What are you reading now?: November 2, 2024.

In striking distance of finishing The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands. George W. Goethals and the Army and Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World will follow.

I will note now that there will be a new thread launched on November the 9th, but it might be a little later in the day. I'll be in transit that day, coming back from vacation.

I've about 60 pages to go now in Shattered Tablets: the End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer. It's a mixed bag, I guess I'd say at this point. After this I'll be returning to M. Proust to read the last quarter of The Guermantes Way, which I've been reading in 150-page chunks.

Canary Girls – Jennifer Chiaverini
Book on CD narrated by Saskia Maarleveld
3.5***

Chiaverini turns the reader’s attention to the British women who, during The Great War (i.e. World War I), worked in munitions factories to produce the shells the British men fighting on the continent needed to win the war. She focuses on four women: April, Marjorie, Lucy and Helen.

April and Marjorie are young housemaids who leave service to join other women working as munitionettes in the factories producing weapons for the soldiers. Lucy is a bit older, a married women with two children who also joins the women at Thornshire Arsenal, doing her part to ensure her husband and other soldiers will have the tools they need to win the war.

Helen Purcell is also married – to the owner of the factory. But she wants to work not only for the cause, but for the health and wellbeing of the factory workers. For these workers who are handling large quantities of TNT every day are exhibiting significant side effects, the most noticeable of which is the yellow hue of their skin, hence their nickname of Canary Girls. This reminded me of the nonfiction work, The Radium Girls.

While I knew about the many “Rosie the Riveter” workers during WW2, I was completely unaware of this part of the history of WWI. I really appreciated learning more about this, and about the way the women in the various factories formed football clubs (soccer to Americans) and showed that women COULD not only play but excel. In this respect, the book reminded me of the movie A Leage of Their Own.

Saskia Maarleveld does a fine job of performing the audiobook. She has a lot of characters to deal with, many of them women, but I never felt confused about who was speaking.

>1 Shrike58: Have fun on your trip!

I'm back to reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Illustrated Edition. I have about 150 pages to go.

I just finished listening to Isabel Allende's Eva Luna, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I thought that the ending was weak, perhaps a bit rushed.

I'm reading The Marco Effect by Jussi Adler-Olsen, and I think that my next audiobook will be Middlemarch by George Eliot. It's 35 hours long, which seems like a lot!

>1 Shrike58: Enjoy your vacation!

>1 Shrike58: Yes! Enjoy your vacation and thanks for all your hard work.

I've just started Our Missing Hearts and have just finished The Last Light of the Sun and Three Hainish Novels which I really found hard to put down. So I think I'll start on Lancelot by Chrétien de Troyes this week as well.

The Paris Apartment – Lucy Foley
Digital audiobook performed by Clare Corbett, Daphne Kouma, Julia Winwood, Sope Dirisu, Sofia Zervudachi, and Charlie Anson.
4****

Jess is broke and alone and calls her brother, Ben, to ask if she can crash with him for a spell. He reluctantly agrees. When she shows up she’s surprised by what a nice building and apartment this is, and even more surprised that Ben isn’t in the apartment. Where is he? The other residents of the building seem unconcerned and certainly unwilling to help Jess discover the truth of what has happened to her brother.

Foley has crafted a mystery / thriller with more twists and turns than the most treacherous mountain road. Not a single character – including Jess – is to be trusted. Everyone has a hidden agenda, a secret they wish to keep hidden. Most are master manipulators and accomplished prevaricators. I was engaged and enthralled throughout and could not put it down.

The audiobook is masterfully performed by a full cast of talented voice artists, each taking on one of the narrators. This is very helpful in keeping this large cast of characters straight.

OK, I've finished Shattered Tablets: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer. My rather mixed review of this very recently published book can be found on my 50-Book Challenge thread. Now it's back to Proust's The Guermantes Way, which I've been reading in 150-page segments (in other words, a quarter of the book at a time). I'm now reading the final quarter.

