Janoorani 50 Book Challenge 2024

2023 was an abysmal year for my reading. I started a new job and started too many long, boring books, so I only finished 26 books for the year. I've gotten off to a great start this year though!

Finished:
1. 1/7/24 - Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta, 3 stars, Kindle. I started reading it right after watching the movie. Some relation to the movie, but not much.

2. 1/15/24 - The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith, 4 stars, Kindle. I could not put this down, and consider it the best of her Cormoran Strike novels so far.

3. 1/15/24 - The Library Book by Susan Orlean, 4.5 stars, Personal Library. I started this in 2023. It's a fascinating book about the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire - but also about libraries in general.

4. 1/18/24 - Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella, 3.5 stars, Audible. It would only be three stars if not for the audio book narrators being decent. Overly long, drawn out story about a woman and her sister and the "unfortunate choices" they make in their lives. It's kind of funny, but too long.

5. 1/20/24 - An Assembly Such as This by Pamela Aidan
Type: Novel, 246 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2003 (2006 for this edition)
Series: Fitzwilliam Darcy - Gentleman
Genre: Romance
Format: Trade paperback
Publisher: Touchstone
Reading dates: 10/23/2023 - 1/20/2024
4.5 stars originally, 4.0 stars now

This is the second reading of this book. It's a re-imagining of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of Fitzwilliam Darcy. When I first read it in around 2008, I gave it 4.5 stars, and this time around I'm downgrading it a little, but it's still an excellent and pleasurable look at Pride and Prejudice from Darcy's point of view. There are three in the series and I've already started re-reading the second one.

The reason I began this second reading was because I read Darcy and Fitzwilliam: A Tale of a Gentleman and an Officer last year and thought it was so awful (2.5 stars), I had to re-read a similar fan-fiction I remembered being so good.

In this book, Darcy is introduced to the reader through his visit to Netherfield Hall with his friend Charles Bingley. We see the Hertfordshire countryside and it's inhabitants through Darcy's critical eyes, and he is truly insufferable at times, though always kind to those he likes, including his servants.

Aidan not only imagines what Darcy would have been like, she throws in details about the political and historical details one doesn't get from reading Jane Austen's novels, but she manages to do it without modernizing the book's point of view.

Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth Bennet grow throughout the short novel, but this first of the series never shows him revealing his feelings to anyone. Instead, he keeps his thoughts and musings to himself while he surreptitiously attempts to undermine Bingley's feelings for Jane Bennet.

"Book" 6.
1/24/24 - Jokester by Isaac Asimov
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Short Story, 14 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1956 (unknown for this edition)
Series: Multivac Stories
Genre: Science Fiction
Format: Facsimile - read on Kindle - saved to Kindle from Internet Archive
Publisher: Infinity Science Fiction Magazine
Reading dates: 1/22/24 - 1/24/2024
Rating: 2.5 stars

Interesting concept, but primitive writing. It could even be considered an early version of an artificial intelligence story. The ending seemed dumb, especially given Asimov's disbelief in intelligent alien life.

"Book" 7.
1/31/24 - The Song of Roland translated by Dorothy L. Sayers
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Saga, 55 pages (excerpt in World Masterpieces)
Original Language: Medieval French
Original Publication: Composed sometime between the 9th and early 11th century, possibly by the poet Taillefer
Series: Chansons de geste
Genre: Poetry/Saga
Format: Paper
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973
Reading dates: 1/01/24 - 1/31/2024
Rating: 3.5 stars

The actual events of the poem took place 300 years before its composition, but the poem is written as if it were a contemporary event with knights in armor and enormous Saracen armies. I was intrigued to find this version was translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of the Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane mysteries. I don't have another translation to judge it by, and I wish this version had more footnotes. The version in this anthology is an excerpt and only goes up to the death of Roland. For background, the poem tells the story of Roland, one of Charlemagne's warriors and his epic defeat in the battle fought in Spain at Roncesvalles. The battle would make a good, though bloody, movie. I was astonished by the extreme gore of the battle description.

Seven books in January! Well, two were short stories, but I'm counting them anyway. I didn't finish seven books last year until 29 June. I've read 2,458 pages so far.

