Benita's Big Bad Book Pile 2024

Once again I will attempt to rid my shelves of books that have been sitting around for a very long time. I had a good year of ROOTing in 2023 with 96 ROOT's removed from my shelves. My goal for 2023 was 72 and I exceeded that. I retired in 2023 with the expectation that I would have much more time to read. That expectation never came to fruition and it was hard to reach my goal of 72. For that reason I am going to set my goal for 2024 at 72 in hopes that I will be able to reach it this year. I hope to exceed that number, but it will depend on what events can impose themselves on my time.

The books I will be reading will be anything purchased or added to my list before December 31, 2023. The eligible books can also be recorded books. I will add titles to this posting when I finish them and a short review below as I get time to write it. I will be leading the mystery read along challenge again this year. It is titled "Investigators: Ancient and Modern." Late last year I took on the moderator role for the 75'er Nonfiction Challenge and I will continue to moderate that for this coming year. I will also be doing the "Reading Through Time" group in 2024. I enjoy reading historical fiction and hope to clear some of those titles from my shelves using the prompts from this group throughout the year. I am trying to complete reading some of the series that I have started but not finished and will continue that project for this year. Several years ago I started a personal project of reading books from my list that have a title beginning with the word "last" and I will continue that project. It seems that whenever I read a title that starts with "last" I find that I have added more. Such is the life of a reader - more is always added to the list.

I will try to review each title as I get them read and those posts will follow this one.

I will use this first spot to index my ROOTS for the year.

1. Last Act in Palmyra by Lindsey Davis - Marcus Didius Falco series - Book 6 - January 2, 2024
2. A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life by Andrew Krivak - January 3, 2024
3. Doc by Mary Doria Russell - Doc Holliday series - book 1 - January 14, 2024
4. Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell - January 18, 2024
5. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - sound recording - January 21, 2024
6. Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones - January 28, 2024
7. Unwarrented: Policing Without Permission by Barry Friedman - January 29, 2024
8. Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford - sound recording - February 4, 2024
9. Discord of Gods by Jenn Lyons - Chorus of Dragons series - Book 5 - February 6, 2024
10. Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood - February 7, 2024
11. Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott - sound recording - February 11, 2024
12. A Chateau Under Siege by Martin Walker - February 12, 2024
13. Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli - February 18, 2024
14. Loki's Ring by Stina Leicht - February 20, 2024
15. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T Kingfisher - February 22, 2024
16. Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman - sound recording - February 22, 2024
17. Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace by Lynn Povich - February 26, 2024
18. Last House Before the Mountain by Monika Helfer - Bagage series - book 1 - March 1, 2024
19. Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson - sound recording - March 4, 2024
20. Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee - Laurie Lee's Autobiographies series - book 3 - March 9, 2024
21. Harney & Sons Guide to Tea by Michael Harney - March 12, 2024
22. Longmire Defense by Craig Johnson - Longmire series - Book 19 - sound recording - March 13, 2024
23. Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty - sound recording - March 16, 2024
24. Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen - March 18, 2024
25. Gone Again by James Grippando - Jack Swyteck series - Book 13 - sound recording - March 19, 2024
26. Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce - sound recording - March 22, 2024
27. Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - Wayfarers series - book 1 - sound recording - March 25, 2024
28. Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Jerry Ellis - March 28, 2024
29. Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos - April 5, 2024
30. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi - Legacy of Orisha series - Book 1 - sound recording - April 8, 2024
31. Fire Dance by Helene Tursten - Irene Huss series - book 6 - April 11, 2024
32. Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman - Did not finish - April 19, 2024
33. Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams - April 20, 2024
34. Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian - sound recording - April 22, 2024
35. Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat by Chris Stewart - Driving Over Lemons series - April 27, 2024
36. Jell-O Girls: A Family History by Allie Rowbottom - sound recording - April 28, 2024
37. She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper - sound recording - May 4, 2024
38. Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire - Wayward Children series - May 5, 2024
39. Almond Blossom Appreciation Society by Chris Stewart - Driving Over Lemons series - May 10, 2024
40. The Fury by Alex Michaelides - sound recording - May 11, 2024
41. Rose For Winter by Laurie Lee - May 15, 2024
42. World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability by Amy Chua - May 19, 2024
43. Little Thieves by Margaret Owen - Little Thieves series - book 1 - sound recording - May 20, 2024
44. Kill Artist by Daniel Silva - Gabriel Allon series - book 1 - sound recording - May 21, 2024
45. A Moment of War by Laurie Lee - Laurie Lee Autobiographies series - book 3 - May 27, 2024
46. Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki - May 31, 2024
47. Beige Man by Helene Tursten - Irene Huss series - book 7 - June 1, 2024
48. Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce - Harold Fry series - book 2 - sound recording - June 2, 2024
49. Music Shop by Rachel Joyce - sound recording - June 4, 2024
50. Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House by Norman Eisen - June 11, 2024
51. Philida by Andre Brink - June 13, 2024
52. D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose - June 14, 2023
53. Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto - graphic novel - June 15, 2024
54. City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley - Miranda Corbie mystery - book 2 - sound recording - June 16, 2024
55. Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel - June 19, 2024
56. Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen - June 25, 2024
57. Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson - June 28, 2024
58. Known World by Edward P. Jones - sound recording - June 29, 2024
59. Time to Depart by Lindsey Davis - book 7 - Marcus Didius Falco series - July 8, 2024
60. Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi - book 2 - Legacy of Orisha series - sound recording - July 9, 2024
61. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers - book 2 - Wayfarers series - sound recording - July 10, 2024
62. Mystery Guest by Nita Prose - book 2 - Molly the Maidseries - July 13, 2024
63. Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - July 14, 2024
64. A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum - sound recording - July 17, 2024
65. Real Life of the Parthenon by Patricia Vigderman - July 29, 2024
66. Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 by Madeleine K. Albright - sound recording - July 31, 2024
67. Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson - August 5, 2024
68. Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman - August 12, 2024
69. Column of Fire by Ken Follett - book 3 - Kingsbridge series - sound recording - August 15, 2024
70. Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason - August 19, 2024
71. Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard - August 20, 2024
72. Measure: A Novel by Nikki Erlick - sound recording - August 21, 2024
73. For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds: Essays by Jennifer Moxley - August 22, 2024
74. The Christie Affair by Nina De Gramont - sound recording - August 25, 2024
75. Wandering Through Life: A Memoir by Donna Leon - August 26, 2024
76. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers - book 3 - Wayfarers series - sound recording - August 29, 2024
77. American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis - sound recording - September 5, 2024
78. Soul of the Sky: Exploring the Human Side of Weather edited by C. Ralph Adler and Dave Thurlow - September 6, 2024
79. The Martian by Andy Weir - sound recording - September 7, 2024
80. Treacherous Net by Helene Tursten - book 8 - Irene Huss series - September 10, 2024
81. Mr. & Mrs. American Pie by Juliet McDaniel - September 15, 2024
82. Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi - sound recording - September 23, 2024
83. Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture by Daniel Mendelsohn - September 25, 2024
84. Meet Me At the Bamboo Table: Everyday Meals Everywhere by A. V. Crofts - September 27, 2024
85. Who Watcheth by Helene Tursten - book 9 - Irene Huss series - September 29, 2024
86. Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz - book 5 - Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery - sound recording - September 30, 2024
87. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet - October 4 2024
88. Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever by Geoff Edgers - October 11, 2024
89. Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See - sound recording - October 12, 2024
90. Tradition: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World's Most Beloved Musical by Barbara Isenberg
91. Starless Crown by James Rollins - sound recording - book 1 - Moon Fall - October 31, 2024
92. On Girlhood: 15 Stories From the Well-Read Black Girl Library edited by Glory Edim - November 1, 2024
93. English Creek by Ivan Doig - book 1 - McCaskill Family - November 6, 2024
94. Mango and Peppercorns: A Memoir of Food, an Unlikely Family, and the American Dream by Tung Nguyen - November 9, 2024
95. Armor of Light by Ken Follett - sound recording - book 5 - Kingsbridge - November 12, 2024
96. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid - sound recording - November 13, 2024
97. Yellow Rambutan Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu - book 6 - Crown Colony and Su Lin Mysteries series - November 14, 2024
98. Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett - sound recording - book 4 - Kingsbridge - November 21, 2024
99. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer - November 24, 2024
100. Matrix by Lauren Groff - sound recording - December 4, 2024
101. Open Season by C. J. Box - sound recording - book 1 - Joe Pickett series - December 5, 2024
102. Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things by Hannah Holmes - December 6, 2024
103. A Refiner's Fire by Donna Leon - book 33 - Guido Brunetti - December 8, 2024
104. Transcription by Kate Atkinson - sound recording - December 10, 2024
105. Conviction by Denise Mina - sound recording - book 1 - Anna and Fin - December 12, 2024
106. Winterkill by C. J. Box -sound recording - book 3 - Joe Pickett - December 18, 2024
107. Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford - sound recording - December 25, 2024

Last Act in Palmyra by Lindsey Davis
My first book in 2024 was book 6 in the Marcus Didius Falco series. I find this series enlightening and fun to read and this one was no exception for this series. It was a great way to start my reading year. In this entry Falco gets his chance to show his prowess as an author. He and Helena join a traveling acting troupe in order to find a murderer and travel to the far eastern reaches of the Roman Empire. They travel to Petra in Nabataea, the cities of the Decapolis, and Syria. It never ceases to amaze me how much Roman citizens traveled. This novel started out seriously and ended as a farce. And whoever knew that an ancient Roman authored "The Spook That Spoke".

A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life by Andrew Krivak
I read this memoir for the 2023 November Nonfiction Challenge. The category was "Matters of Faith and Philosophy." I have had it on my TBR list since I somehow found a review of it. I was also curious because the author was had a work of fiction on the shortlist for the National Book Award. This book was hard to read. It took concentration and time to analyze the text and the story.

The author spent 6 years in preparation to be a Jesuit priest and decided to leave and become a college professor and author. This memoir tells of Krivak's journey from young man without purpose to a man who made a decision about his future. Krivak was searching for a group of people who were also looking for God's purpose and who were searching for God through prayer. Prayer and meditation were Krivak's way to find God. The biggest surprise was the philosophical discussions about Augustine's Confessions and Loyola's Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Some of these got really technical. However, I enjoyed the book and found it well worth the time it took to read it, even if it was hard reading.

Hi Benita, Glad you are back with the ROOTers. And two ROOTs down already! Love to see your progress.

Two ROOTs already, that's great progress. Happy reading to you!

>2 benitastrnad: I may have to look into this one - fascinated by a book set in ancient Petra!

Welcome back for another year! You're absolutely right - Such is the life of a reader - more is always added to the list. Not that I'd have it any other way :)

Welcome back and have a great reading year!

Welcome back!

Doc by Mary Doria Russell
I read this book for my real life Book Discussion group. It was our December 2023 selection as a work of historical fiction. It was a good book, but it was so much work to read. When I would pick it up and read it I enjoyed it. I liked everything about the book, the writing style was elegant, but it was not the kind of book that grabbed you and compelled you to open the book and keep reading. It was easy to put down and not go back to. Why that was so is hard to pinpoint.

At its heart this was a murder mystery and it just never took off as such. In fact the murder mystery was meant to tie everything together but it ended up being a distraction. I just didn't care who murdered John Horse Sanders, or what part in the solving of said murder, that John Henry Holliday and Wyatt Earp played. I do plan on reading the follow-up book, but won't do it tomorrow.

Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell
This little book is all about the reasons for writing and reading Children's Literature. It was written by a UK author and it give reasons for keeping children's books open and available to children, in their homes, schools, and public libraries. It is also about why adults should read or reread children's books periodically.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
This science fiction novel was full of scientific surprises and speculation. The premise for the novel is that the Earth is bombed back to its primeval starting point by the destruction of the Moon and the resulting bombardment of the resulting lunar debris. The book is full of full descriptions of the realm of possibilities available with the current ideas and manufacturing abilities that humans have that would enable the human race to survive in space long enough to repopulate the Earth. There was a great deal of science and math in this book that can be hard to understand. Those parts I just listened to and went on. However, there were plenty of things that I had heard about in a rudimentary way that Stephenson extended outward that were fascinating possibilities for mankind. The book was full of extended speculation about biology, environmental issues, space exploration, living in space, space mechanics, etc. etc. It was those parts of the book that I really appreciated. It would be fascinating to see how much of what the author speculates on will happen in the coming hundreds of years. I would call this novel very good speculative science fiction.

I listened to this novel and the narrators were great. It is 32 hours long so I reserved it for a road trip to Kansas and it served its purpose for that long of a trip. This was my first Stephenson novel and it won't be my last.

Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of An American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones
This biography was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in 2020. The Carnegie Medal for Excellence in nonfiction is given each year by the American Library Association for the best contribution to American literature. There are two categories for which the award is given - fiction and nonfiction. It was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Biography of the year in 2019. I am read this one because one of my real life book discussion groups does a biography month in January and this was the book I picked to read for that discussion. One title served double duty in this case. I generally try to read a biography of a literary person and this year I picked Dr. Seuss as my literary selection.

This was a fairly straight forward biography of Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. It was organized chronologically so there is a great deal of information about Geisel's family background and his early years. I was surprised at the length of his service in the U. S. Army with the Army Signal Corps. He went into the army in 1942 and was discharged in 1946. He credits his service under Frank Capra with teaching him how to be a writer and this surprised me. Geisel said that Capra taught him the importance of story - anything that doesn't support the plot should be eliminated. The big question was always "Does this sentence support the story?" and Geisel tried to stick to that rule for the rest of his life.

