What are you reading the week of September 4, 2021?

I have about 100 pages left to go in Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record. We've made it all the way up the tree of evolution to crinoids and sea urchins. It's not going to leave much room for dinosaurs and mammals. :-(

>1 fredbacon: I'm impressed with your perseverance regarding a very dense book.

Enjoying this OverDrive audio VERY much ~

The One by John Marrs
(UK sci-fi/results of DNA tests used to find one's perfect love match/
interesting and thought provoking)

As for myself, I knocked off Fire in Paradise (a truly gripping read), am wondering why I'm even bothering with Panzergrenadiers to the Front (not especially well written (though I'm not shocked by this)), and am about to have A Psalm for the Wild-Built in my grubby little paws, though I decided to continue with The Fallen.

I put down The Storyteller's Secret. Better classified as YA.

Ne t up for listening is Pastoralia by George Saunders.

I'm advancing in The Wedding Date series with The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory. It was a stressful week so some light reading was just right, and I think it will continue to be just right for a relaxing, long weekend.

I'm about 3/5 of the way through The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson's recent publication about Winston Churchill during the first year of WW2 and especially the Blitz. I've read a lot about the Battle of Britain over the years, so little about the overview of the battle itself is new to me, but there are a lot of details about the interactions between Churchill's key advisors and department heads that I'm finding interesting.

>7 rocketjk: I loved all the little details in it.

Last week I finished Kira Jane Buxton's follow-up to Hollow Kingdom, Feral Creatures. It was as fun as the first.

This week I'm reading Mystic River and wondering why it's taken me this long to get to it.

Still reading The Mists of Avalon, The Moonlight Child, and Thunderbird.

I thoroughly enjoyed Pastoralia.

Next up for listening is another Stephanie Plum installment, Turbo Twenty-three by Janet Evanovitch.

Enjoying my latest Tigerlily' Orchids by Ruth Rendell

Death And Judgment – Donna Leon
Digital audiobook narrated by David Colacci
3.5***

Book # 4 in the Commissario Brunetti mystery series, set in Venice, Italy. This case starts with a tractor trailer catching fire, destroying the cargo, which includes foreign women. Then three prominent businessmen are murdered. And Brunetti’s investigation leads him to an organized group of sexual traffickers.

This was definitely one of the darker works in this series. As usual, the Commissario relies on his wife for advice and comfort, but his daughter insists on helping and that gets uncomfortable very quickly. I love the atmosphere of these novels, but the seedy underbelly of Venice depicted here made me disinclined to ever want to visit.

Leon crafts a good mystery, with enough clues keep the action moving forward and a logical solution. She also does a great job of putting the reader right into the setting. And I love the scenes of Brunetti at home, which make him so much more human and fallible and approachable. It’s a series I’ll continue reading.

David Colacci does a great job of performing the audiobook. He sets a good pace and I love the voice he gives these characters.

This week I read The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard and enjoyed it very much. It is the first book in her Cazalet Chronicles, and I have the second on hand.

I'm going to read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald next.

I'm always reading The Stories of John Cheever bit by bit - a story here and there. What an amazing writer he is. I'm thoroughly pleased by the little glimpses of life and character in each new tale.

Finished listening to Turbo Twenty-three.

Next up for listening is The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams.

The Next Thing On My List – Jill Smolinski
3***

From the book jacket: After a car accident in which her passenger, Marissa, dies, June Parker finds herself in possession of a list Marissa has written: “20 Things to Do By My 25th Birthday.” The tasks range from inspiring (run a 5K) to daring (go braless) to near-impossible (change someone’s life). To assuage her guilt, June races to achieve each goal herself before the deadline, learning more about her own life than she ever bargained for.

My reactions:
It was about what I expected. I was not a big fan of the main character, June, who really seemed to have her priorities backwards. As she worked to complete Marissa’s list it really became all about HER, not about honoring Marissa. I also wasn’t much of a fan of most of June’s friends. And I really didn’t like how the relationship with a young girl she is supposedly mentoring played out.

Still, the plot moved forward and there were some situations that really captured my attention and kept me reading, as well as scenes that were quite entertaining. All told, it was fine, just not stellar.

I have just finished reading the novel THE SECRET GARDEN by FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

.

Ok, last couple weeks... nothin' but Shakespeare:

Pericles - bonkers and little performed... sea voyages, storms, death, burials a sea, resurrection of the dead, riddles, incest, revenge... and on and on

Much Ado About Nothing - I've said previously that I like tragedies better than comedies. Here's the exception to the rule! Laugh out loud funny!