Book 8:
2/5/24 - Duty and Desire by Pamela Aidan
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Book, 280 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: Wytherngate Press, 2004
Series: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentle an
Genre: Romance, Fan Fiction
Format: Paper
Publisher: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 2006
Reading dates: 1/20/24 - 2/5/2024
Rating: 4 stars

I finished Duty and Desire by Pamela Aidan a few days ago, and immediately began the last book in the trilogy, These Three Remain. Duty and Desire, while officially a Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice fan fiction, only features Elizabeth Bennet as a day dream in Darcy's mind. He attempts to fulfill his duty by traveling to a country house gathering to find a wife suitable for his station, and overcome his desire for Elizabeth. The novel contains gothic elements and new characters outside the Jane Austen universe. I enjoyed it a lot and give if four stars.

'Book' 9:
2/9/24 - The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Short Story, 9 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: Flowering Judas and Other Stories, 1935
As read publication: Fiction: A Pocket Anthology, Fourth Edition, 2005
Series: N/A
Genre: Short Story
Format: Paper
Publisher: Penguin Academics, Pearson Education, Inc.
Reading dates: 2/9/2024
Rating: 3.5 stars

Uses the 'stream of consciousness' technique to describe the thoughts of an elderly woman on her death bed.

A couple of phrases that I liked, "...a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly," and, "While she was rummaging around she found death in her mind..." Her last thought brings tears to my eyes, "Oh no, there's nothing more cruel than this--I'll never forgive it," as she thinks back on the man who jilted her.

So much sorrow in nine short pages.

Book 10:
2/23/24 - Black Plumes by Margery Allingham
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Paperback, 180 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: Double Day edition, 1940
As read publication: Bantam, 1983
Series: N/A
Genre: Mystery
Format: Paper
Publisher: Bantam Books
Reading dates: 2/14/2024 - 2/23/2024
Rating: 4.5 stars

I've read this book multiple times. I was thinking of Margery Allingham for some reason last week and picked this book off the shelf and started browsing through it, and then couldn't stop. For some reason, this is my favorite Allingham mystery -- maybe because it's the first one I read. I bought it new when I was living in Alaska in the early 80's. Now my copy is quite worn and the binding is falling apart.

The plot isn't why I like this book so much, it's the way Allingham writes about the wind in the book. The wind is almost a character. Here's one example, "The October wind, which had promised rain all day, hesitated in its reckless flight down the moist pavements to hurl a handful of fine drops at the windows of the drawing room...The sound was sharp and spiteful, so that the silence between the two women within became momentarily shocked, as if it had received some gratuitous if trivial insult."

I’ve starred your thread as you are giving me more ideas about more books to read. Thank you…I think!

>10 lamplight: Thank you! I also get so many ideas for books to add to may list by reading other peoples' posts!

'Book' 11:
2/24/24 - Obasute by Yasushi Inoue
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Short Story, 23 pages
Original Language: Japanese
Translator: Leon Picon
Original Publication: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1965
As read publication: Included in the collection The Izu Dancer and Other Stories published by Tuttle, 1974
Series: N/A
Genre: Short Story
Format: Paper
Publisher: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan
Reading dates: 2/23-24/2024
Rating: 2 stars

I read one of the stories, Obasute, by Yasushi Inoue on 24 Feb 24. The writing is spare, stripped of excessive description. I suppose it could be a story about people who want out of their lives, and includes a couple of examples from the narrator's family who have left what would be considered successful lives for new lives that aren't really successful, but where they have more freedom to be themselves. On the surface, it's about a man's obsession with an ancient Japanese legend where people who reach the age of 70 are taken to a mountain, Obasute, and abandoned. Overall, the story evokes a feeling of loneliness and abandonment.

I would have originally read this story in 1974. I was living in Japan, spoke barely any Japanese, and read even less. I devoured anything written in English, but I have no memory of reading this story. I know I did, because there is a hair from my head stuck in one of the pages, from back when it was brown and not white.