This was a very readable biography. It didn't patronize Geisel, justify, or sanctify him. There was lots of information about his writing process and his reasons for putting what he did on the page. It was also full of information about his personal life and relationships. Geisel's life was an interesting story and he was an interesting person so the author had plenty to write about.

As a former teacher and school librarian I was surprised to learn about Geisel's educational philosophy. The "Cat in the Hat" (his first mega best seller) was written as a response to a challenge to produce a reading book text for use in the classroom. The vocabulary words to be used was limited to 50 words from a list of words that 1-3 grades should know and be able to recognize. Seuss wrote and illustrated "Cat in the Hat" in response. The challenge was issued by the president of the textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin and after the book was produced and selling Houghton Mifflin did not get to publish it in their reading primer. It was a gold mine for Random House and Dr. Seuss and Houghton Mifflin got nothing out of it.

I have to admit that I didn't know much at Dr. Seuss as a person or an author. I only knew him by the two or three books of his that I read. I wanted to read about him because the brouhaha about his foundation withdrawing from print some of his books because they were racist directly affected me in my professional life. Somehow, Dr. Seuss became associated with the Read Across America Day and the announcement about the withdrawal from publication of those 6 titles was made close to the Read Across America Day. In my library that meant that every one of our multiple copies of the Dr. Seuss books was checked out. Three days after the announcement the Dean of the Libraries called and asked me to remove all of our copies of those titles because they were selling for $500.00 apiece on EBay and the library would not be able to afford replacing them if they were stolen. I had to explain that our copies were all checked out. I also tried to explain that library copies of these books would not sell for $500.00 because they were damaged due to normal library wear and tear. In the end that didn't matter. When the books were returned they were all sent to our Archival Facility were they will never be used again by teachers. For that reason I decided that I wanted to learn more about Dr. Seuss.

Unwarrented: Policing Without Permission by Barry Friedman
I finished another book for the January Nonfiction category of prize winners. This one was the 2018 winner of the American Bar Associations Silver Gavel Award for the book that helps improve comprehension of jurisprudence in the United States. And this book does just that.

The book is about the intrusion of policing into our privacy and consequently into the daily lives of all of us. The author points out throughout the book that unwarranted policing affects minorities in greater proportions than it does white America, but the book points out that all of us are at risk in the policies that our government endorses because they "might" need the information. The book is full of examples, and the resulting court cases, brought by excessive policing and the author advocates for greater democratic input from the citizenry. The author believes that the citizens have failed and abdicated their democratic responsibility for setting the policing boundaries. The police are doing what they do because nobody is stopping them. The author states that it is the duty of the citizens to provide clear boundaries for police and other law enforcement bodies so that they don't overstep the bounds of the law as they are doing currently. He also gives judges a drubbing in saying that judges should not be the only arbiters of the interpretation of laws. Citizens need to pressure lawmakers to make laws that the citizens agree upon and in the current political state of affairs that is hard to do.

This book was published in 2018 and there is an epilogue/appendix in which the author briefly outlines the incidents in Minneapolis, MN and Baton Rouge, LA in which black men were unlawfully searched and then murdered during an arrest that should not have happened. This brief chapter contains a prescient warning that the people are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior from the police for very long, but again he hits on his point that the people must set the rules for the police and they are not doing so. He was hopeful that the latest crisis would provide the impetus for citizens to step up and force lawmakers to pass bills and enforce regulations that are already in place to stop this kind of behavior.

This is a big book - 400 pages of text and it took me two years to read it. I started it for the Nonfiction Challenge of January 2022. It is a meaty book that demands concentration when being read. However, I believe that it is the kind of book that more citizens of the U.S. should read in order to understand why our policing is the way it is, how our policing functions currently, and reinforces the idea that "we" need to step up and tell our law enforcement agencies what we will and will not accept from them.

Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford
This work of historical fiction is set in the Seattle Chinatown in the years 1921 - 1934. It is the story of one single Chinese woman trying to establish a career as an actress and getting caught in the expected role she is to play in the Chinese community. She has a child and is a single mother and is shunned by her compatriots but establishes herself as an actress in spite of the hardships. Like all Jamie Ford books this is a very good book to listen to. There is much information in here about the life of Chinese immigrants in the Pacific Northwest. There is also references to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Jim Crow laws regarding Chinese. However, these elements are not the focus of the book and that is the downfall of the novel. Nevertheless, this is a good narration and a good listening book.

Discord of Gods by Jenn Lyons
This is book 5 in the Chorus of Dragons epic fantasy series by this author. Like the authors this is classic epic fantasy and great exciting action filled novel. The world the author created is fully fleshed out and the characters familiar to the reader of this series. This is the last in the series and was a great good bang up ending. This is the way to wrap up a series. Other authors of epic fantasy should take note and write endings like this one.

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood
I read this one for my real life Book Discussion group. We have been reading one retelling of ancient Greek myths for several years and this is the 2024 selection for that theme. This novel is a retelling of the Odyssey from the point-of-view of the faithful dedicated wife, Penelope and her maids. This is a decidedly feminist retelling of the famous story. That should be no surprise for a reader when they consider Atwood's oeuvre. In this retelling Penelope is faithful but resentful. She is trying to preserve the kingdom for her son to inherit and finds that the suitors and her own servants and relatives are doing everything they can to thwart her. It is an interesting point-of-view and makes a reader stop and think about all the interpretations they have read or heard in the past. There is more to this myth than what most of us know from skimming the surface.

>17 benitastrnad: I read that one a couple of years ago, and I thought it was really interesting and thought-provoking. I enjoyed the fleshing out of Penelope's experience, but also the tale of the maids, who were pushed into the blurry lines between collaboration and resistance, that occupation always create, and punished harshly for it.

Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott
I finally finished listening to Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott. It was one of the most boring recorded novels that I have listened to in a very long time. I think it is because the narrator had this soft sleepy voice that sounded boring. The plot was a solid mish mash of pieces that didn't seem to fit together. I finished the book and still don't understand why Napoleon was in it. There were just too many plot lines that the author couldn't get to come together. The only reason why I finished it was that I am running short of recorded books to listen to in the car, so I have been trapped with this book for the last two weeks.

>19 benitastrnad: That's really annoying, Benita. I hope your next book will be better.

A Chateau Under Siege by Martin Walker
This is book 16 in the Bruno Courreges series. It was another fun romp through the Dordogne River valley, but there wasn't much other of interest in the novel. However, a few days after I read this novel an announcement was made by the French government that they had broken up a major Russian disinformation ring. Normally, they wouldn't publicize this but the disinformation was so egregious that the French government wanted the public to know what the Russians were doing. They were aiming to destabilize the French government by creating the impression of incompetence and mistrust in critical institutions. They also said that this was not the first time that the French had traced disinformation campaigns back to Russia. This is exactly what the last couple of Bruno novels have been about. Sometimes mysteries can be very prescient.

Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli
This was an engrossing read and goes on my best of 2024 list - at least on a temporary basis. Basically it is a biography of the four women "stars" of National Public Radio combined with an abbreviated history of NPR. The four women in the title were some of the first people hired by the fledgling NPR when it was founded in 1971. Each of these talented women were unable to find full-time employment with the more traditional media outlets and took low-paying jobs at NPR because it was full time. Two of the women were married with children and so there was discussion of the work-life balance in this book as well as a close look at what the jobs were, how they were done, and of the obstacles that each woman had to overcome in regards to the job discrimination that was deemed acceptable at the time. These four women almost singlehandedly turned an unknown news outlet into one of the most respected sources of news in the U.S. They did it with unparalleled reporting and tenacious (some said pugnacious) pursuit of the truth of a story. The book was quite frank about the discrimination these women endured, but it was also open about the money problems at NPR and congressional questioning of the purpose for NPR and the other public broadcasting outlets funded by the congressional act of 1968 that created the US public broadcasting system. It also shed light on the convoluted financial structure of the various public broadcasting entities involved in our public broadcasting system.

This book was very well written with extensive end notes, indexing, and bibliography. I can recommend this book with out hesitation to any reader who is interested in women's roles in the society of today, and those who are interested in the media in the US and how it has become what it is at this point in time.

Loki's Ring by Stina Leicht
This science fiction novel is the sequel to Persephone Station by the same author. I liked the first novel well enough that when this one came out I wanted to read it, so checked it out from the public library. However, this novel was not of the same quality as the first one. Leicht's strength is her writing of battle scenes in space, but this novel didn't manage that same level of intensity. This novel was flat.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
I finally got around to reading this fun Middle Grade fantasy. This was a romp through a siege, sorcery, and sourdough. (That is what is on the cover.) With a lead like that on the front cover how could you not read it? This is a great good romp. (oops - I said that already - but it is true.) This is a highly original take on the fantasy genre. It uses something that wouldn't be seen as something of power - baking bread - and makes it something important using creativity and intelligence. It is perfect for Middle Grades. It would make a great read-aloud in grades 5 - 7. It was published in 2020 when baking bread, and creating wild sourdough cultures, was THE thing to do, so this book had lots of relevance. It makes me wonder if the author was doing lots of baking at that time - but the afterward claims that is NOT the case. I will have to read more books by this author.

Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
I listened to this book while I was doing other things around the kitchen so I probably didn't do it justice. It was a quirky book with great humor. How those Swedish authors can pack that much humor into life situations is beyond me, but Backman manages to make a reader feel good about life. In this novel he tackles the older woman living an unfulfilled life. She has everything, rich husband, nice car, nice house, and is known for her orderly lifestyle - until she leaves all of that to get a job. This was a great book to listen to. The narrator was almost perfect and managed to convey all of the emotions revealed in the book to a t. The novel might have been a bit predictable, but it was still a satisfying novel to listen to.

>24 benitastrnad: I have several coworkers (I work at a bookstore) who love this author. Especially Nettle and Bone.

>25 benitastrnad: Backman is one of my favorites. I don't know how he does it, but he always pulls me in. I tell customers that if he stopped getting translated into English, I would learn Swedish just to keep reading him. (Jeg snakker ikke svensk, bare veldig litt norsk.)

>25 benitastrnad: I love the books by Kingfisher. This was a fun one.

>22 benitastrnad: This looks really interesting. I worked at the NPR affiliate in New Orleans from 1980 to 1986 and spent a lot of time listening to these women on All Things Considered and other shows.

>25 benitastrnad: I will certainly have to give this book a read as he is also one of my favorite authors.

Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace by Lynn Povich
I read this book for the February Nonfiction Challenge category of Women's Work. It was a history of how the women employees of Newsweek filed a class action lawsuit took on their employers and sued for back pay, and a route to promotions. They were the first group of women to do so in the US. This was simply a history of that event and my reading was prompted by what I had read in the previous book I read for this category which was Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie. The Newsweek lawsuit was talked about in the book on the founding women of NPR and since it was the second time in the last couple of years that I had found this lawsuit mentioned I decided it was time to get more background on that historical event. This book was written by one of the women who was part of the original grievance that was filed and then one of the employees named in the class action suit. Eventually, she was promoted and was the first women to achieve the rank of Editor at Newsweek. The book was written by a journalist and it shows. It was short and fast-paced. Even though it was short it provided the background I was seeking on this subject. It was well written and moved fast through about 6 years of history while also providing background. Due to the style in which it was written it also read fast.

Last House Before the Mountain by Monika Helfer
This is the first in a fictionalized trilogy about the author's family in the alps of Austria. This first book takes place in the mountain village where the author's great grandfather lived. He was drafted into the army in WWI and survived the Italian front. This book is the story of what happened to his family in the four years he was gone. It is a strange dark story and speaks of trauma in both the family and the father. I doubt I will read the next in the series, but I there were parts of this book that I liked. It will be hard for most Americans to relate to this book due to the darkness of the subject and the geographic isolation of the family, but it is also a worthy read. I want to read the trilogy by Andrew Krivak that is set in the mountains of Pennsylvania and deals with the same subject before I totally write off this series.

Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
I have suffered through a spate of bad books lately and I hope this is the last of the lot. This is not an example of a sophomore slump - it is worse than that. This book was published in 2016, one year after the super successful first book by this author. This book was not successful and was in fact a terrible bore. Only the last quarter of the book was interesting. If I hadn't been trapped in the car on my way back to Alabama I would not have finished this book as it was a boring waste of time. The plot was one cliché after another and it was filled with stock characters. I literally ground out the miles with this book.

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee
I read the second of Lee's autobiographies back in 2016 and have had this book in my collection since 2018. I had forgotten how beautiful his descriptive prose is. Somehow this author makes the mundane little things of growing up between the wars in a small village one of the most exciting things ever done. Lee's childhood was one of poverty but even though that is described it isn't the main focus of the book and Lee's love of life and living in his small village shows through. The exuberance of childhood along with all the meanness and communal love shows through in every line of this book. It was so well written that immediately, upon finishing it, I requested the next book in the series from our library.

Harney & Sons Guide to Tea by Michael Harney
This short book about tea is a shortened guide to the basic teas that are grown, where they are grown, and how they should be tasted. It is not meant to be a definitive guide to all things tea, but a way to start a tea lover down the path, letting them decide what areas of tea culture they want to explore further. As such it is a great introduction to the world of tea.

