What are you reading the week of December 16, 2023?

I have about 60 pages left in The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. An excellent book that is both timeless and of its time. She leans a little too heavily on Marxist class conflict. But that's not too bad. For the most part she has a lot of interesting things to say.

She elucidates how the lies of a would be totalitarian to his (or her) followers can lead disaffected people to believe that there are nefarious forces at work in the world that keep them down. These subterranean forces control the state illegally, so removing them and seizing control of the government is justifiable. They deserve their turn at the helm.

My summary does a disservice to the subtlety of Arendt's argument, but I didn't have 500 pages to make my point.

Fred

Still working on With Their Bare Hands. Confederate Reckoning and The Surviving Sky will come after that.

Just beginning to get into Voroshilovgrad by Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. The novel was written just a few years before the current war.

>2 Shrike58: Thank you for pointing out the gibberish at the end of my initial post. I had a long tiring week and was falling asleep as I wrote. I ended up with my left hand placed on the wrong row of keys. :-D Touch typing is great until you put your hands down on the wrong row, then it becomes an Enigma machine.

>3 rocketjk: I'll be interested to know what you think of Voroshilovgrad. As soon as I finish Hannah Arendt, I'm going to be starting Babi Yar, Anatoly Kuznetsov's novel about the German occupation of Ukraine during WWII.

>4 fredbacon: Babi Yar is considered a classic, I think. I haven't read it, though. It was written several decades earlier than Zhadan's work, of course. So far I'm mostly enjoying Voroshilovgrad, although I'm only about 40 pages in. He's got a nimble hand with the metaphors, but so far he's laying them in so fast and furious that it's beginning to bog down his narrative. But still I'm expecting to like the book overall.

I'm doing some light Holiday reading - especially as compared to the previous posts here! :) Anyway, The Christmas Guest is a delightfully dark holiday novella. I breezed through it in an afternoon. Dark, but just what I was looking for.

I'm still reading Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo. I haven't had the ability to concentrate on reading.

In the land of audiobooks I am listening to The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell, which is one of the few of his books I've not read. It's a lovely story of the Durrells' visit to Patagonia, and the people and animals they encounter. I'm really enjoying it, and the narrator (Rupert Degas) is excellent.

Steeped in Malice by Vicki Delany.

Solito – Javier Zamora
5***** and a ❤

This is a memoir of the author’s own harrowing journey from El Salvador to the USA when he was only nine years old. While his parents and grandparents paid a “trusted coyote” (i.e. a smuggler of humans; a guide to take migrants through the desert) to accompany him on the entire journey, he was still basically alone for most of it, in that he had no contact with his family, and no idea whom to actually trust.

He started out with joy and excitement, anticipating a couple of weeks of adventure ending in a reunion with his parents. But the reality was a months-long feat of endurance and courage.

Like a few of his fellow “pollitos” (little chickens … what the coyotes call the migrants), Javier had to put his faith in the hands of a man he had only just met, to do what he was told without complaint of question. He suffered through weeks waiting in a safe house, changes in plans (including an unanticipated sea journey), and several changes in coyotes. He endured heat, cold, hunger, sleep deprivation and thirst. He was lucky in that one woman and her teen-aged daughter “adopted” him on the journey, as did at least one of the men who traveled with them.

The book came about partly with the encouragement of the now-adult Javier’s therapist, who helped him recall some of the repressed memories and work through his guilt and anger and fear.