'Book' 12:
3/1/24 - Mama, Rimma, and Alla by Isaac Babel
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Short Story, 9 pages
Original Language: Russian
Translator: Peter Constantine
Original Publication: Letopis, 1916
As read publication: Included in the collection The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2002
Series: N/A
Genre: Short Story
Format: Paper
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, New York
Reading dates: 3/1/2024
Rating: 3 stars

A day in the life of a mother and her two daughters in Moscow. It's hard to be precise as to the time of the story, but it was first published in a Russian literary journal in 1916, and three of the characters are students, and no mention of the war is made, so I think it may be set sometime shortly before the start of the World War One. Hardly anything happens in this one short day, but there is still a lot of detail. The maid "had begun putting on airs and walked out." The electric bill came...two of three student borders announce they are leaving and want their rent money returned, the father is a magistrate in faraway Kamchatka and powerless to assist. The two daughters have their own difficulties, the youngest is seventeen and loves someone who doesn't love her, and the oldest wants her freedom from her mother.

Book 13:
3/2/24 - Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Audio, 10 hrs, 3 mins (352 pages equivalent)
Narrator: Harry Myers
Language: English
Original Publication: Gollancz, May 2022
As read publication: Audible, 2022
Series: N/A
Genre: Science Fiction
Format: Digital
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Reading dates: 1/19/2024 - 3/2/2024
Rating: 3.5 stars

The narration was excellent - great voices for all the characters. The story is an interesting concept -- on the surface it's a sequence of scenes on different types of ships, from sailing, through air, through space. All the sequences feature the same characters -- the main character is Dr. Silas Coade, and other primary characters are the security person (a Mexican with various backgrounds such as a member of Santa Ana's army at the Alamo, a fighter in the Mexican revolution, etc), the ships captain, a Russian with ulterior motives for financing the expeditions, a mysterious woman passenger, and a young mathematician. Other crew members feature in all the sequences. All the stories center around an expedition to find and explore an 'edifice' previously discovered during an expedition only the Russian financier knows about. As each sequence ends, a little more is known about the true nature not only of the expedition, but of Dr. Coade himself.

Book 14:
3/8/24 - Intelligence-Driven Incident Response: Outwitting the Adversary by Scott J. Roberts
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Paperback 260 pages
Language: English
Original Publication: N/A
As read publication: O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2017, First edition.
Series: N/A
Genre: Non-fiction, Technical
Format: Print
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Reading dates: 7/6/2023 - 3/8/2024
Rating: 4 stars

This is the first book I've read dedicated solely to cyber threat intelligence. What makes this so valuable to me is that it covers how analysts assist the cyber incident response teams in responding to a cyber incident such as a hack or ransomware attack. The book is organized into sections covering the fundamentals of intelligence, the fundamentals of incident response and how they work together. Then the book covers the analytical process in some detail, to include the writing and dissemination of reports. There are a lot of references to check out, and I filled a small notebook with notes. This will be a constant reference for me going forward.

''Book' 15:
3/8/24 & 3/22/24 - On Being an American from Prejudices, Fourth (sic) Series by H. L. Mencken
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Excerpt, 4 pages (64 pages in read version on the Internet Archive)
Original Language: English
Translator: N/A
Original Publication: Prejudices, Third Series, Alfred A. Knopf, 1922
As read publication: Included in A Patriot's Handbook edited by Caroline Kennedy
Series: N/A
Genre: Essay
Format: Paper
Publisher: Hyperion, New York
Reading dates: 3/8/2024
Rating: 2 stars

This was a satirical look about being an American. I did a little research, the author, H. L. Mencken was a journalist, and this is an excerpt from a longer work he wrote for a series of essays he compiled in 1922, which were published by Alfred A. Knopf. I found the complete text in the Internet Archive, and am going to read that and edit this entry then.

I read this today as part of my goal to read more selections from my collection of short stories and other collections, such as this volume of writings, which was "selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy." First of all, I don't know why she selected this excerpt to put in the book's section on Portraits of Americans. Mencken was born and raised in the U.S., but he was very German in his attitudes, greatly admired Nietzche, and disliked the idea of representative democracy.

Two quibbles: First of all, Kennedy starts the excerpt in the middle of a thought. "...it is my contention that, if this definition be accepted," -- there is no indication of what the definition is that he is talking about. Here is the prelude to the thought (from the Internet Archive's version), "To be happy (reducing things to its elementals) I must be:
a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.
b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.
c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste."
Mencken then goes on later in the excerpt about the stupidity of the vast majority of Americans, "all of which may be boiled down to this: that the United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men -- that distinction is easy here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgment, or ordinary competence is so low." I don't have a problem with reading satire like this, but I don't understand why Kennedy included this excerpt in a book celebrating patriotism -- it's not at all flattering to Americans.