Longmire Defense by Craig Johnson
This is book 19 in the Longmire series and it is a real return to the things that made this series so much fun to read. The scene is back in Wyoming and is about Walt's family history and his involvement with a murder that happened in 1948 that appeared to be committed by his grandfather. I loved the title because it is a double entendre so that is also a return to the writing style of the earlier novels in this series. I listened to this book while traveling back to Kansas. The narrator of this series is not one of my favorites because I find it very hard to understand him. I had to run the CD player almost as loud as it would go because of his low tone of voice. Also he slurs is words and I find that makes it really hard to understand him. All of that was the downside but the great plot and wonderful characters makes these books great reading.

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
This is not my normal kind of novel and I read it for my book discussion group but I ended up liking it. I can tell that this is going to make a good book for discussion because of all the different topics that come up in the plot. These are things like body shaming, ageing, mid-life crisis, suicide, and megalomania. The setting is also unique and creates interest. It is a health resort/spa in Australia. For American's this is an exotic setting that makes it attractive to American readers. This is a well plotted book with great characters. It's only fault is that it is too long. It needed some editing. The novel was made into a TV mini-series and that is the reason it was selected for our book group.

Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen

I purchased this book at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park in Antelope County, Nebraska when I visited that park in July 2022. I read it for the Nonfiction Challenge for March. The topic was forensic sciences. On first glance this might seem like a strange title to choose for the topic. However, as I read the book it became more apparent that this is a detective story on a massive scale. Geologists, paleontologists, biologists, astronomers, explosive specialists, and big data specialists are all a part of this story.

This book is an overview of the five mass extinctions documented in the fossil records. It is extremely readable and makes much of the science behind these mass extinctions accessible. It is written by a journalist who writes about science and as such this book is a short explanation. It is not a detailed scientific report. That is a blessing for the reader but it will also give science doubters room in which to maneuver and therefore refute some of what is in this book.

One of the most enlightening aspects of the book is the time taken to explain big numbers and deep time. The last extinction discussed is that caused by man in the last 50,000 years. The book also discusses the coming extinction caused by man. One of the most impressive things the author does is to make the science of carbon and carbon dioxide accessible. In fact the author goes into great detail on the role of carbon dioxide in life on this planet. He also explains the role of excessive carbon dioxide in all of these mass extinctions and proves to be one of the main drivers of these extinctions, and probably the next one. He also explains how the planet has managed to recover from high dosages of carbon dioxide in the past. This is why he has to talk about big numbers and deep time.

The most effective part of this book (for me) is the very detailed and yet VERY understandable explanation of why big numbers and deep time are so important to the story of mass extinctions. Key to this process is the role of carbon dioxide in the extinctions. The author takes the time to explain in detail that EVEN if we started following strict carbon emissions guidelines it will take hundreds of thousands of years (200,000 - 500,000 thousand years) and those are huge numbers that seem meaningless to those of us alive today. Our live spans are so short in comparison that these numbers don't have much meaning. However, the planet doesn't work on the same time scale. This is important to understanding the amount of time it will take to bring the carbon dioxide back in line with what it was at the beginning of written history. For the first time, I started to understand the numbers and how they work in relation to deep time.

The second part of this book that was important for me was the explanation of how the planet naturally sequesters carbon dioxide via the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle takes hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through. Again, the number of years for the process to complete is staggering. I never understood the scientific process of the carbon cycle and Brannen managed to write a lightbulb moment for me.

The downside of this book is that there isn't much about forensic science in this book except for the discussion of carbon dioxide and its rehabilitation cycles, including ocean acidification and rock weathering. How geologists use mass spectrometers, DNA samples, microbiology, and micro zoology techniques to date rocks, fossils, and other physical evidence to date the mass extinctions and determine what happened that caused the mass extinctions as best they can. The author also points out that the fossil record is incomplete and that means that there are incomplete answers to some questions.

I would recommend this book to anybody who is trying to understand the deep past and the deep present as well. It is both a book about the past and about the future. The author ends the book with a discussion of the probable future based on what part of the carbon cycle we are currently in, and the scientific evidence that tells us that point, and based on the past scientific evidence what the likely outcome will be. This is not a book for creationists or people who don't trust science.

>37 benitastrnad: Thanks for this review. It is a subject for which I have a lot of interest.

interesting books there!

Gone Again by James Grippando
I read this book for my real life discussion group. It will be our October 2024 selection. I have had it in my TBR list since 2018 when it won the Harper Lee Award for Legal Fiction. I had a long road trip to Kansas ahead of me and I knew I wouldn't have TV so what better time to listen to books than when you are working at cleaning things up and moving them out? This is a fairly standard legal mystery but it was perfect for listening to. The narrator was very good and the mystery was interesting. Since I like mysteries, I will probably listen to more books by this author. There will be lots of discussion around this book and I can't wait to hear what the others have to say about the topic - which is out-of-country adoption and children with special needs.

Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
I listened to this book and really enjoyed it. The narrator was very good and the plot was emotionally involving. It is the kind of book I really like. It is a Pilgrimage and I love a good pilgrimage story. This one was very well done. I can understand why it was long listed for the Booker. It is the story of a retired man who heads out to find a long lost friend of his. This journey turns into a pilgrimage for both he and his wife, and for a neighbor of theirs who has become a close friend over the years. This one hit all of my sweet spots.

Long Way to A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
This is the first book in a series titled Wayfarers. This book got lots of buzz on LT when it was published and so I think my expectations for it were set too high. I found it an average book. I also thought it pretentious, or perhaps too earnest. I thought it tried too hard to be inclusive. It was also heavy handed on the cultural acceptance part of the plot. Inclusivity and cultural acceptance should just be part of the story - not the point of the story. I thought it was the point of the story. Granted, there were parts of the plot that did these things very well, but most of it was not. I will continue to read this series as there were flashes of good plot in it. The characters were all engaging and I liked them, so they will get more reading time. I am not giving up on the series yet.

Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Jerry Ellis
I love a good pilgrimage book. I like the idea of pilgrims and pilgrimages. This type of book is my favorite kind of travel writing. I have read all kinds of travel books and pilgrimage books. They are mind candy for me so I tend to really really like this kind of book. However, this book fell short for me. The reason was - sex. There was too much of it in the book. Too much reminiscing about what great sex he had, how he pursued women and loved them, how much he desired them, and how much he wanted to have sex with practically every woman he saw. There was not enough observation about the countryside he walked through, or the history of the walk done by his Cherokee ancestors. The strong part about this book was his observations about the people he met along the way. What I wanted was his inner journey and how that related to his walk - not what I got. Oh well - there are other pilgrimage books out there. I am still looking for one about walking Hadrian's Wall.

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos
I finally finished reading Sing Them Home this morning and even though it was very very slow getting started, I ended up liking this book. It turns out that the more of it I read the more I started thinking of it as a work of magical realism. Once I did that the book became much easier to understand. It is a book about disabilities and how that effects a family. Parts of it were rather emotional. I was also surprised when From I discovered that it is set in a small southeastern town in Nebraska - not far from where I am moving. This is not an area that gets many books written about it, but it does work. I found the chapter about the University of Nebraska football tickets really funny. I always knew that UA didn't have a lock on crazy football season ticket holder fans, and this passage proved it. From what I know of Husker fans, I don't doubt that this incident was taken from a real life encounter at the UNL Ticket Office.

The first two thirds of the 542 page novel were very slow moving. For the most part, the reason for that is that it is burdened with unlikable characters. Only one character, the common law widow, is sympathetic. As the story progresses the reader gradually comes to understand the reasons why each of the main characters have developed into the people they have become. At the heart of this book is the search for family. The mother in the novel, has a severe disability and how this affects the children, along with her abrupt disappearance after her long and gradual decline is the reason for writing this book. In the end, I was am I persevered and read this book. However, due to the extremely slow start to the book, I rated it as 3 1/2 stars. I really want to mark it higher, but ...

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
This is the first book in the Legacy of Orisha series by this author. When this book was published it was a big hit with lots of pre-publication publicity, including the Jimmy Kimmell Show. However, I didn't find this book to be anything exceptional. This was book one of a proposed trilogy. Book two was published a year after this one, 2019, and I don't think that quick publication bodes well for the quality of book two. Book three is still not published. It is YA dystopian fantasy that incorporates African mythology and folklore, but since I knew most of what the novel was alluding to it wasn't that exciting for me. I listened to the book and thought the narrator did a good job. Since I was trapped in the car I listened to the entire novel. However, that doesn't mean that I wasn't bored by it. I am going to go ahead and listen to the second book in the series.

>42 benitastrnad:. I had about the same feeling, Benita. I did not even finish, but some of my RL-book-club members did love them.

I just discovered O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker and it is a terrific book. I see that you 'acquired' the book in the past and I am wondering if you have read it, and what you thought about it.

>47 JoeB1934:
I haven't read it. I put all of the books I would like to read but don't own in my wishlist file. If I have the book it is in my To Read and My Library file.

Fire Dance by Helene Tursten
This is book 6 in the Irene Huss series. I am reading this series for the LT Mystery Series Challenge and it is the book for April. This is a good solid police procedural series and fairly standard for the genre. There was more of Irene's personal life in this book and consequently we get to see how her personal life intrudes on her professional life and vise-a-versa. Good solid series that I recommend for mystery readers and will continue to do so as this is another good entry in the series.

Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman
I seldom quit on books, especially nonfiction books, but I am giving up on Lexus and the Olive Tree. I have read 140 pages and I know two things reading this book. Friedman is an unabashed cheerleader for globalization and that this book is sadly out-of-date. I should have known there was a reason why it was on my shelves for almost 25 years. It never appealed to me and it still doesn't. The book was written in 1998 and that age shows. The great disasters of 2007-08 haven't happened yet, and so all the evils of globalization as we know it today haven't happened. Therefore, it is easy to be positive about the idea and how it will lift all boats and bring millions out of poverty. Yada, yada, yada. I think I will quit on this book and start reading World on Fire instead. It was written in 2003 and appears to be a sort of answer to Lexus and the Olive Tree. It may also prove to be dated, but we'll see.

At any rate, I wouldn't recommend anybody waste their time reading Lexus and the Olive Tree unless they are undertaking a historical study on attitudes and ideas about globalization. That sounds like a job for an academic, not somebody who just wants to learn about globalization in 2024.

>50 benitastrnad: I had the same reaction to Friedman's The World is Flat, though I read it closer to its publication. His bowing down to the wonders of Walmart left me cold, even before we all realized how evil their project was. Much more recently, however, I think his NY Times columns about the Middle East are thoughtful and worth reading.

Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian
This was a tough book to read. It was about the Armenian Genocide and the Battle of Gallipoli. The book has a dual time line that takes the reader from past to present. In the past the book begins in 1915 and centers around a fictional author's journey to discover more about her grandparents roots. It flips back and forth from 1915 to the present with the authors discoveries about the lives of her grandparents as she does the research to write a book about their lives.

I listened to the recorded version of this book and I have to say that this was an excellent recording. There were two different narrators for the two different voices in the novel and that helped the reader/listener distinguish between the two time periods represented in the novel. This is not a happy novel and in fact is a hard novel to read. The recorded version has an author's afterwards and a short interview with the author. The author explains that he decided to use the literary device of a dual time line in order to give the reader some space between the horrific events and the choices that the characters have to make, often on the spur of the moment, that he describes in the novel. In this novel that literary device works very well and is helpful to the reader. It does what the author intends for it to do - give the reader some space.

This is a novel that should be read by many people as it will expose them to the truth of the Armenian Genocide and the horrible deeds done at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It makes it plan that the Holocaust that people know about was not the only genocide in the twentieth century and that the twentieth century was indeed, the Century of Genocide.

As a follow up to this novel I need to read the YA book Forgotten Fire.

Looking forward to your comments on this one. Would like to know the level of gratuitous and unnecessary intimacy; also if the violence is tolerable. Ive read a couple of works on/ near this topic at the young adult level

Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat by Chris Stewart
This travel memoir is the prequel to the Chris Stewart books about his life on a farm in Spain. Stewart is a jack-of-all-trades and in this book he learns to sail a boat and becomes the skipper of a small yacht in the Greek Islands for a summer. After that he becomes a crew member on a larger yacht that makes a Trans-Atlantic crossing using the North Atlantic route in a summer. The crew starts out on the Cornish coast, travels to Bergen, Norway, across the northern Atlantic to Iceland, and goes all the way to Vineland roughly following the route of the Vikings from the Norse Sagas. This book is the kind of mind candy I love. It was fun to read, informative about how he learned to sail, what went wrong and why he loves sailing, and, in short, was great reading entertainment. At the same time it was full of information from the serious to the mundane and all of it written in an accessible way. You can't beat that for summer reading.

Hi Benita. As always I enjoy your elaborate reviews. They are so eloquent as your letters. I wish I could write lake that. Maybe I could in Dutch, but in English it would be to difficult for me.

She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper
I finished listening to She Rides Shotgun and it was a very good mystery/suspense thriller. It is the authors debut novel and it was good. This book was an Alex Award winner in 2018 and I think that award for this title is problematic. There is no doubt that this is a good novel and it is one that I will encourage people to read. However, given the climate in today's schools I don't think I would put this book on a high school library shelf. The reason is that there is lots of violence in it. The violence is realistic and I don't think it is gratuitous, but I am sure that there is a group of people out there who would not like to see high school student reading this book. The Alex Award is a list of 12 adult books published each year that would be suitable for High School students to read. I think that this title is suitable for High School students to read, but it might not be suitable to place in High School libraries. (Isn't that a weird stance to take?) Instead of having the book on the shelves I would not hesitate to give the Alex list to students and tell them to visit the public library to get the book. That feels like shoving the censorship problem off onto the public librarians, but I also feel strongly that parents have the rights to question what their children are reading. People under 18 are children. Public Libraries have to supply books for all ages so their mandate for service to all groups would make it easier for them to allow High School students to read this book.