When I was fifteen, I took a trip to Puerto Rico to visit friends. The plan was for me to fly home two weeks later, but an airline strike scuttled that, and I wound up staying for nearly two months. When I was finally able to get a flight home it was a convoluted journey with several changes of plane (and airline) and some unanticipated delays which resulted in a missed flight (or two). This was before cell phones or internet. My parents waited at the airport for my scheduled flight and were understandably distressed when I failed to arrive. They called their friends in PR thinking perhaps I hadn’t gotten on my plane at all. Now from both PR and Texas panicked parents were frantically calling every authority they could think of to trace my journey and find me. What should have been a 10-hour total journey turned into 16 hours. And for most of it my parents had no idea at all where I was and if I was safe. I was also anxious (though at least I knew I was safe), and unsure, and often in tears. Kind strangers helped me – a young military man retrieved my bags for me; another man let me ahead of him in line for a chance I might make my next flight (I didn’t, and neither did he); a grandmother and her granddaughter bought me dinner and kept me company for two hours while I waited for another flight. While my experience is in no way equivalent to Zamora’s, I could not help but think of it as I read his tale, and the emotions came flooding back.

Zamora uses a lot of Spanish, including colloquial phrases / vocabulary. Although I grew up speaking Spanish, mine was the Spanish of the Texas/Mexico border and I didn’t’ always know the exact meaning of the words Zamora used. (Just as the young Javier didn’t always understand when Mexicans used their colloquialisms rather than the Salvadoran Spanish he was used to.) That didn’t slow me down, as I could glean the meaning from context. Non-Spanish speakers might want to have google translate handy.

I finished the excellent book The Trial of Soren Qvist. this is a book of very beautiful and clear descriptions of scene and character. The plot is rife with question of good and evil and justice,.

American Dirt – Jennine Cummins
Book on CD performed by Yarreli Arizmendi
4****

Lydia Quixano Pérez runs a bookstore in Acapulco. She is married to Sebastian, a journalist, and they have a son, eight-year-old Luca. But when Sebastian publishes a profile of the head of the local drug cartel, their family is in the crosshairs. Lydia has to flee with her son, and there is no one she can truly trust.

This is a gripping story. Lydia is an intelligent woman, but she is not equipped with the street smarts for this journey. Luck and the kindness of a few strangers, plus her basic privilege (as a white, middle-class, educated woman with money in the bank), all serve her well.

There were some things about the book that bothered me. Did Cummins choose a middle-class white woman as the central character because she wanted to open the eyes of her reading public to the fact that not all migrants coming to the USA are “rapists, drug traffickers, welfare cheats”? Did Cummins think her USA audience would be more sympathetic to the story if they could more easily relate to this woman’s horror rather than to a young male peasant?

Speaking of which, there is plenty of horror and trauma to go around. Beto’s story of “being born in the dump” was heart-wrenching. No wonder he’s such a tough, wise-cracking, endearing character! The two sisters, Soledad and Rebecca, were wise beyond their years due to traumas they witnessed and/or suffered. But why emphasize their “incredible beauty” so often? There is no requirement of “beauty” for a woman to be subject to kidnaping, rape and human trafficking. And we should be just as outraged about the incidents, and compassionate towards the victims, even when they are poor, smelly, and unattractive.

As for other books that also depict the harrowing journey that so many migrants make, I’d recommend these: The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea (nonfiction); Solito by Javier Zamora (memoir); The Only Road by Alexandra Diaz; Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario (nonfiction, there are two editions, one for adults one a young-adult version).

The audiobook was performed by Yarreli Arizmendi who did a marvelous job of the narration.

I'm reading The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights by multiple authors. The first story was chess themed and so creepy! Looking forward to the rest of the stories.

Time Was Soft There – Jeremy Mercer
3***

Subtitle: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co
Also published as: Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs: the Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Co.

Several bad decision derailed Mercer’s journalism career in Canada, so he ran to Paris to take a final French course and finish his degree requirements. On a rainy afternoon he took refuge in a shop near Notre Dame and discovered Shakespeare & Co. A casual invitation from a lovely young woman to join the others for “tea upstairs” eventually led to his being offered a bed in the place, something the owner, George Whitman, did for writers and other artists down on their luck. The result is this memoir of the time he spent there.

I found this very entertaining. I loved reading about his adventures scrounging for the cheapest food, picnics with friends along the Seine, the joys of free museums, and the eccentric residents of the shop, not least of which was the owner. It’s a very atmospheric read – you can smell the dusty books, hear the soft buzz of conversation, relish in the aroma of fresh baked croissants.