Antony and Cleopatra - Another one I have not read before. Not far in yet. Cleopatra seems like a force, and there's lots of profligate behavior in Egypt!

Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell
3.5/5 stars
In this semi- autobiographical story, Orwell tells of an English writer who has spent time in France and England in poor circumstances having to live in shelters and outside, scavenging for food while working in restaurants and thus highlighting the lives of the homeless and poor. Very interesting!

Still working on James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips. Absolutely fascinating, and I remain astonished at the depth of research Phillips put in and the amount of material she was able to pull together.

I finished the mostly excellent history The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. The subtitle for Larson's latest is "A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz," which is a pretty good description. This is a history of the first year of Churchill's time as Britain's wartime Prime Minister. I was mostly already familiar with the circumstances of the Battle of Britain, but Larson, in focusing in on this one year and in the Churchill family's experience of the event, adds a lot of detail that was new, and interesting, to me.

You can find my longer review, if you're interested, on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

The Larson was book group reading for me, and to be sure I got it finished in time I had to interrupt my reading of a fun baseball history that my wife gave me as a birthday present a few months back: The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell

Finished The Moonlight Child by Karen McQuestion. Mediocre. Also put aside Or What You Will by Jo Walton. Just not my cup of tea right now.

Added Scandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly to my rotation.

The Court Dancer has sashayed out of my life leaving a pall of Korean tragedy behind it and memories of court life at the end of empire, along with edifying details of Korean culture and late 19th C. history.

I'm now listening to Britannia Mews and reading my current (and only) favorite author of thrillers, Kevin Wignall who wrote A Death in Sweden.

Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas
#5 in the "Lady Sherlock Series"

That Churchill Woman – Stephanie Barron
Digital Audiobook narrated by Saskia Maarleveld.
3***

From the book jacket: Wealthy, privileged, and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by storm when she landed on its shores. As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the twentieth century: her son Winston. But Jennie--reared in the luxury of Gilded Age Newport and the Paris of the Second Empire--lived an outrageously modern life all her own, filled with controversy, passion, tragedy, and triumph.

My Reactions
I’m not sure I would have picked this up if it weren’t a selection for my F2F book group.

I find Jennie a fascinating character. Barron does a good job of bringing her to life and giving the reader a “modern” woman who was able to bend the rules of the restrictive society in which she found herself to achieve some measure of personal happiness and fulfillment. And she certainly succeeded in nurturing her son, identifying his gifts, helping him overcome his difficulties, and launching his career!

I knew that Winston Churchill’s mother was an American heiress and that she was known as somewhat of a firebrand. But I didn’t know much else about her story. Stephanie Barron is known to me as the author of a series of cozy mysteries featuring Jane Austen as the amateur sleuth (try them, they’re delightful). So I know that she is able to fill her novels with the kind of accurate period details that I like in historical fiction. She certainly does that here.

This novel has piqued my interest and I think I’ll seek out a biography of Lady Randolph Churchill.

Saskia Maarleveld does a find job of narrating the audiobook. She sets a good pace and has the skill to handle the many characters.

Put down the garbled The Illness Lesson.

Next up for listening is Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson
5/5 stars
I am a big fan of Bryson and this book doesn’t disappoint. Bryson writes about the body and how it functions and includes so many interesting facts, including that mustard gas slowed down the creation of white blood cells which influenced the science and started the study and the beginning of chemotherapy and also that in “a lifetime, the heart does an amount of work sufficient to lift a one-ton object 150 miles into the air.” Definitely for science non-fiction readers!

>1 fredbacon: I'm reading a book titled "Cacti and Succulents" which is akin to watching paint dry, but I'm enjoying it.

>2 Shrike58: Thanks...I think. :-) I finished it last night. It was interesting and aggravating. The authors left a lot of words undefined. Perhaps they assumed the reader was familiar with them from previous courses. I was not. I kept my tablet ready at hand whenever I was reading it, because I would have to look things up. This made the going slow. I would often find myself reading Wikipedia to get background information on various terms. I can't remember a fraction of what was covered. I'll have to expand my reading to texts with a narrower focus to find what I was looking for. They covered the evolution of the dinosaurs and mammals in one chapter of about 25 pages! The history of the evolution of life on earth is a lot to cover in even a 600 page textbook. One of the least helpful statements in the book was that species naming will make a lot more sense if you know ancient Greek.

>27 kmarson: I know the feeling! I recently watched a Great Courses lecture series on botany and it was fascinating.