The recorded version of the book was well done and the narrator did a good job recording it. For those who like mystery suspense/thrillers this is one I will recommend.

>56 benitastrnad: Except the problem (or, really, one of them) with censorship in school libraries is that it's not just a parent controlling what their own child reads. It's a parent trying to prevent other children from reading those books, too.

I could see a parent being able to choose an alternative to an assigned book in the classroom setting -- IF they have themselves read the book they're objecting to. Maybe. But taking a book experts in reading and education have curated off of library shelves? Nope. Never.

>56 benitastrnad: This is an interesting thing to ponder for me. Both my parents and all my siblings were readers and nobody ever monitored my/our reading. Since none of my children are/were tremendous readers, Ive never been faced with this as a dilemma. There are some modern books that I wonder whether I would have liked in my childhood, but I've never, until you mentioned this, really entertained what all this fuss is about.

Are we really certain that masses of children are barging down libraries to get at any books, let alone challenged books? And if so, are we positive that the librarians are standing by with "greedy immoral" intent to direct all these children to these questionable books? I never met a school librarian after 5th grade.

Just my brain wandering. I have no recollections of my children in a school library.

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire
This is book 8 in the Wayward Children series and each book in the series has been better written than the last. This one tackles the very difficult topic of child molestation. Once again something terrible happens to a child and that child runs away. The Doors to an alternate world open and the girl walks through. There she grows up safe and eventually returns to the School for Wayward Children. This novella was the best plotted and best written of the books in this series and was spot on for its targeted audience. It also provides sound advice for the targeted audience. As such I think it should be part of all middle school and high school collections even though there will be some who would argue with my judgement. The book maintains it gentle but insistent tone throughout the book and this adds a sense of urgency to the message. All of this is finessed by an author who knows her audience and her tool for getting the message out. Up until now I have been sort of lukewarm about this series but not with this entry. Well done McGuire.

Almond Blossom Appreciation Society by Chris Stewart
This is book three in the Driving Over Lemons series by Stewart. All three of the books are set in Andalusian Spain where Stewart and his wife moved after purchasing a subsistence sheep farm in a remote mountainous area of southern Spain. The series starts in the 1990's and the last book was published in 2014. Stewart was a minor celebrity when he purchased the farm. He was the original drummer for the rock band Genesis. His books have made him into a well known European author due to their best seller status in the UK and in Europe. The books are not well known in the USA and I had to get all of them through Inter-Library Loan requests. Almost all of them came from public library collections.

This series is really fun to read. They are part memoir and part travelogue as they chronicle the day-to-day life on the farm and in the remote villages of Spain. They also give details of travels that Stewart and his family do around Spain. In this book, the Almond Blossom Appreciation Society is a small group of men who hike up into the mountains to see the blossoms on the Almond trees. There is also a chapter on Stewart's skiing trip during a wicked cold snap, and his venture into Morocco to gather seeds to sell to gardeners in the UK. There is also details of farm life and the constant struggles of such a life that are leavened with humor and just the right amount of pathos.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides
This is the third mystery/thriller by Michaelides and like the others it has a very twisty plot with an unreliable narrator that centers on some part of Greek mythology, Greek theater, and Greek tragedy. This one has the narrator leading the reader through several different versions of the "truth" with the only "truth" being that the narrator is desperately in love with one woman - enough so that he is willing to do anything to gain her trust and love. He does not recognize that all of the people involved are as morally compromised as he and that is is downfall. In many ways the main character reminds me of Tom Ripley in the Ripley books, but I found Elliott to be much more sympathetic. At least the reader understands why Elliott is the way he is and the almost perfectly repeated bullying scene from Elliott's childhood is a keystone to the plot. It was very well written. Like the previous book this one has a compelling plot and uses ancient literary texts to great effect. Once again Greek mythology and Greek theater are part of the tragic events. I also like the way the author ties characters from the previous books into this book. They are not main characters but they are skillfully blended in so that they make an appearance. If you like psychological thrillers you will like this one.

Rose For Winter by Laurie Lee
I got this book from the UA Archival Facility where I am the third person to check it out since it was ensconced in that building. This is book 4 in the Laurie Lee memoirs. The book was published in 1955 and in this book Lee returns to Spain where he revisits places he traveled in his previous books. This time his traveling companion is his wife Kati. Franco is firmly in power and since Lee fought and sympathized with the opposite side, he finds Spain much changed and not to his liking. It is a poorer place than it was and the people often more suspicious. The writing in this volume is beautiful. Lee has mastered the art of describing a place so that a reader can picture it in all its glory or poverty. The description of his visit to the Alhambra is masterfully done. Some might think his writing florid and it might be borderline, but his word pictures allow the reader to "see" what he means. For that talent alone this book should be read.

>62 benitastrnad: I miss the days when you could see when and how many times a book had been checked out! Computers make things so much easier in so many ways but there are trade-offs!

I remember seeing Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread and it was a shocking account of Spain's poverty (specifically in the mountains) - I don't know how it could have gotten worse in the 1950's... maybe more wide spread. Certainly a shocking contrast to modern Spain.

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability by Amy Chua
I read this book for the LT Nonfiction Challenge. The April topic was Globalization.

This book had a very interesting thesis - the insistence of Western Democracy's, particularly the U. S., to establish free-market democracies without establishing democratic foundations and principles that would allow new democracies to grow slowly and more organically, as well as stating out with some market restraints in place, actually causes destabilization in the areas these Democracies are trying to stabilize. Central to the thesis is the idea that in many extremely unstable parts of the world, where terrorism is know to fester and breed, there is often a small ethnic minority that dominates the economy, thus creating a situation where the ethnic majority is economically and politically suppressed and resentment simmers creating the perfect breeding ground for violence and terror. The author carefully explores the histories of these places and the context in which the ethnic minority gained power. She proposes that often the economically powerful ethnic minority is also involved in corruption at the political and economic level with the full blessing of the authoritarian regimes that take kickbacks and favors from these small groups. In many ways this book is a treatise on how authoritarian demagogues establish power and play off the various ethnic groups in their countries against one another to stay in power.

After the author has made her case, she then explored the histories of authoritarian countries with a record of ethnic violence, she offers some solution to the problem in the last two chapters of the book. She defends the slow moves that China is making towards a more open society and a more free-market economy. This slower movement allows more time for people to become accustomed to the wilder economic ride that free-markets take. She also uses Canada and Malaysia as an examples of how affirmative action policies can make a positive difference in the economic life of a country and break down the ethnic favoritism that has turned so many other countries into large scale terrorist organizations.

This book was written after 9/11 and published in 2003 but before the Forever War in Afghanistan and Iraq became the debacle they were. The planners of that war should have read this book first and that would have saved the U. S. from 20,000 casualties. The author is an academic and so she sets up her argument carefully and then provides example after example of what went wrong along with an analysis of why it went wrong. This is a very thought provoking book and reading it will provide a different view of "why they hate us" from the stock answers the public generally gets.

This is a very academic book and will take much concentration to read and understand. Even so, I recommend this book.

>60 benitastrnad: These look like fun reading. I'm a bit surprised to see my library has the first two as well as the prequel, Three Ways to Capsize a Boat.

>65 clue:
My advice is check them out and read them. You are correct they are fun reading.

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen
I have been wanting to read this book since it was published in 2021. I had read the Merciful Crow series by the same author and thought them very well done and this novel is too. This is a YA dystopian fantasy that finds its roots in several fairy tales. That is the simple explanation. The more complex analysis is that this is a YA dystopian fantasy based in class conflict and the dignity that is deserved by every person regardless of station. It is also a YA dystopian fantasy that deals with the devaluation of women and therefore the position they hold in society. That makes this a YA novel with a message, howbeit a subtle message on the aforementioned fronts. I wanted to listen to this novel and to my astonishment and consternation found that it was one of the recorded books on CD that had been removed from my local public library. I had to request the recorded book from Inter-Library Loan and because I have access to WorldCat I knew that it would be hard to get on CD. I let the ILL people get what they could get in a sound recording, so I got it on a Playaway. Playaway's are designed for use in schools and a person has to have an auxiliary cable to plug into the car speakers in order to listen to it. That works and so I listened to it that way. The recording was excellently done and at 14 hours in length was perfect for the trip back to Kansas.

If you like YA dystopian novels this is one you should consider. So far it is the first in a duology. I will try to get my hands on the second novel.

Kill Artist by Daniel Silva
This is book 1 in the Gabriel Allon series of spy thrillers. Whenever a new book in this series comes out they are an automatic best seller, so I was curious about them and wanted to read them. When I took Sharon to Chautauqua one year we stopped and stayed at her friend's home in Medina, Ohio. That woman gave me copies of several of the newer entries in the series. (I think there are now almost 25 titles in the series.) This was another reason to read the books.

This novel surprised me. I didn't expect there to be such a strong female character in it. This character was not supposed to be the star of the book, but she took over the book and made it her own and I was surprised that the author did that. Was this simply a case of the secondary character simply running away with the book? Or was it something the author did on purpose? It will be interesting to see what the author does in the next book. Does Jacqueline appear again? Or does Gabriel get his chance to shine? Other than this one little fact I found this to be a standard novel of this genre. Other than Jacqueline this was another good start to a series.

Silva is married to the NBC and CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel.

A Moment of War by Laurie Lee
Like the critics, I found this book to be the weakest of his four memoirs. It showed the same descriptive powers that is common to all of his autobiography/memoirs but it simply didn't have the depth that I expected. For instance, he did not every explain why he felt compelled to go to Spain and join the Republican Army. I got no sense of him as a person other than he left a girl in England who he thought was trying to push him into a more serious relationship than he wanted. But that was only inferred and never explained. It could be inferred that this book is not meant to be a complete picture simply from the title. A moment implies that it is a snapshot of one moment in a war, so I will grant Lee some leeway for that reason, however, I honestly found myself wishing for a bit more detail. Without that detail, this is the story of a rather silly and foolish man making a silly and foolish decision. I am glad that I read this series and have no regrets about any of the books. In fact, I was very impressed with Lee as an author.

Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
I started reading this book as a group read with Mark and Stasia here on LT. They got far ahead of me. I started it on April 4th and finished it today - May 31st. Of course, it was a Big Boy and that was part of the reason why it took so long to read this book. However, this is what I would call an ambitious novel and therein is the fault. It simply tries to do too much and becomes to broad. This is a novel about many different topics and all of these threads come together in the course of the novel, but that makes it a slow starter and it has a long slow finish as well. In its heart this is a book about books, reading, readers, and libraries. It is somewhat idealized about libraries but I think it right on target with the parts about books and reading. It is also a book about teenaged angst and a boy growing up with a grieving and traumatized mother while he also has problems. Because his mother has poor coping skills she is unable to recognize or understand her sons problems and can't help him with them as a result. The mother also has an idealized view of the world and of her son and husband. All this makes for a volatile mix and is the setting for the story.

While I appreciate what the author was trying to do in this novel, it just didn't come together very well. It had too many moving parts and those didn't move fast enough. In short, there are long stretches were this novel gets boring. However, much of the novel is about what is going on in the mind of a grieving 14 year old boy whose body is being flooded with hormones. I think that my experiences with schools and school children allows me to better understand what is going on with a 14 year-old better than most people so I totally "get" this novel, while others haven't.

Beige Man by Helene Tursten
This is book 7 in the Irene Huss series by this author. I read it for the Mystery series group here on LT. This book was translated from the Swedish but this was a new translator and that might be the reason why this translation seemed a bit rough in places. This is a standard police procedural and the mystery isn't anything new, however, there is lot more about Irene's private life and how that affects her job. This entry in the series provides more evidence that Sweden and the U.S. are more alike than different. There are the same job concerns and the same social problems. In this case the mystery was about the sex trafficking of young girls - a common problem in both countries. Sexism in the police force itself is also a continuing theme in this series.

Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce
This is book 2 in the Harold Fry series. The author tries very hard, in an afterward, to dispel the idea that this is a sequel. It is. The author uses the literary device of telling the same story from a previous novel from the point-of-view of a different character and using a different setting. In this case, the story of what happened to Harold Fry and his family is told from the point-of-view of another major character Queenie Hennessy. Same story but different. The setting is in the hospice where Queenie Hennessy is waiting for Harold Fry while he is on his pilgrimage to get to Queenie before she dies. I listened to this novel and I really liked the narrator. She did a great job using different voices to tell the story of each of the people in the hospice.

Music Shop by Rachel Joyce
I "discovered" this author when I read her Booker long-listed novel about Harold Fry, so I listened to this book on my trip back from Kansas. I liked this book. It was nothing special, just a simple story about the people who lived on, or had living space on the same block in a blue collar neighborhood in London. In many ways this novel reminded me of the work of Fredrick Backman. That means that this was aa book that you read for pure entertainment. I listened to this one and the narrator did a great job. He sounded just like what I would imagine the hero of the story sounded. Unfortunately, I was in the van and it is a very noisy vehicle, so I had to turn the volume up so much that a times the sound was distorted. That is not the fault of the narrator. It is a fault of the vehicle which is old and cavernous, but that empty space makes it perfect for moving packed items from my house.

Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House by Norman Eisen

I read this book for the June Nonfiction challenge for Middle Europe. I didn't intend to read this book and I am also reading another book for this challenge, but when I was searching around for books for others to read, this one caught my eye. I realized that I had a copy of it, and because of all the book packing I have been doing lately I knew just where it was in the house. I pulled it and started reading. It turned out to be an interesting and entertaining book that I read in a week.

The book tells the history of Czechoslovakia during the twentieth century. Czechoslovakia is no longer a country. It is now two separate countries: The Czech Republic and Slovakia. The story of the 20th Century state of Czechoslovakia is told through the lens of the Petschek Mansion in Prague. The story of the country is told through the lives of five people who lived in and were influenced by the house and the city of Prague. (at least in the opinion of the author.) This impressive house has been called the last palace built in Europe and it is from that the book takes its title.

The mansion was built by Otto Petschek, a banker and industrialist, who was also Jewish. He started building the house in the 1920's and died in 1936, shortly after the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. The next person featured is Rudolph Toussiant, who was the German general who was in charge of the military occupation of Czechoslovakia. He lived in the house from 1939-1945. The next occupant was Laurence Steinhardt, who as the ambassador to Czechoslovakia who persuaded the US government to purchase the house from the Petschek heirs. The time covered by his tenure was the first years of the Cold War and in these years the country became firmly Stalinist and under the control of the Soviet Union. The next person profiled in the book was Shirley Temple Black who was in Prague when the Soviet's crushed the Prague Spring and who was the ambassador during the Velvet Revolution. The last person in the book was Norman Eisen whose mother was a Czech Jew who had spent the last year of the war in two different concentration camps in Germany and who had half of her family murdered in the war years. Eisen was the first Jewish ambassador to an Central European country.

The entire book was very readable, and my only complaint is that it is not very academic. By that I mean that there is little to no documentation in the printed book. The author says that the documentation is all online. That is OK, but it should be in conjunction with, not the ONLY form of documentation available to readers. Nonfiction books have to have authentic documentation. Without that the veracity of the entire work can be disputed. I know that is a minor quibble in this case, but as a retired academic it does bother me a bit.

I highly recommend this book for anybody seeking an entertaining way to understand a bit more of the history of the more obscure parts of Europe. This book is eminently readable along with being factual (near as I can tell), and that makes it a very useful book.

Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams

This book is a series of twelve essays written about twelve different National Parks in a variety of parks around the U.S. This book was a selection for my real life book discussion group. This was a nonfiction best seller when it was published in 2016. After reading it I wonder what all the hubbub about it was? It is the kind of book that can be read on the surface as a wonderful peon to our National Parks, or the reader can search for the deeper meanings in those National Parks. Williams is a devoted conservation and nature author and her love of places shows in this book. There were several outstanding essays that really touched me and then there were several that were just off the mark. This makes me wonder what other's saw in the book that I might have missed.

One outstanding unique element of the book was that each essay was accompanied by a photograph that had something to do with the following essay. These pictures were a vital part in understanding the essays. For this reason this is almost a multimedia book because it doesn't depend only on the words in the book, but also on the pictures for the reader to understand the meaning of the essay.

Jell-O Girls: A Family History by Allie Rowbottom
I listened to this book because it was at the Tuscaloosa Public Library when I was looking for books to listen to in the car. I had seen the reviews of it and thought it sounded interesting. It turned out that I didn't care for this book as much as I thought I would. It was a memoir of the author's mother and grandmother as much as it was of her. The author's mother and grandmother died from breast cancer and the author tied this into an episode of mass hysterical illnesses in her ancestral hometown in upstate New York. I found this a rather far fetched idea and thought it distracted from the overall quality of the book. The local history and the short histories of the family Jell-O enterprise was very interesting. The memoir part less so, as it was mostly about providing care for sick parents in their last days. This is not the book that I thought it would be, so I was disappointed in it. That doesn't mean that in its own way it wasn't good. I tend to listen to whatever I have playing in the car no matter if I like it or not, and this recorded book fell into that category.

Philida by Andre Brink
I started reading this book back in June of 2022 for a group read here on LT. I read 28 pages and never finished it. It just didn't capture my interest. I decided that after 2 years of not ever picking the book up again that it was time to Pearl Rule it. I don't want to pack it up so I called it quits. I seldom Pear Rule books, but this one just didn't work for me.

D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose

I read this book for my real life book discussion group. I was very surprised by it. The quality of the research was outstanding and the detail included in it was impressive. The cover of this book gave me the impression that this was another of those frivolous works of narrative nonfiction. That is not the case with this book. The author profiled five of the women who served the longest in the British Secret Service as agents in France during WWII. These women survived for 2 years organizing and training the French Resistance in the face of great odds. To a large degree they succeeded even though one male agent had been turned and he was handing information to the Germans whenever he got it. The story does not end well for some of the women and for the few who survived it is ironic that they could not tell their stories for many years after the war.er

One chapter in particular stands out in this book. It is the chapter on the Allied bombing of the French cities along the Normandy coast in preparation for the D-Day Invasion. The fact that 16,000 French civilians were killed by Allied bombs in the first day of the invasion is not often discussed. Rose devotes almost a full chapter to it. About a week after reading this book, I read an entire blog entry on this bombing written for History News Network (HNN). HNN is a blog for historians and scholars that is hosted and maintained by the history department at George Washington University and I often find great tidbits of current historical research being discussed on this platform. I hope that somebody will tell the story of these bombings in greater detail at some point in the future.

This work of scholarship highlights the role of women in WWII and points out that women are always involved in wars. They just don't get credit for what they do. The work of gathering poorly documented history should not be underestimated either. What Rose did gathering this information and verifying it is impressive and so very important. This is first rate scholarship combined with stories that are sometimes the stuff of a James Bond novel. Both elements make for great reading.

Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto
I have had this graphic novel checked from the UA library since I retired. It was time to get it read. I thought this was going to be a book about the Louvre and the paintings there. It wasn't. It was a graphic novel fantasy. I did not find the story interesting at all. I wasn't able to make any connections within the plot that made sense to me. In the end I decided that this was some kind of fable that missed the mark for me.

City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley
This is the first book in a series that features a hard-boiled female private eye who lives and works in San Francisco. With a first book the job of an author is to set the stage for the reader. They must give the reader setting, plot, and character. This author hit one of the three.

San Francisco is the place and the author never lets the reader forget it. There are long passages in the novel that describe places in San Francisco as they were in 1939. In great detail. The level of detail kills the story. It is way to granular. Nobody likes to read that the main character walked two blocks uphill on 14th street, turned right and walked three blocks down Newport, then turned back uphill and walked two more blocks past the famous civic concert hall on the left where she stood in an alley watching to see if she was tailed. The author does this over and over and over. It got very boring.

The book has a good plot and if the author had just told the story instead of worry about getting the hard-boiled atmosphere just right, it would have been a good murder mystery. The murder involved Chinatown tongs and Japanese mafia fighting a turf kind of war with the politics of the 1930's war in China between those two countries serving as the tension filled backdrop to criminal life in Chinatown and Japantown in the San Francisco of that era.

I get it that part of the author's job is to create a character that the reader can like and understand. Writing about a hard-boiled woman private eye demands that the author let the reader know what tragedies have created the attitude displayed by the heroine. What the reader doesn't need is to have these details repeated over and over again and again to the point that the reader feels that they have been the victim of a beating. This constant repeating of the back story got very boring and made me as a reader want to tell the author to just stop already and get on with the story. The author had a good character but ruined any sympathetic feelings I might have had by constant repetition of the same tired back-story.

I listened to this novel and I liked the narrator. I hope this narrator reads more books.

Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel
This novel had good reviews and was in the collection of my local public library, so even though it isn't and wasn't a best seller I read it. This is one novel that started out quite well and then trailed off into nonsense.
The story starts with teenage sisters who go with their mother, a graduate student working on her PhD, on an expedition to Siberia hunting for recently thawed Mammoth specimens. The mother is part of the research team because she takes good notes and will keep the expeditions organized. The sisters are extra baggage, but end up discovering what the expedition wants - a frozen Mammoth. The sisters and their mother are recovering from the loss of their father and husband who was killed in a car accident. That makes this a novel that is trying to explore grief. It also is trying to explore the discrimination that women face in the academic world because they get shunted off into clerical parts of the research due to stereotypes of women. I wish that the author had followed this angle a bit more and spent less time on how the family worked through their grief. I finished the novel but rated it as average.

Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen

This is a YA fantasy that finds its base in African mythology. It is a very good read for YA's ages 12-15, but I think anybody older than that would be bored with it. I found the idea for the book interesting but the structure of the novel was weak and the language and plot simplistic. It is perfect reading for it's age group and I would have no problem recommending it for those middle graders who want something romantsy. Mermaids. Cute boys who need to be rescued by a nice well-meaning earnest girl. Who wouldn't like that? I purchased this book for a gift for a relative who has graduated from 8th grade this spring. I ordered it from Once Upon A Book Club. These people pick one YA title per month and then fix up a box of goodies, gifts, and items that are connected with the story. On the page in the book where the item is mentioned there is a note to open gift box 1. It is a cute idea and perfect for girls in that age bracket. I am sure that Elyn will enjoy the box, and the book. It is a good kind of gift for a librarian to give.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson
I started reading this book in March of this year. I read it at my computer station in my office. I keep a book beside my computer and while I am waiting for my computer to bootup I read a couple of pages while waiting. Most of the time I can read 2 pages while waiting. Of course, I have to be careful about what book I select for this purpose. I try to select a book that has lots of white space on the page, that has around 250 pages, and has short sections within chapters. All of this means that I can read a book that I might not have time to read otherwise and that I can use all the minutes of my day productively. This book was one that I purchased specifically for this purpose.

I was not aware of Heather Cox Richardson but was introduced to her by one of my fellow Wine Club members at a Wine Club meeting. I purchased this book soon after it came out on his recommendation. I found it to be "history lite." For me it contained no new ideas, but was a short version of American history. However, I imagine that for many people this book is quite revolutionary in that it presents history from an alternative point-of-view - that of a historian of Progressive movements. The author goes into none of the Constitutional questions explored in-depth, but rather takes the reader through history using a Progressive, or liberal, lens. When I first started reading it, I found the book offensive in its righteous tone and in my mind I labeled it a reactionary screed. However, as I look back on the book in its entirety I do not think that my initial reaction was correct. This book is NOT going to be read by those who are of a Conservative bent, and it is going to offend the middle roaders, but it is always valuable to look at events, people, and laws from several viewpoints. This book does just that. I find that I happen to agree with most of the authors interpretations. I hope that I can convince others to read this book.

Known World by Edward P. Jones
This was a book I have had in my collection since 2008. This book was an award winner when it was published and it was not a hit with me. I think it won so many awards because it of the subject matter - the idea of Blacks owning black slaves was probably shocking in 2003 and therefore a bit titillating for the public and critics alike. I liked Jones' style. He created many different threads and rabbit trails that left the reader wondering which one was the real story and then he ended the novel with several surprises that I did not expect. The novel was peopled with interesting characters but none of them really caught my emotional attention, so my involvement with the novel wasn't as deep as it should have been. The two characters with whom I did connect were Augustus and Mildred Townsend. How could they have raised such a son as Henry? Even they wondered why he did not match their ideals. The novel fell a little flat for me, but it was still a good historical novel and a realistic picture of those times (1850's Virginia) and place that wasn't much different from the Jim Crow South of a hundred years later.

I did take note of the dust jacket design. It was very effective and after I had completed the novel, I knew why that cover was designed as it was. The wagon was perfect for this novel.

>78 benitastrnad: I have been eyeing the D-Day Girls at my local library. Your thoughts are just the push I needed to grab it!

Time To Depart by Lindsey Davis
This was book 7 in the Marcus Didius Falco series by this author and it was just as much fun as the previous entries in this series. I am glad that it is one of the mystery series title selections and I hope that others in this small LT group are enjoying them as much as I am. This novel takes place back in Rome and involves Falco and his friend, who is head of the Roman police for their precinct in Rome. Right at the beginning of the book, the author made clear to me one of the big puzzles in the Bible regarding Paul. A Roman citizen could only be executed by direct order of the Emperor. If a Roman citizen was convicted of a capital crime he was given "time to depart" from Rome and could go into exile in some part of the Empire that was not considered to be Roman territory. The idea that Rome was barred to that citizen for the rest of his life was considered to be punishment enough. Paul, was a Roman citizen so he went to Rome to have his trial before the Emperor. This was probably due to the fact that Paul was sure that a Roman Emperor would dismiss the case against him and Paul would be free to go about his preaching. Because the Emperor was Nero that didn't happen. I can't wait to read the next book in this series because they are so chuck full of information about ancient Rome and other societies of that time and this information is presented in a clear humorous way that enables so many to learn from it.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi
This is book 2 in the Legacy of Orisha series by this author. This book is much better than the first book in the series and since book 3 has just been released I will need to make a request for it in the future, as I now want to know how the story ends. This series has been touted as being a mashup of African folk tales and Slavery. Up until now this was not evident in the book. With this book the two are linked and that is the main reason why I want to see how the author resolves the book. This entry in the series is devoted to telling the story of the various factions in Orisha and how they are fighting each other as much as the enemy. The main characters in the story become enemies of each other and easily manipulated into doing things that hurt all of them rather than just one of them. They are unable to focus and the common enemy. This makes for complicated story telling, but the author manages to pull this off. Three of the four main characters manage to remain sympathetic but the fourth is simply stupid and comes across that way in the novel. This doesn't make him a very sympathetic character and turns him into a fools foil. This was a recorded book and the narrators were very good. There is no doubt in my mind that the narrators added to the excitement and tension of the novel and this kept me listening even when some of the story lines remained predictable and silly.

Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
This is book 2 in the Wayfarers series by this author. This is a Sci/Fi space opera series. I listened to this book and like its predecessor, it was a quality recording with several different narrators doing the reading. This, like the previous novel had a very pointed message. This time the subject tackled was the question of AI sentience. The book does not start were the previous entry in the series left off. It starts after those events and so can be read as a standalone. It starts with the AI Lovelace waking up and having to learn how to act human. Then it switches to a cloned human who escapes from her drudge job in an assembly factory. She is rescued from pursuit by an AI, who if not sentient is close to it. Jane 64 has to learn how to be human because she has never experienced doing anything other than what she is told to do in the factory by the "Mothers" - the AI's who care for the cloned children. Jane also has to learn to be human along with Lovelace. It took longer to get "into" this novel than it did the previous one in this series, but in the end it was worth the time it took. Another series that I will now have to continue.

Mystery Guest by Nita Prose
This is book 2 in the Maid series by this author. These are lighthearted mysteries - not quite cozies but close to that. The main character is autistic and this gives the books a sense of humor and uniqueness that makes them pleasant reading. The mystery isn't much, but it is a nice easy ride from start to finish with a character that a person can like from beginning to end.

Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I started reading this book in 2016 for my real life book discussion group. I read 400 of the 771 pages in it and then left the book to sit on the bathroom floor. I did not pick it up again until I decided to move and I did not want to take this book with me. I hated this book and I fail to understand why it won so many awards. It is filled with poor writing, lying cheating stealing and worse main characters and no great philosophical truth on which to hang its hat. This is the first book by this author that I have read and I wonder why she gets accolades for this kind of shoddy work. I simply can't understand why this book would have won the National Book Award. This book is not recommended.

A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum
This is my first 5 star fiction of the year! I hesitated before I wrote a review of this book. I loved this novel. This novel should have had more readers than it did. It is a novel about immigrants - first, second, and third generations. It is a novel about repressive family relationships and the struggles that women have in some cultural settings to be heard and seen and to be people. It also explores the idea of generational trauma and how that plays out. The novel is set in Palestine and Brooklyn, New York and is the story of three different women from three successive generations of Palestinian women. There lives start in one country with one culture and end in another country with a totally different culture. The conflict is in how they try to reconcile the two cultures and the extent to which they don't succeed in blending the two settings. This causes great heartache and misery to all of the major characters, men, women, and children. The hard life of immigrants is also part of the story and in this case is made worse by the inability of the matriarch to realize that Brooklyn is not Palestine and that she has to open herself up to the new culture. Her refusal to do so results in great family trauma. At the same time this character is a strong woman who rises to the challenges that life has given her and deals with them using her family and cultural traditions and belief systems. It is the wrong approach, but she is trying and the reader can feel sympathy for her. In fact there was not an unsympathetic character among the characters. This novel was very well written and plotted. It is the type of book that I will think about for a long long time.

I listened to this novel and the recorded book was a wonderful experience. There were three different readers and each of them brought some personal nuances to the work that I don't think I would have noticed had I not listened to the novel.

Real Life of the Parthenon by Patricia Vigderman

This book of essays is about the controversy surrounding the acquisition and keeping of ancient artifacts from the grounds in which they were found. It is also a travel book and a personal memoir. The author starts out thinking that any museum keeping artifacts from other countries should return them, however, over the course of the book she rethinks her position and it becomes more nuanced as a result of her travels and study of the subject. The author starts her study of the subject of restoration of artifacts to the places where they were found at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This museum has been a hotbed of controversy because some of its prized items have a dubious background. The museum has been gradually returning some items to their places of origin and one of those, a sculpture of a woman goddess becomes the object of the author's search for a solution to the problem of incomplete provenance. Her travels take her to several sites in Sicily, Italy, and Greece. Among them is the Parthenon where the author learns about the restoration of the Parthenon and the plans to rebuild completely. She also travels to Pompeii where excavation continues after three hundred years and tries to decide if that level of activity is necessary for historical purposes or if Pompeii has just become a giant theme park.

This is a good book to study the problems with continued acquisitions of artifacts, continued excavation of historical sites, and who should own these items when they are excavated. She offers no solution but does tell readers that the best thing to do is to travel to the places where these items were excavated and see those places in order to more deeply understand why the items were created. In doing that the the person can learn more about the people who created these items and that is the object of all archeology.

Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War 1937-1948 by Madeleine Albright
I listened to the recorded version of this book. The narrator was Madeleine Albright and she did a great job of reading her book. It wasn't until 1997, when Albright had been appointed Secretary of State by President Bill Clinton that a Washington Post story revealed that Albright had several members of her family killed during the Holocaust. She was unware that she had Jewish relatives or that she herself might be Jewish. This book is the story of how that happened.

The book is part detailed diplomatic history of the country of Czechoslovakia, history of the rise of fascism in Czechoslovakia and the resulting Sudeten crisis, part family history, and part memoir. I found the history of the formation of Czechoslovakia fascinating, but I realize that many readers would not be as interested in that as I am. I have a vested interest because I am of Czech ancestry. Albright's father was a diplomat who worked for the Czechoslovakian government and eventually became the Czech Ambassador to Yugoslavia in the Interwar years. After the resolution of the Sudeten crisis with the Munich capitulation, their family fled to London. However, other members of her family weren't so lucky and stayed in Czechoslovakia, eventually ending up in concentration camps where they were killed.

I could have used more of Albright's stories of her life as a school aged girl in England during WWII and their eventual immigration to the US. However, these parts of her life are glossed over. Even with that flaw this is a very good memoir. Throughout the reading I found myself listening closely for the pronunciation of family surnames that I was familiar with, and to my surprise I often found them. But to my surprise her pronunciation of place names and family names was often very different than the way we pronounce them, but I suspect that our pronunciations are corrupted by our native language of English.

This is a memoir well worth reading if you are interested in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson

This book was an easy nonfiction to read. It had short concise sections within each of 9 chapters with a total length of 202 reading pages. The notes and index constituted another 33 pages. This book was full of humor and anecdotes about insects, their lives, and how that intersects with the lives and ambitions of humans. The final two chapters were dedicated to discussions of the various kinds of pollution that are endangering the insect population worldwide and why that will have an adverse effect on humans. One of the big surprises in this chapter was the revelation of how much light pollution effects insects. It affects their eating, reproductive, and navigational functions. All of this was news to me. I had a friend in the astronomy department who kept trying to get the University to do something about the light pollution on campus and was always disappointed by decisions that were made based on aesthetes rather than science. The worst offender was the street lighting. The University spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on new street lights. They are pretty but not practical. The globe forces the light to go up and does little to light the sidewalks or streets. All of that effects the ability of the astronomy department to simple night sky viewing - let alone how Sverdrup-Thygeson says that it affects insects.

Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman
I read this book for the Nonfiction Challenge. The August topic was Being Jewish. I had great fun and enjoyment reading Out of Egypt. It was a memoir from Aciman's young adult years and concerned school boy things, but it also told a great deal about Jewish life in Alexandria, Egypt. Alexandria in the Inter-War years and up until the 1960's was a very cosmopolitan place and this memoir reflects that. Aciman's family was Sephardic Jews who moved to Constantinople and remained there until forced to leave their home in Constantinople in 1919. They choose to make Alexandria their new home and were caught up in WWII. The Suez Crisis of 1956 plays a major part in the family story and is the first major event that Aciman remembers and understands as important to the future fortunes of his family. The book ends with the entire family immigrating, once again, this time to France. The families native language was Ladino and this lead me down the rabbit hole of what this language is and what its status is today. Bluntly, it is a dying language with few native speakers left. Aciman's biography is very interesting and I hope that he writes another memoir about his life after he and his family left Egypt.

The writing in this book is beautiful. It is very atmospheric and critics have compared it with the writing of Lawrence Durrell. I haven't read anything by Durrell, but I do need to get at least one of those books read that are set in Alexandria. That city was clearly a very different place for most of the twentieth century than it is today.

Column of Fire by Ken Follett
I had great fun listening to the behemoth book while driving from Montana to Alabama. 2500 miles and 24 CD's. This was a fairly standard work of historical fiction but it was about a subject that is often covered in works of historical fiction - the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I of England. This is a very romantic period for authors, but this book goes a bit deeper into that time and ties the Dutch War of Independence, the Huguenot Wars in France, and the Protestant Reformation all together in one giant book. These separate counties all had active Protestant wars and rebellions going on at the same time and in many ways they were related to each other as events in one country affected the events in another. Added to the religious upheaval were the dynastic struggles for power. Follett ties all of them together in an easy to understand way. Follett doesn't sugar coat any of the religious wars but he adds nuance and layers be bringing in the Humanistic philosophies written by Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and others that changed the way common people looked at matters of faith. Faith became more personal and more inner and the form of worship changed greatly in this time period. Follett brings all of that into this book and does a good job weaving pieces and parts of all of that into one story. Like all such endeavors there are places where the author succeeds beyond expectations and places were the story becomes sappy and trite, but the overall novel is a great entry point for readers to start studying this time period.

Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason
I have a love hate relationship with this novel. I liked the novel because it starts with all kinds of horror and ends in hope and renewal. I don't recall Mason's first novel Piano Tuner being that hopeful. However, it is a completely different story with different objectives.

It took me a long time to read this novel because I found that I couldn't read it before going to sleep. It had a negative effect on my sleep patterns. That is not surprising given its subject matter.

This novel forced me to do a deeper dive into some of the subjects it covered. I did more reading about the Eastern Front in World War I and I also did a deep dive into Typhus. Both of these were subjects about which I didn't know enough to fully understand this book.

I do have a couple of quibbles with this novel. My biggest one is, that by 1914, Sigmund Freud had written 11 books on mental issues, and the hero of this novel had heard of none of them? Really? And Freud wasn't the only doctor exploring the mysteries of the mind. It seems impossible to me that a student of any kind in Vienna of that time wouldn't have some idea that there was a nascent field of psychology. I understand that he was a barely trained physician but even a university student in Vienna would have heard of Freud and his work in psychoanalysis, let alone a medical student. Once he got to the front didn't he realize that the professor he worked for was a quack? I am sure that on one level he knows the professor is a quack because when he returns to Vienna he realizes that the patients in the Rehabilitation hospital are in danger because of the professor's incompetence. I don't expect that army officers would have any understanding of mental illness in 1916 (witness the problems that obnoxious Patton had in the U.S. Army twenty years later) but even incompetent military officers at higher levels would have some provisions for dealing with mental cases.

I also didn't like the way the novel ended regarding Margaret and our hero. I can grasp that Lucius was in love with Margaret and that in dealing with his patients the way that he did, he broke down her barriers about getting involved with patients, as well as his own. It is interesting to me that in the end Lucius came to believe that he should not have gotten so involved and Margaret turned over a completely new leaf and came to believe that medical personnel should become involved. Nowadays there are cultural and societal rules regarding professional relationships and they are generally frowned upon so the relationship between Margaret and Lucius would have had professional consequences for both - more, most likely for Margaret. Not to mention that the patient/nurse relationship would have also had consequences for Margaret.

I am amazed at the amount of research that the author must have done to write this novel. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is not well known in this country so he would have had to do lots and lots of research. It added a layer of authenticity to the novel that he included all the little details about the problems people had in getting around in the post-WWI world. Just trying to remember the new names of towns and cities was a test - as Lucius found out. It was also interesting to me the iterations of the name of the modern Ukrainian city of Lvov. Lemburg - Lwow - Lvov, and it wasn't the only city that happened to. The risk that Lucius took just trying to travel and having the right papers issued by the right people was the subject for a novel in itself. Mason did a masterful job of getting those details correct.

I also noticed throughout the book that Mason named actual books and textbooks from that era, so it makes me wonder about the lack of including Freud. But, as I said that is a minor quibble. ...but, it does bug me.

I am glad that I stayed with it and finished this novel, but it was not an easy book for me to read. It tested my limits.

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard
I really enjoyed this short book. It was really an essay. The author originally gave it as a lecture in London, and it was subsequently published in book form by Livewright. The author is an expert on life in Ancient Rome and for this lecture she dealt with the way that women were silenced in the ancient world and drew the parallel's to the modern world. She starts with women in ancient literature and uses the Illiad and Odyssey as base points illustrating how women were cut out of the literature even when they were the focus of the story.
It was a fascinating comparison. There was lots of meat in this little book and it will become a gift for somebody in the near future. Highly recommended.

The Measure by Nikki Erlick
This was a Jenna's Book Club pick and had starred reviews. It was very good and I recommend it. At the beginning of the novel everyone in the world gets a wooden box with a string in it. The string turns out to be the length of one's life. It doesn't take long and soon the world is discriminating against the short stringers in various ways. The novel tells how that happens. It is a quality of life novel told in a fresh and unique way. I listened to it and it made a great recorded book. Highly recommended.