But, I was less enamored of the casual lawlessness, from drug use to petty theft; I just don’t find that kind of behavior “romantic.” Still, I think it’s an honest, and well-written, depiction of his time there. And I enjoyed vicariously living in Paris for those few days I was reading this. (Mercer still lives in France.)

Listening to this audio via Libby ~

Second Act: A Novel by Danielle Steel

Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen
3/5 stars
This is Bruce's autobiography about his family and his career as a musician. This was published in 2016. Very interesting but it is a long book.

The White Priory Murders: A Mystery for Christmas by Carter Dickson, pseudonym of John Dickson Carr
Originally published in 1934 and reissued as part of the "Crime Classics" collection by the British Library in 2022.

I've been reading Christmas theme mystery books and short stories from the British Library Crime Classics collection, reissues of mystery novels and short stories collections by authors of the Golden Age of Mystery. Martin Edwards is the lead editor for the series.

The Dictionary of Lost Words – Pip Williams
Digital audiobook narrated by Pippa Bennett-Warner
3.5***

”Some words are more important than others – I learned this, growing up in the Scriptorium. But it took me a long time to understand why.”

Esme is a young motherless child when her father takes her to work with him. He’s one of the lexicographers who are collecting information for the first Oxford English Dictionary. Sitting under the sorting table where the men work, Esme is surrounded by words and their meanings. One day she finds a slip of paper with the word bondmaid printed on it. After learning that it means “slave girl,” Esme begins to save the “forgotten” words that fall beneath the table. Eventually she realizes that the discarded slips are frequently words related to women or to common folk, and she begins to collect them in earnest with the goal of writing her own dictionary – a Dictionary of Lost Words.

Esme is a wonderful character, maturing from an innocent child to curious adolescent to determined young woman. And living at a time when the Women’s Suffrage Movement was very active in England, and World War I was looming. She is nurtured by her father, but also by a few women, beginning with Lizzie, a maid whom Esme trusts to keep the slips of paper safely hidden away. Another is Ditte, Esme’s godmother, a “learned lady” and a regular contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary project. (Edith Thompson, a/k/a Ditte, was a real woman who, along with her sister, contributed tens of thousands of entries to the OED.)

I like the way that Williams puts the focus on the “missing women” in history. She’s far from strident, but she is insistent and caused this reader to think about all the missing women is “HIS”tory.

Pippa Bennet-Warner does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. I really liked how she interpreted these characters. She sets a good pace and has very clear diction, so even when I doubled the speed, I could easily understand her.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding – Agatha Christie
3***

This is actually a collection of short stories, which are:
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
The Mystery of the Spanish Chest
The Under Dog
Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds
The Dream
Greenshaw’s Folly

Poirot takes center stage in all but the last story, which features Miss Marple.

I have seen the BBC dramatizations, starring David Suchet as Poirot, of most of these stories, so the plots were vaguely familiar. Still, I didn’t always remember the culprit and was happy to read how Poirot and his little grey cells put together the clues to solve the case. I also enjoyed the subtle differences in plotting from the televised episodes to the original stories as written by Christie.

I’m less a fan of Miss Marple, and in this case she’s really in the background until she comes in and tells everyone how the murder REALLY happened and who the culprit is. Of course she (and Poirot in his cases) is right.

Agatha Christie is one of my go-to authors when I want a break from everyday life and heavier, more literary reads. I just plain enjoy them. I’m also a fan of short stories, and this fit the bill nicely for winter evenings … one story per night.

Candy Cane Murder – Joanne Fluke, Laura Levine and Leslie Meier
2.5*** (rounded up)

Three short novels make up this anthology. Candy Cane Murder (Fluke), The Dangers of Candy Canes (Levine) and Candy Canes of Christmas Past (Meier).