I find myself in a weird stage of life where I'm aware of how little time I have left to learn all of the things that interest me. It's driving me to stretch myself and read textbooks outside of my field of work. I hate not knowing things. I want to learn as much as I can before I go, but then all of that effort will disappear with me. *sigh*

The worst part is that I find myself struggling to remember simple things on a daily basis. I found myself in a meeting on Wednesday were I couldn't remember the name of the guy in the office next to mine. We've had adjacent offices for twenty years. People kept having to finish my sentences for me because I'd get stuck on a word. It's my worst nightmare. :-(

Don't get me wrong. Wednesday was an aberrant day. Normally, I remain pretty sharp, but that won't go on forever. I watched one of my colleagues deteriorate from Alzheimer's over the past decade and another from Parkinson's. And just a couple of years ago, one of the guys I work with went home to visit his father and had a stroke in his father's kitchen. He had a PhD in physics studying General Relativity, and now he has trouble speaking coherent sentences. He can understand you, but he has trouble formulating a reply. Physically he is fine. He had always been a bit of a health nut. He just stopped making sense in the middle of a conversation with his dad.

I finished Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico. It is a first hand account of travel on the Santa Fe Trail and then down into Mexico in 1846 and 7 and presents many good descriptions of the life and customs of traders, soldiers, Indians, and Mexicans of that time. Since this trip coincided with various battles against the Mexicans, military maneuvers and rumors dominate much of the account.

Currently reading and loving Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South by Rick Bragg.

A History of Loneliness – John Boyne
Book on CD performed by Gerald Boyle
5*****

Father Odran Yates has spent thirty years as a teacher and librarian at a boys’ school. He has no real ambition to rise in the ranks of the Church. Although he excelled academically and even served a year in Rome as the Pope’s night attendant, he has been content “behind the high walls and closed gates of this private and erudite enclave.” But just as the scandal of predatory pedophile priests erupts, the bishop moves Odran to a local parish who priest has been removed. That priest is Odran’s best friend from seminary. Odran must come to terms with the ugly truth of a longterm coverup by the Church, and with his own role.

What marvelous writing! Odran narrates the story, but moves from time period to time period, from 2001 back to 1964, then forward to 2010, and back to 1972, etc. Through his recollections he reveals his history of loneliness … the family tragedy that leads to his entering the seminary, the experiences there (good and bad), his obsession with a woman in a coffee shop, his conflicted feelings about his mother, sister and nephews, and his struggles to understand and embrace his Church and his country.

His final realizations about his life are painful to witness. My heart about broke for Odran, and at the same time I was appalled at his willful ignorance.

Boyne gives us characters who are conflicted and run the gamut of human behavior and emotion. Some are angry and lash out, other are cowed and submissive. Some are understanding and compassionate, other defensive and determined to hide. There are times when I just want to slap Odran, and other when I long to comfort and console him.

This is a book I will be thinking about for a long time.

Gerald Boyle does a marvelous job of narrating the audiobook. He has many characters to deal with and he has the vocal skills to deftly handle this.

>31 BookConcierge:

Boyne is one of my favorite authors. He writes sensitively about gay men and their lives while they function within a herterocentric society. One of my favorite books by him is The Absolutist. Set in post-WW I it's about the moral conflict a young veteran undergoes while underway journeying to visit a war buddy's home. I don't want to say more except the tender humanity of the book moved me emotionally like few novels or novelists can.

Perhaps you will want to read it.

>30 marell: There's a new Rick Bragg? Ooh, ooh. Must check that out!

I just finished reading the novel DRIVE by author JAMES SALLIS.

.

The new thread is up over here.

>33 LyndaInOregon: This book is a collection of stories that were previously published in the magazines Southern Living and Garden & Gun. I have only read two of his other books but I hope to remedy that in the future. Just love his writing.

>32 Limelite: Thank you for that recommendation. I really disliked The Boy in the Striped Pajamas so have avoided Boyne for some time. But this book is making me reconsider his books.

>37 BookConcierge:

I chose not to read "The Boy" because so many children in the Holocaust themed novels have hit the stands in the last 5-7 years. And it seemed like a YA novel, but I may be wrong there. But "Absolutest" definitely is neither, and is beautifully written. The style reminds me of Michael Ondaatje's contemplative internal novels like English Patient and Cat's Table. Both of which I loved reading.

Just finished The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, for my F2F group, and just can't get too excited about it (as usual with this group).

The liaison, who chooses the books, seems determined to present us ***only*** with books set in cultures other than our own and written by authors as unlike the readers in this group as it is possible to be. Now, I don't mind a little adventure now and then, and one reason I belong to a book club is to be pushed out of my comfort zone now and then.

But seriously ... would it be a crime to read something by a contemporary American writer, writing about mainstream culture? Just once in a while?