The second quibble is that Kennedy cites this excerpt being from Mencken's Prejudices, Fourth Series, when it is from his Prejudices, Third Series.

Update on 22 March:

I found the entire book on the Internet Archive and read the essay there. It's the first essay in a longer work called Prejudices, Third Series and is 64 pages long. The essay is very hard on the United States, saying it, "to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly—for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously—and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly—for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven."

The essay reminds me of our political climate today and some of the commentary. Amusing how little has changed in 100 years.

Book 16:
3/22/24 - These Three Remain by Pamela Aidan
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Paperback, 437 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: Wytherngate Press, 2005
As read publication: Touchstone, 2007
Series: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman
Genre: Historical Romance
Format: Paper
Publisher: Touchstone (imprint of Simon & Schuster)
Reading dates: 2/05/2024 - 3/22/2024
Rating: 4.5 stars

This is the final volume of the Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman series by Pamela Aidan. It is a re-read, but I read it for the first time around 2008, so it felt fresh. Since it is a Pride and Prejudice fan fiction, the ending is known, but the story is told from Darcy's point of view, and I think it's very well done. One thing that adds to the story is Aidan's use of other characters not in the original Austen novels, and her fleshing out of some of the characters who are; all without detracting from or modifying the original masterpiece. This series is my favorite example of Jane Austen fan fiction -- if you at all enjoy Pride and Prejudice, this is the alternative viewpoint/story I recommend.

Book 17:
3/27/24 - The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family by Ron Chernow
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: eBook, 880 pages
Language: English
Original Publication: Chatto and Windus, 1993
As read publication: Penguin Random House, Apple eBook, 2012
Series: N/A
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography
Format: Digital
Publisher: Apple eBook, 2012
Reading dates: unknown - 3/27/2024
Rating: 3.5 stars
World War One reading challenge book

This is a detailed and well written history of the German Warburg banking family. It follows their evolution from a small German Jewish banking enterprise in the late 1700s into major banking firms by the 1990s -- affecting US, British and German politics and financial policy.

I have no idea when I began this, but it was several years ago. I finally began making a concerted effort to finish it in February when I was only about 30% done with it. It was good enough that I didn't want to abandon it, but reading very long books on an e-reader is a slog -- Apple books more so than Kindle for some reason.

I also have no idea why I bought the book to begin with. I like biographies, but this isn't the type I usually choose. It is heavy on banking history in general, and extremely detailed about each member of the family. My favorite parts were the sections covering World War One and it's aftermath. For that reason, even though I began it before my personal challenge to read all of the books I have about World War One, I added it to my World War One reading history.

The 3.5 stars are only because the book isn't really my style, but Chernow did a fantastic job with this family biography.

'Book' 18:
3/29/24 - The Red-Headed League by Arthur Conan Doyle
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts, Abridged
Type: Abridged, 24 pages, pp. 224-248 (15 pages in original Strand Magazine story)
Original Language: English
Translator: N/A
Original Publication: The Strand Magazine, No. 8. August 1891.
As read publication: Included in Challenges, Book 8. 1967.
Series: N/A
Genre: Short Story
Format: Paper
Publisher: Scott, Foresman and Company, Glenview, IL
Reading date: 3/29/2024
Rating: 3 stars (2.5 stars for the abridgement, 3 stars for the original in The Strand Magazine (as found on the Internet Archive - mostly because of the illustrations by Sidney Paget)

I have only read a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories many years ago (in my copy of the Folio Society Crime Stories from the Strand, and don't really care for them, but this came up through my convoluted and impossible to explain system of choosing a short work to read on Fridays. My pleasure in Sherlock Holmes comes from the character's portrayal by different actors (especially Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey, Jr.). The particular book I chose to read from today is in an old textbook I've had since I was in the 6th grade at Capistrano Intermediate School in San Juan Capistrano, CA in 1969. The school only existed for a couple of years. It was opened in 1969 in an old administration building for the Capistrano Unified School District to accommodate the overabundance of sixth graders the district had as a result of the end of the Baby Boom years (children born in 1958-59). The abridged version was dumbed down for 6th grade readers, and is a little boring. It is contained in the section of the book called 'Imagination.'