The first is a typical Hannah Swenson cozy. Her sisters and mother help her investigate the murder while her two boyfriends, dentist Norman and policeman Mike either help or warn her to stay out of the investigation. I have to wonder how this woman makes any money when she’s always giving cookies away. The story comes with some tasty recipes, though.

Levine’s entry comes next, and it was the weakest of the trio. Freelance writer Jaine Austen is asked to check into an “accidental” death; seems a suburban neighborhood’s holiday decorating contest has turned deadly. I didn’t like the heroine, I didn’t like the plot.

Candy Canes of Christmas Past revolves around Lucy Stone, her husband and son, who have left the high-stakes world of New York City finance to move to Tinker’s Cove, Maine. But things aren’t going well with the renovations of their farmhouse, and money’s tight. When she spots a sign for a yard sale, Lucy takes a chance and finds a unique artifact – a glass cane. Trying to find out more about it, she heads to the library and uncovers a family mystery. The story was pretty light on the mystery, but was a sweet and charming holiday tale.

I am working my way through books about the Gnostics has it is apropos to do at this time of year. I am still of the opinion that they had it right and their claim that the universe is a facsimile of the Pleroma seems to be borne out by experiments in quantum physics, neuroscience and the philosophy of idealism.

>6 Copperskye: I just finished that as well! A great, fast read. :)

Finding Chika: A Little Girls, An Earthquake, and the Making of A Family
Mitch Albom
5/5 stars
What a wonderful but sad story about Mitch Albom who with his wife befriend an orphan girl named Chika in Haiti at their Have Faith Haiti Orphanage. Unfortunately, she becomes quite ill and Albom and his wife try to get her treated medically and hopefully cured of her condition.

>21 enaid: Absolutely!

Last night I finished and very much enjoyed Voroshilovgrad an hallucinatory novel by Ukrainian novelist and poet Serhij Zhadan. The book was written several years before the Russian invasion of the country. And yet, the book is rife with a feeling of the precariousness of the Ukrainian state in the post-Soviet era. Our protagonist Herman has a steady if somewhat shady job in a large city. But he gets a call from an old friend that his brother has suddenly disappeared, presumably to Amersterdam, urging Herman to come out to his home town and "take care of business" in his brother's absence.

Often, reading this novel is like stepping through thin ice and falling into a dream. But the sense of time and place is solid, and the current of hope and compassion carried me along. Highly recommended. You can find my longer review on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next for me will be a history of a tragic event, The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner about a brutal mass killing during the civil war in El Salvador in the early 1980s.

Aunty Lee’s Delights – Ovidia Yu
2**

From the book jacket: After losing her husband, Rosie Lee could have become one of Singapore’s “tai tai,” an idle rich lady. Instead, she is building a culinary empire from her restaurant, Aunty Lee’s Delights, where spicy Singaporean meals are graciously served to locals and tourists alike. But when a body is found in one of Singapore’s tourist havens and one of her guests fails to show at a dinner party, Aunty Lee knows that the two events are likely connected.

My reactions:
I had hopes for this first in a new cozy mystery series. I’ve visited Singapore and love the cuisine. And I love cozy mysteries with fun amateur sleuths. But this one just fell flat for me.

I thought Yu was trying too hard to craft a complicated mystery and NOT doing enough to endear Aunty Lee and her trusty sidekick/maid, Nina, to the reader. Senior Staff Sergeant Salim seems way too inexperienced and easily cowed by Aunty, but he is a good foil for her efforts to solve the crime on her own.

The other characters were just ridiculous … though I did love how Aunty thought of her stepdaughter-in-law; “Silly-na” perfectly describes Selina!

And there was something off-putting for me about the lesbian characters and theme. Perhaps I don’t have sufficient understanding of the Singaporean culture to appreciate what Yu was doing by introducing these characters and their storyline.

The new thread is up over here.

>24 rocketjk: I've been vacillating over reading Voroshilovgrad for the past year. I'll definitely read it now.

>27 fredbacon: I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.