For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds by Jennifer Moxley
This book of essays is part essay, part literary criticism. Moxley is a poet and a bird lover. She uses poems and their imagery about birds as a starting point for her essays. The essays are of varying length and quality. The best ones are those that are part literary criticism with the common thread being birds. Moxley takes time to explain some of the inner workings of successful poetry as she is breaking the poems down and relating them to life. This was a very interesting book of essays in which I learned something while also being entertained with her style, imagery, and knowledge.

Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont
I am finding Christie Affair a hard book to listen to. It is one of those novels with a dual story line and it jumps back and forth from the woman with whom Archie is having the affair to Agatha. The novel is narrated by the same person and the transitions between the two personae is rough. I went to the library today and got the hardcopy of the novel so that I can check to make sure who is telling the story when I get confused. This was a Jenna Bush Book Club selection and I usually like her books, however, I am not sure about this one. I haven't given up on it and am about 100 pages into the novel, but it isn't working as well as an audio book as it should. It was a muddled mess of a book in my opinion. It certainly was a confusing novel to listen to. I also don't understand why Goodreads would say this is one of the best historical fiction novels of the year.
It was one of those novels that jumped back and forth from one point-of-view to another and was narrated by one voice. This made it very hard to distinguish when the point-of-view jumps happened. It might have worked better if two different people had narrated it, but since they didn't this novel is getting a very harsh review from me. I don't recommend it at all.

Wandering Through Life: A Memoir by Donna Leon
I was somewhat taken aback by the flippant tone of this memoir/essay book. The first section of it is about her family life and her early professional life. She was decidedly nonchalant and ambiguous about her early professional life and all of this surprised me given that her Guido Brunetti novels tackle such serious moral and ethical topics. The best part of the book was the last sections in which she settled down and wrote why things such as as music of Handel, bees, and Venice were so important to her. I can say I am glad that I did not pay full price for this insubstantial memoir, but I would recommend it to the people who read her mysteries just because it is full of background material.

My review of this book for the Mystery Series group.
I came into this book with certain expectations and for the most part they weren't met. The book is not a memoir in the way that most readers would be expecting. It is really a series of essays. The tone of this book is rather light-hearted and flippant and it makes me wonder if that is they way Leon is in real life. The essays about her early life certainly make her appear to be less than serious and to just wander through life without care or worry. I found that surprising because her Brunetti novels are so serious and tackle very serious subjects. This book/memoir didn't do that. The essays about the cruise ships and the over running of the city of Venice by tourists seemed like they were written by a cranky elitist. The essay about her love of bees was a complete contrast to most of the others in that it expressed true wonder and passion. The most interesting and outstanding essays were the ones about music and her love of that medium - especially for the composer Handel and for opera. It is there that a reader gets a sense of the depth of her passion, understanding, joy, and obsession with that art form. It is these essays that draws the reader into her life and gives them an understanding of what makes her tick.

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
I listened to this book and have to say up front that this was a good recorded version of this novel. However, I am not sure what to think about the novel itself. It is a work of science fiction in the tradition of Ursula LeGuin, due to the social and cultural critique contained in the plot. Do I think that was well done? No. I finished the entire novel and was left wondering what the novel was about. I had to do some internet digging to find something written about it to help me figure out the point. If you have to do research to find out what a novel is about is it a good novel?

According to what I read, this novel is about the importance of keeping a historical record and keeping memories close and personal. I certainly didn't see that while I was reading it. This is the third book in this series that I have read and I think it will be the last. They are simply too much work to read and listen to and I don't seem to be getting the point. Time to move on to other series.

American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis
I don't often read short stories and decided to read/listen to this collection on a whim. I got the recorded version through our ILL system. The short story collection has been on my bookshelves since September 11, 2020. The reviews of this collection were very good and I agree with them. As always, some of the short stories were much better than others. I thought that the best one was "Dumpster Diving With the Stars" and the "Wainscoting War" was super funny, as was "How to be a Patron of the Arts."

The most outstanding thing about this book might have been the cover. It was colorful and eye-catching. It was a phot and it had a retro look harking back to the late 1960s with the big curlers and the mid-century modern orange terry cloth lounging outfit. But it was also modern with the pink hair and the modern shaped eye glasses. Overall, it was just very cool. So MCM. The look of the cover was very reflective of the contents of the stories. They were all about women who are modern but are also trying to be the perfect wife and housewife.

The narration of this collection was very good. There were four narrators who treated the reading as if it were a voice acting exercise. The end result was a recording that was entertaining and nuanced with all the necessary audio cues.

Soul of the Sky: Exploring the Human Side of Weather edited by C. Ralph Adler and Dave Thurlow
It was surprise last night when I finished reading my first book for this month. Soul of the Sky: Exploring the Human Side of Weather edited by C. Ralph Adler and Dave Thurlow. This was a shorter book with only 148 pages but it was chocked full of essays, both short and long, about how people react to weather, extreme and normal weather. The book was put together by the people at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire and as always such books have essays of uneven quality. Four of them were standouts. One by Diane Ackerman was particularly good about how to observe weather throughout the year. Another that really caught my interest was about a storm chaser who went looking for when storm chasing started. To his surprise the US Army heard reports about weird storms in the Plains and sent a nascent meteorologist to investigate in 1879. He is created with the first reliable reports of tornado and tornadic activity in the Plains. The essayist then used this report to try to find the town in Kansas that was totally destroyed by two tornados that hit it on the same day about 3 hours apart. It turned out that this town was close to where I live and I knew the area he was talking about. I had never heard about this town, so this was a fun read for me in that regard.

I admit it. I like essays. I like books of essays. I find essays to be a pleasant reading experience because you can put them down and pick them up more easily than many works of fiction or nonfiction.

The Martian by Andy Weir
I was ten years late to this party and boy did I miss out on a good book. This work of fiction is full, (and I mean FULL), of science, engineering, math, physics, astronomy, and great action! The book is one long science lesson and if a teacher could use it in chemistry, physics, or math class, it would be a series of amazing lessons. Technically, this book falls into the category of techno-thriller, but it is, sadly, science fiction, since I am sure that at some point in the future many of the things in this book will be proved impossible or simply, and more likely, out-of-date. In the meantime, it made for great reading/listening. I listened to it, and I should have probably read the book because of all the science and math in it. I am sure that in listening there are parts that I missed - but, hey!, I saw the movie.

Treacherous Net by Helene Tursten
This was book 8 in the Irene Huss series. In this entry the author introduces the reader to two murder mysteries. One is current and one involves a murder from 1983. That murder in turn leads to a murder in 1943. This is a new element in this series otherwise it is a fairly standard police procedural. The author also draws the reader into the main characters personal life by bringing in elements of the main characters home life. In this case, she is suddenly an empty nester, her husband isn't happy at his work, and her elderly mother is demanding more and more care. All of this, while the police department is trying desperately to track down a serial killer.

The more interesting of the two murder mysteries was the cold case one. This involved Swedish history from the WWII era. As a reader this mystery was not solved in a satisfactory manner and I wonder if it will turn up in a subsequent novel. It also involved the personal life of the former department head of the Violent Crimes Unit and his on-the-way-out attitude. This character halfway worked and the rest of the time he only wanted to be retired. I did like the way the author told this story and even though I didn't like the character I did like the story.

Hi Benita. Visiting your thread to see what you've been reading. There are to many new posts here! So I've skipped a few.

Promise to visit more in the coming months.

Mr. & Mrs. American Pie by Juliet McDaniel
I didn't expect to like this work of Chick Lit - but I did! This was a fun romp through the American cultural scene of the early 1970's. It is set in Palm Springs just after the Rat Pack has started to forget what it was that they liked about the place and while the city is becoming a bastion of white upper class societal rigidity. The social climber heroine is dumped by her husband and left with a nice amount of alimony and a condo in Scottsdale, AZ. This is Scottsdale before it has become the artsy new Palm Springs. It is a story of revenge and reward and it is told with verve and excitement. It kept me reading far into the night and I totally understand why some TV network grabbed the novel and made it into a TV series. I might watch it myself, but in the meantime, get the book and have some fun.

Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi
This is a gothic retelling of a combination of old fairy tales. As a gothic novel it succeeds. As a fairy tale retelling I am not so sure. The author does a fine job of maintaining the gothic atmosphere of the novel throughout, but the use of multiple fairy tales muddles the overall picture too much. The author is mostly known as a children's and YA author, but this is not a YA novel. It is clearly aimed at adults. It starts out charged with eroticism, mystery, and sexual games, but these disappear and with it the novel deflates. In the end it is another gothic romance wrapped up in a mishmash of fairy tales.

If you like gothic then read this. If you like fairy tale retellings be aware that the plot is going to be muddled.

I finished reading Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture by Daniel Mendelsohn. I read this for the LT Nonfiction Challenge. The September topic was essays. This was the longest book I had selected for this monthly topic at 432 pages. It was a collection of 24 essays that were written, mostly, for the New York Review of Books where Mendelsohn is a regular contributor of book and cultural reviews. (There were a couple of them that were written for other journals.) Mendelsohn is a Classicist and his education in all in that area. In these essays this training and intellectual bent shows clearly as the section on the Classics is the strongest section of the book. The book is largely arranged chronologically by the time period that is the subject of the essay. The strongest essays are at the beginning of the book and this corresponds roughly to how the essays are related to the Classics. The book ends with a series of essays about the modern literary and cultural critics. I found these essays to be the least interesting in the book and indeed, started but didn't finish read two of them. Mendelsohn is usually a very good author and I find his cultural opinions to be insightful and enlightening. They are certainly well worth reading. His essay on the filmography of John Cameron made me think of his work totally different and as inspired me to make an effort to systematically watch these films to see if I view them differently from the way I had in the past. This will force me to watch "Titanic," a film I have not had any desire to see. Mendelsohn opened my eyes to several works of classical literature to the point that I wish I had read them before reading "Song of Achilles," "Circe," and "Silence of the Girls." I did not find as much to interest me when Mendelsohn turned his thoughts to the modern era, and in fact, both essays that I did not read are critical essays about modern authors. Several of his essays about the later Romantic and Early Modern poets did not interest me but they did keep me reading. I also discovered a new German author, Theodor Fontane that I will have to try to read at some point in my lifetime. If I do so it will be purely because of the influence of Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn has another book of essays that was published in 2019 and I will have to read these at some point in the future. The fact that I want to read more of his work is indicative of the quality and the relevance I found in these essays.

Meet Me At the Bamboo Table: Everyday Meals Everywhere by A. V. Crofts
I picked up this delightful little book at Gorgas Library on a whim. I read it because it was a book of short essays and essays was the category for the LT September Nonfiction Challenge. It is 216 pages and so just over the 200 page limit for my short book project, but I set it beside my computer and read it while waiting for my computer to bootup. The essays and accompanying pictures were perfect for this sort of reading. The author is a well traveled person who has lived in many places around the globe. She keeps notebooks and makes drawings and notes about her experiences traveling and eating. This little book of essays is the published result of those notes and travel experiences. They cover territory from China in the 1990's to Italy and recently in the war zones of Syria. This type of book is a perfect mental break and the essays are easily read in 10 minutes or less. This is not an essay book to make you think, but one to make you want to sink into the comfy atmosphere it provides for a reader or dreamer.

Who Watcheth by Helene Tursten
This is book 9 in the Irene Huss series by this author. In this entry there is a serial killer on the loose at the same time that Irene is being stalked electronically by a person involved in a previous book in the series. The two cases blend together and are resolved in different ways. There is also the domestic part of Irene's life that has to be dealt with. She and her husband are aging, empty nesters, her husband suffers from depression and a need to change careers, her mother has died, and then downsizing from their house to a smaller apartment. All of these devices serve to turn Irene into a real person with lots of things to deal with beside serial killers and stalkers. I am looking forward to reading the last book in this series as it is clear that the author is trying to wrap up this series in a real-life kind of way.

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz
This is book 5 in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series of metafiction mysteries. This is not an easy sub-genre in which to do much writing but Horowitz always manages to pull it off. However, I am getting tired of Horowitz's bumbling Watson act.

The novel is a tricky mystery and it comes with a surprise twist at the end, and the writing is good. The reader gains a bit more insight into the characters of both Hawthorne and Horowitz and into the social and class structure of a typical British housing estate. There are lots of interesting characters in this novel and I can't wait for this series to make an appearance on PBS. They have serialized Moonflower Murders so they can darn well do the same for this series. When they do I will be watching.

I listened to this novel and I enjoy the narrator. He does a great job of voicing different characters. It does make it harder to distinguish when the action has moved to something different than the previous scene because there are not the visual clues that make such a transition easier, but nevertheless this series does work as a narrated book.

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
This is another of those Young Adult dystopian apocalyptical novels that the publishers were wise enough to publish as an adult novel. Probably because of the bad language in it. There are plenty of these novels out there for YA's to read so I found nothing special about this novel and wonder why it was a best seller.

I suspect that the author wrote the novel intending it to be a warning siren call to adults to take climate change seriously, but on that level it fails because it simply isn't serious enough. She would have done better to write a nonfiction book to do that.

On another level this a rewriting of Lord of the Flies and other Children-rule-the-world novels. It can also be read as a metaphor for growing up and casting off the childish need for adult supervision, even when parents have to come in and make a bungling rescue. In the course of the book whenever things get to tough there s some kind of adult who comes to the rescue.

It is a good thing this novel is short - it lessens the pain of reading it.

I didn't want to clog Mark's thread with more Bankers Boxes stories, but I get mine (real Bankers Boxes) at Office Depot. I'm not sure what Office supply places you have in your area, but Staples and other types probably would have them. And like you, I use the smaller ones to pack books. Can't hold as many books but definitely a lot easier for moving.

Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever by Geoff Edgers
I finished my first book for the October category. This one was a history of the collaboration between the Hip-Hop singers Run-DMC, and the hard rock band Aerosmith. Aerosmith had made and recorded the song Walk This Way in 1977 and was a band on the skids for many reasons, but drug addiction was the main one. The book also introduced the music producer Rick Rubin, who was the force behind getting Run-DMC to cover the Aerosmith hit Walk This Way. He was also the one who, almost forced them, to collaborate on the MTV video that turned the hit into a smash hit. This is the same producer who went on to produce Johnny Cash and revive his career, among others. The book was a biography of the making of the cover and the MTV video. I am not a Hip-Hop fan and so much of the history of that musical genre was new to me, but I enjoyed the book for what it was.

I do have one complaint. I really dislike the use of hyperbolic titles and the title for this book is a classic. One son that changed American music forever? Really? I can see that this collaboration between Hip-Hop and rock did blend parts of both genres. I can see that it opened doors to black musicians by exposing Hip-Hop to white audiences, which was where the money was, thus providing them greater exposure and added economic value to the genre. I can see that it did introduce fans of one genre to another, but change American music forever? I am not so sure about that. However, I am wiling to cut the author some slack on this one because he is a music and culture reporter for the Washington Post and so is much accustom to hyperbolic titles. He probably thought that kind of title was normal.

Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
This is the 5th book written by this author that I have read. I have enjoyed each one. See's greatest talent is that she opens up parts of the world and the world's varying cultures to readers in totally different areas of the world. She does this in an easy reading style that makes these worlds accessible. This historical novel was all about tea. Pu'reh tea, to be specific. The growing, marketing, and consumption of it. It was also about the ways that traditional China is changing and how that changing is affecting the lives of those caught in it. This novel explores friendships and business in a traditional world that has been "discovered" by the outside world. My main criticism of this novel is that the heroine has a fairy tale life in many ways, but that is balanced by the fact that the character is the vehicle the author used to tell the larger story of China's ethnic minorities and how political decisions made thousands of miles away affected the lives of these people.

Tradition: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World's Most Beloved Musical by Barbara Isenberg

Basically, this book is a short history of the creation of an American Musical legend. It starts with the collaboration between three men and how they came up with the idea. It is full of tidbits about this collaboration. For instance, the threesome wrote about 50 songs for the musical, but many of them were ditched early on, while other's were dropped only after the first staging's of the musical in Detroit. The making of the movie went much smoother but still was interesting.

I am not sure that this is the world's best loved musical, but the author sure makes a good case for that, with the final chapters devoted to statistics about the musical. Clearly, these are put into the book to justify the use of the term "World's Best Loved..."

I enjoyed this book about the creation of the musical and the movie. It introduced me to many legends about which I didn't know anything and now will have to put on my gargantuan TBR list. The history of the writing of the musical was quite well down and documented, as was the movie version. The part that wasn't as well documented but was great fun to read, was the part about how the musical was put together.

>119 benitastrnad: That's a very long title, Benita.

>120 connie53:
and very hyperbolic. I thought it was also funny and probably meant to be that way.

Starless Crown by James Rollins

This is book 1 in the Moon Fall series. I had it in my TBR list but had no intention of reading it now. However, since I knew I was going to be making several long drives back and forth to Alabama, and it was there on the shelves at the library, I grabbed it. It is epic fantasy and it as a great way to pass the many miles. There are currently three books in the series with the third one due out early next year. That means that I will now be looking for book 2 to listen to when I need to occupy my time on a long drive.

For epic fantasy, I highly recommend this series. It is a slightly different take on epic fantasy, but still familiar enough that fantasy fans will love it.

On Girlhood: 15 Stories From the Well-Read Black Girl Library edited by Glory Edim

I don't read many short story collections. I have always found the form to be too short for my tastes. This collection, however, was a very very very good read. The short stories were all carefully selected and included in this volume and was aimed at the specific audience of the readers of the Well-Read Black Girl Blog. Each of the selected stories were exquisitely written and helped to shed light on the Black Girl experience. Questions of identity, behavior, and expectations were all dealt with in this volume. If you are interested in learning more about the Black Girl experience this volume is a must read. It is both entertaining and enlightening. It has prompted me to look into the writing of some of the authors whose work I had never read. I highly recommend this collection - even if you don't like short stories.

English Creek by Ivan Doig

This is the first book in the McCaskill family trilogy and it is a realistic, honest, and heartwarming coming of age novel. It is set in small town Montana in 1939. Jick's is 14 and his brother is 18 and in love. The older brother is a very talented student and the family expectation is that he will be the one to go to college and make something of himself. He only wants to get married and cowboy for a living. This splits the family. Jick is the observant brother who only wants the family to all get along. The book is a peon to a good decent family and the life that they live prior to the coming of WWII. The descriptions of life in a farming and ranching community are rich with descriptions and many of the scenes are full of humor and love. Some readers might think this novel is merely nostalgia write large, but it was so much more. Doig's descriptions are beautiful to read. The action is slow moving, and the climax unexpected and comes with a very gentle denouement.

Mango and Peppercorns: A Memoir of Food, an Unlikely Family, and the American Dream by Tung Nguyen, Kathy Manning an Lyn Nguyen.
This was an easy relaxing book to read. I should have been reading it on the long dark night of the soul last Tuesday. It would have relaxed me. I try to read one "food" book about food, or a chef, or the restaurant industry every year. This was my last minute selection for this year. It was a good one. It is the story of Tung and Kathy. Tung was a Vietnamese refugee and Kathy was the big-hearted midwesterner who sponsored her when she came to the US. Together they created one of the top restaurants in Miami. Their relationship wasn't always easy but they managed and made it to the top of the restaurant world.

Armor of Light by Ken Follett
This is book 5 in the Kingsbridge series. The setting is England from 1790 - 1820, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. What I found interesting about this novel was that most of the story is told with an emphasis on religion. (this was the same in the previous novel in this series.) Here the opposing religions are the Church of England and Methodism. I also found the author to be sympathetic to the changes brought about by the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. This is not normally the case in many historical novels about England during the Napoleonic Era. The author is also clearly sympathetic to the changes in the English Parliamentary system: the development of universal suffrage, the lessening of power in the House of Lords, and the movement towards a constitutional monarchy, plus the trade union movement. Clearly, the author is trying to tell the story of the common man rather than that of the aristocracy. For this he should be congratulated.

I listened to this novel and found the narrator to be excellent. Great pacing and timing with the voice.

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This is another of Reid's California novels. This one centers around a dysfunctional family - the Riva's. The story is very well told and it is the kind of novel that is easy to listen to and like. The Riva's are all sired by the greatest singer of the late 20th century Mick Riva. He married their mother twice and left her twice. He has sired multiple children with multiple women and finally at the end of the novel he shows up to claim his title as patriarch of the family. The catalyst for telling the story is a wild Hollywood party given by the siblings yearly. Over the years it has gained a reputation for being wild and crazy and this party gets out-of-hand early on. I listened to this novel and found the narrator to be excellent. This was good on-the-road listening.

Yellow Rambutan Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu
This is book 6 in the Crown Colony and Su Lin Mysteries by Yu. The setting is Singapore just after WWII and the British have returned. It is not a happy reunion. The British don't have the money to make the needed repairs and return Singapore to prosperity and instead act like the conquering heroes who want things to return to the way it was before the war. It is Chinese New Year and Su Lin and the family are sick with some bad food poisoning and then a murder occurs just outside their doorstep. Su Lin begins to investigate and discovers that her mentor, Le Froy is back from his postwar stay in England. However, the round of sickness at home continues and solving the murder becomes Su Lin's primary focus. This is the best one of this series so far. It has a more complex mystery in it and with all the returning characters from previous books the scope is widening. This makes for a nice complex cozy mystery.

Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett
This is book 4 in the Kingsbridge series that started with the blockbuster Oprah Book Club title Pillars of the Earth. This was a prequel to the series and gives the Kingsbridge series reader the background startup of the town of Kingsbridge and how it became a thriving market and cathedral town. This was not the most entertaining book in the series, but as with all the entries, this one was full of information about life in the pre-Norman conquest era of English history. The novel is rich in information about cultural mores as well as church and governmental administrative laws. I listened to this novel on a long-distance trip and the narrator was excellent. That, combined with the fact that I was trapped in a car probably kept me listening more than the quality of the novel. However, if you are invested in this series it is good background for the series.

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
I read this book for my real life book discussion group and like all of the books this group has read by this author, it was very well done. It lends itself to lots of discussion. The book is a short history of the Mormon Church but what the author is really concerned with is the rise of a violent fundamentalist faction within the church. The book explores the roots of this violent faith and to do that successfully he has to explore the beginnings of this religion. This book is a good example of exploring past history and its effect on the present. It is also very good in-depth reporting. If you are looking for a good book for a book discussion this one should be a candidate. It is also a great example of the narrative nonfiction format. I was unable to put this book down once I started reading it. It is one of those titles that makes a person stop and think about their own religious values and fundamental tenants of their personal faith.

>130 benitastrnad: That looks deeply disturbing

>131 EGBERTINA:
It is disturbing because of the lengths that some people will go to expand and defend their faith. The author really goes into depth about how far some personality types are willing to go to promote their particular interpretation of their faith. Why so many people are intransigent regarding their interpretation of the pillars of thief chosen religion is the basis for this book. I recommend it as an introduction to people who are interested in the radicalization of religions.

Matrix by Lauren Groff
This was a very good book. It is also a book about the development of faith. In this case it is a fictionalized life of a woman who is forced to enter a convent. Eventually she becomes the abbess and the novel covers her religious development over the course of her life. It also provides a fictionalized framework for the development of monastic life that might make that kind of lifestyle more understandable. The heroine of this novel develops this small failing community of nuns into a thriving monastery and in the course of doing so finds fulfillment and a lifetime of loving friendships and companionship. This novel is very much worth the time to read it. I listened to this novel and the narrator was very good.

Open Season by C. J. Box
This is book 1 in the Joe Pickett series. Pickett is a game warden in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Game wardens are law enforcement but they are confined to dealing only with matters that have to do with the management of wildlife. Essentially they are poacher protection. However, Pickett is endowed with an ethic that demands that he do the right thing, so when a man is murdered in his backyard and that man is a person that he had arrested earlier that year for poaching an elk, Pickett is not satisfied with the quick arrest made by the sheriff's department. He keeps digging and runs into another mystery that eventually endangers his entire family. This was a standard murder mystery, but it was a very satisfying way to pass the time on the road.

I listened to this book and it was a well done recording. I liked the narrator.

Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things by Hannah Holmes
I read this one for the nonfiction reading group for the November topic of "To Small to See." Dust is often too small to see, so it worked for this category. The book was full of information and I learned a great deal from it. However, I expected it to be more narrative nonfiction. It wasn't. It was much more academic than I thought it would be, and not as interestingly written as it could have been. But I did learn a great deal from it so it wasn't a total loss.

A Refiner's Fire by Donna Leon
This is book 33 in the Guido Brunetti series and it was more of the same about Guido and his life in Venice. This may make the book sound uninteresting, but don't be deceived - this book and any of the others in the series are great fun to read.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson
I listened to this book while driving to Alabama. I like Atkinson's books, but this one was a clunker. It was dull and never caught my interest. It is set in WWII and involves a young woman who is recruited for work in MI5 as a counter intelligence officer. Her job is to transcribe what is recorded from the bugged apartments of a fascist group in the UK during the war years. This novel just didn't work for me.

Conviction by Denise Mina
This is the first book in the Anna & Fin series by this author. The cover says this is a psychological thriller, but I found it to be a great murder mystery. I don't like psychological thrillers. They scare me, but this was a perfect murder mystery for me. Mina has created two interesting characters. Some of the backstory for both of them I found to be somewhat implausible, but for the most part these were characters I liked to read about. The book starts with the breakup of Anna's marriage when her husband leaves her for Fin's wife, who is also Anna's best friend. While running from her present troubles Anna stumbles across the story of a past friends murder and she sets out to find out what really happened. At first Fin goes along for the ride, but then gradually he becomes as active in solving the mystery as is Anna. The mystery was very well done, and this is a series that I will try to follow-up on because there are two more books in this series.

Winterkill by C. J. Box
This is book 3 in the Joe Pickett series. (I couldn't find book 2 on the shelves at Tuscaloosa Public Library, so took this one instead.) This another rousing adventure with game warden Pickett and his family. This time Pickett arrests a fellow game warden employee for wantonly killing an entire herd of elk. When the suspect escapes Pickett tracks him, only to find that somebody has murdered him. Once again, Pickett's pursuit of the truth of the matter leads him to conclusions with which others don't agree and he has to find the real killer before his family is irreparably damaged. The narration was very well done.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford
I read this book for my real life book discussion group. It was the September selection. I was surprised because most of the group liked this book. I found it to be heavy educational philosophy, but since so many in this group are educators of one ilk or another we had a very good discussion about this book. Crawford has a PhD in philosophy but makes his living as a motorcycle mechanic. The book is about the value of working in the trades, or with ones hands and how these skills are undervalued in our current society. He also points out that our educational systems also undervalue preparing people for this kind of skilled labor. Even thought this book was published in 2009, it was a very well done discussion of many current issues in public education. The group liked it, and so did I.