The story tells the tale of a red-headed man who comes to Holmes for help finding the reason he was employed for a couple of months as a member of the League of Red-Headed men. The man (Jabez Wilson) had been hired after he answered a newspaper ad a few months before for a red-headed man to fill a vacancy in the Red-Headed League - his job was to copy out the Encyclopedia Britannica for 4 pounds a week for four hours a day. He'd been happily employed doing this when he showed up for work one morning to find that the League had been dissolved without notice. When Wilson tried to find out what had happened, he discovered that the forwarding address for the League did not exist. So, naturally he went to Sherlock Holmes (sarcasm). Anyway, through his powers of deduction, Holmes figures out in less than a day that this employment of Mr Wilson was set up as a cover up to get Wilson out of the way (he owns a pawn shop in London) so his shop can be used to conduct a crime.

'Book' 19
4/1/24 - Space and Dimensionality by Thomas K. Simpson
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts, Essays
Type: Essay, 48 pages
Original Language: English
Translator: N/A
Original Publication: The Great Ideas Today 1993, Part One: Current Developments in the Arts and Sciences, pp. 2-49
As read publication: N/A
Series: The Great Ideas Today
Genre: Philosophy
Format: Paper
Publisher: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago
Reading dates: 1/1/24 - 4/1/24
Rating: 5 stars

This is a philosophical essay about space and its dimensions in both philosophical and mathematical terms. While only covering 49 pages, the essay is dense with ideas and took me a long time to absorb, and I'm still far from being able to completely understand it. According to Simpson, nothing in principle prevents consistent intuitions of non-Euclidean geometry, including thoughts that there are more than three dimensions. There is nothing in the nature of our minds that requires there to be only three dimensions, or makes us incapable of perceiving that it isn't so. Why can't our sense of reality be enlarged to conceive of four dimensions, or even more than that? He uses Euclid's theories, a detailed discussion of Edward Abbot's Flatland, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Platos's Parmenides, Maxwell's color theories and experiments, and a brief discussion of DNA to make the point that the Many and the One are connected, the same, and yet separate. "He writes, "...I believe in the ultimate coherence of all things, a single source of all possibilities. One might say that this is to take the term "space" primarily in its sense as "cosmos," even if that cosmos seems at times to be nothing more than the arbitrary construction of the purest of formal mathematicians."

'Book' 20
4/6/24 - The Tea-Leaf by Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts, Essays
Type: Short Story, 13 pages
Original Language: English
Translator: N/A
Original Publication: The Strand Magazine, October 1925, pp.409-418
As read publication: Crime Stories from the 'Strand'
Series: N/A
Genre: Mystery
Format: Paper
Publisher: The Folio Society, 1991
Reading dates: 1/1/24 - 4/1/24
Rating: 3.5 stars

This is a short story contained within an anthology of crime stories published in The Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1942. It's a classic 'locked-room' mystery where the story revolves around the fact that a man has apparently been murdered in a Turkish Bath and the supposed murder weapon is never found, but the suspected murderer could only be the man who was in the 'hot room' with the victim just previous to his death. It's simplistic by today's standards, but I'm sure it was of great interest to readers in 1925. The story itself is mentioned in several other anthologies and crime story histories.

Below are two short paragraphs from Wikipedia about the two authors:

Edgar Alfred Jepson (28 November 1863 – 12 April 1938) was an English author. He largely wrote mainstream adventure and detective fiction, but also supernatural and fantasy stories. He sometimes used the pseudonym R. Edison Page.

Robert Eustace was the pen name of Eustace Robert Barton (1869–1943), an English doctor and author of mystery and crime fiction with a theme of scientific innovation. He also wrote as Eustace Robert Rawlings. Eustace often collaborated with other writers, producing a number of works with the author L. T. Meade and others. He is credited as co-author with Dorothy L. Sayers of the novel The Documents in the Case, for which he supplied the main plot idea and supporting medical and scientific details.

Book 21:
4/15/24 - Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: Audio, 14 hrs, 29 mins (352 pages equivalent)
Narrators: Emily Rankin & Catherine Taber
Language: English
Original Publication: Ballantine, June 2017
As read publication: Audible, 2017
Series: N/A
Genre: Historical Fiction
Format: Digital
Publisher: Random House Audio
Reading dates: 3/15/24 - 4/15/2024
Rating: 4 stars

This was a heartbreaking book, even though some things are resolved in the end.

