify my thoughts.

Just finished The Queen and I, and found it fun, but the ending was a total cop-out. Reviews are all over the place. I rated it a "B", knocking off half a point for the ending. British humor (excuse me, humour), fantasy, written and set in 1992, so Charles and Diana are still a couple.

Need to finish up a Kindle book, Bridge of Scarlet Leaves, by Kristina McMorris, which is set in WWII and involves a marriage between a young Caucasian girl and the Japanese boy she has grown up with, unfortunately undertaken the day before Pearl Harbor. I've been interrupted several times, and this is a loooooong book, so I don't know whether my difficulty with it is because of the format (I can't read from devices late at night) or being lured away by other titles, or if the book itself is just too slow-paced. We'll give it several more days and see how things shape up.

I’m enjoying Louise Penny’s latest, The Madness Of Crowds.

Attachments
Rainbow Rowell
3.5/5 stars
Lincoln O’Neill works in a newsroom as an internet security officer as Y2K approaches but he also has to monitor everyone’s work email. Two workers, Beth and Jennifer who know they are being monitored but they don’t take it seriously, discuss everything going on in their lives. Lincoln is enjoying their emails but he doesn’t turn them in. He starts to have a crush on Beth but how would that work out and how would she feel that he was the one reading their email. This wasn’t the best romance book I have read but it was kinda sweet.

Dug into Bridge of Scarlet Leaves today and ended up finishing it in one sitting. It really is a good book, following the lives of four young Californians (including a racially-mixed couple) through WWII. It obviously needs more than the chapter-at-a-time attention I gave it at first.

Don't know what's up next.