I have been rather silent here of late because I was involved in reading Hawaii. I read the book primarily to gain insight into the history of Hawaii and it provided that very well. It did so while also creating a variety of interesting characters. It maintains interest throughout its many pages. My interest stems from the fact that I am moving to Hawaii in January. That also means I may continue to be a bit slow in my reading.

I've got about eighty pages to go in Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science. It's an interesting book even if it's a bit dense. The Sumerian and Akkadian languages seem to lack a word for nature. The author argues that this lack leads to a very different way of conceptualizing the world. Without the concept of an external world that can be studied systematically there is no way to develop science as it was formulated in the West.

He spends a considerable time discussing how a "kind" of science is defined by the Babylonians and Assyrians in the form of divination. He puts a lot of emphasis on how they systematized divination in a rational manner creating a sort of code book for divination in the form of "if p then q" statements. If a child is born with it's right foot deformed then there will be bad luck. If it's left foot is deformed, then there will be good luck. To the author, this has the form of science. His argument is weak and has nothing to do with science to put it kindly.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting attempt to decipher how ancient Mesopotamians viewed their world. While he discusses Babylonian astronomy, he completely ignores the practical engineering skills of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. They built an elaborate and efficient irrigation network, monumental architecture, and many practical inventions: the potter's wheel, plows that dispensed seeds as you tilled the fields, and aqueducts that wouldn't be rivaled until the Romans came along. None of these things would have been possible without envisioning the world as a place that follows discernible rules that can be exploited to change your environment.

Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig
2nd and finale to the "Shepherd King" duet.
I brought the Barnes and Noble Exclusive editions--they're collectors!

Everything We Didn’t Say – Nicole Baart
2.5**

From the book jacket: Juniper Baker was nineteen when her world was torn apart. As fireworks lit up the summer sky, her neighbors were brutally murdered right outside their barn, and Juniper’s younger brother became the prime suspect. She escaped, pledging never to return. Until now. Officially, she’s back in town to help a friend. But really, she’s here to repair her relationship with her teenage daughter, and to solve the infamous Murphy murders. As a dogged local true-crime podcaster starts sniffing around, the race to the truth puts past and present on a dangerous collision course.

My reactions:
Been there, read that. There’s all kinds of crazy going on in small town Jericho, Iowa. Juniper’s secrets are par for the course, as her parents, her brother and just about everyone else in town seems to harbor secrets. I get that authors use this device to help build suspense, but I just found it tiresome. Also, I am so tired of the ubiquitous dual timeline.

The whole teen romance and best-friend-now-enemy subplot was unnecessary. And I felt that Baart left enough loose threads to knit a sweater.

Still, it held my attention throughout. I had not figured out the culprits of either the long-ago murder, or the recent harassment before they were revealed. And I can see the appeal for a great many readers. So, my final rating is just shy of “okay.”

The Indifferent Stars Above – Daniel James Brown
Digital audiobook narrated by Michael Prichard
4****

Subtitle: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride

Brown looks at the events that led to and resulted from the infamous Donner Party trapped in a blizzard in the mountains near present day Lake Tahoe. I think that most people today have at least heard of the Donner Party, and for most of us the single thing we remember is their descent into cannibalism, but Brown gives us a more complete picture. We learn of their goals, hopes, and dreams, of their preparations and survival skills. We also learn about their mistakes and disagreements.

He chose to focus on one particular young woman, Sarah Graves, who was a 21-year-old newlywed when the group, which included her new husband, her parents and younger siblings, set out from Illinois bound for California, and who survived the ordeal. Brown did extensive research, interviewing descendants, pouring over historical reports, and actually replicating parts of the journey so that he could get a real sense of walking through waist-high fields of prairie grasses, experience the blinding whiteness of walking across salt flats in summer, feel the bitter wind of a snowstorm in the mountains. This made the tale more personal, even visceral, and helped this reader feel connected to Sarah and the entire Donner party.

Michael Prichard does a marvelous job of performing the audiobook. Nonfiction – even narrative nonfiction – can be dry at times but his delivery kept me engaged and interested in hearing the story.

The new thread is up over here.