The story is read by two narrators who each voice a character telling the tale of the real-life Tennessee Children's Home Society, an adoption agency in Memphis, which notoriously used kidnapping and lies to steal poor children from their parents and essentially sell them to wealthy parents from the 1920's to 1950.

The earlier timeline relates the story of fictional twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings who live aboard their family’s Mississippi River shanty boat. In 1939, their father must rush their mother to the hospital, and Rill is left in charge. The next morning, Memphis police (the director of the orphanage paid police to round up children for her) arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are told they will soon be returned to their parents, but it doesn't take long for the two older children, Rill and ten-year-old Camellia, to realize the awful truth -- there is no getting out of what is essentially a prison. The children are slowly broken apart and given up for adoption to wealthy families in other parts of the country.

The later story tells the tale of Avery Stafford, a successful prosecutor who has recently returned to Aiken, SC to help out her ill father and his Senate campaign. While visiting a nursing home with her father, she stumbles upon a mystery involving a woman who claims to know her grandmother. Avery's story isn't as interesting and her part of the narration drags in places. But it serves to bring the story of the Foss children up to the present day, while also telling the dark history of the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

The narrator who voiced Rill was fantastic -- I felt the story was greatly improved by her narration. Avery's narrator wasn't as good, but she told Avery's story well. I sometimes wished I could have read those parts, since I read faster to myself than she could narrate, and I wanted to get back to Rill's story as fast as I could.

All in all, a good book and I give it 4 stars in LibraryThing, though I gave it 5 stars on Audible.

Book 22:
4/20/24 - The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts
Type: eBook, 315 pages
Language: English
Original Publication: Minotaur Books, Reprint 2010
As read publication: N/A
Series: Mike Bowditch Series
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Format: Digital
Publisher: Kindle, 2010
Reading dates: 04/10/2024 - 04/20/2024
Rating: 3 stars

I've had this book on my Kindle Unlimited list for a couple of years, and needed to read it so I could add something else. I'm sure the only reason I selected this book to begin with is because of fond memories of my sixth grade teacher reading us the book, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham back in 1970. I absolutely loved that story, but it bears no resemblance at all to this book's Mr. (or should I say Warden) Bowditch. This Bowditch is Mike Bowditch, a new Game Warden in Maine who makes a bunch of mistakes trying to clear his father of suspicion of murdering a developer and his police bodyguard. The problem is that Mike's father has fled the scene (after beating up another law officer), and no one else believes in his innocence. Mike does his best to tank his career, dump his girlfriend and alienate everyone around him except for an old retired game warden, who seems to believe in Mike, even if he doesn't believe Mike's father is innocent. This is the first of a 15 book series, and I did actually buy the second book, but I doubt I'll read all 15. Life is short, and I'm not that interested so far.

'Book' 23
4/26/24 - The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy
Category: Books, Magazines, Short Stories, Excerpts, Essays
Type: Short Story, 21 pages
Original Language: English
Translator: N/A
Original Publication: March, 1883 in Longman's Magazine, Collected in Wessex Tales: Strange, Lively, and Commonplace, published in 1888 by Macmillan
As read publication: Within short story collection The Withered Arm and Other Stories by Thomas Hardy, pp.140-161
Series: N/A
Genre: Mystery
Format: Paper
Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999
Reading dates: 4/19/24 - 4/26/24
Rating: 3.5 stars

This strange tale of three strangers who arrive at the cottage of a shepherd during a celebration of the shepherd's first child's christening was written by Thomas Hardy in 1883, after he had already gained fame for novels such as Far From the Madding Crowd. The strangers arrive separately during a storm, interrupt the ongoing party and disturb those in attendance in various ways, especially the second stranger who dismays the guests when they deduce his grim occupation through a song he sings about what he does. Unknown to the party guests and to each other, the strangers are all related by a circumstance that had occurred at an earlier date, and tied to Hardy's predilection for writing about rural England and its poverty and decline. I've classified it as a mystery, because of the mystery of the first stranger's identity, but it is more of a strange interlude in the lives of the people at the party -- "the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever" long after the adults at the party are in their graves.