Author Archives: Lois_PA

This and that

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I picked up Murder at the Library of Congress, by Margaret Truman, at the lunch bunch book swap, although I was pretty sure I had read it before.  Nice light reading; the details and plots in Margaret Truman’s mysteries are interesting, well written and plausible.  This one is about a murder at the Library of Congress that is connected with an art robbery and a mysterious diary written during one of Columbus’s voyages.  Now, I did read the book (and for the second time because I had read it before), but I still couldn’t remember what it was about and had to check Amazon to refresh my memory.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run by Peter Allison, was one of the first books I bought for my Kindle back in 2009, when I was stocking up on books for my assignment in Riyadh.  I chose it because it was written by a safari guide who worked in Botswana, and, since I had been on safaris in Botswana, I thought it might be interesting.  Four years later, I finally read it.  It’s a fun read, Peter Allison is a good storyteller but obviously not a professional writer and the book could have done with some editing.  The young, naïve Peter Allison moved from Australia to southern Africa with dreams of wildlife and adventure, but no actual knowledge about African game animals and their habitats and habits.  Africa does have a way of taking in adventurers though, and he found work in the Botswana tourist safari business, quickly working his way up to guide and manager at a high-end safari camp in the Okavango Delta.  I’ve read more compelling and authoritative books about wildlife and about Africa; the real insights and entertainment in this book are the behind the scenes details about running the unpredictable business of showing wild animals to the unpredictable people who have paid big bucks for the experience.

The Mental Floss History of the World is another book from the initial 2009 stock of Kindle books.  This is a lighthearted but factually respectable history of the world: many parts of the world over thousands of years, not just the European/North American parts.  The authors are editors of Mental Floss magazine, which I haven’t read, although I do like the Mental Floss website, especially the quizzes.  I have read this book in fits and starts, over a period of years, and still haven’t finished it, but not because it is boring.  It is cleverly and concisely constructed, and the perfect thing to dip in to between other books.

Bookstores, and especially used bookstores, are dangerous places for me, and I seldom go into one.  But several people had recommended Mr. K’s bookstore here in Charleston, so we finally went.  Mr. K’s is a huge and very organized bookstore, although I found the organization so detailed it was confusing and hard to figure out where things should be, and the prices for used books, particularly mass market paperbacks, seemed high.  Of course I eventually found some books and authors that have been on my various Wish Lists for a while, and I’ve actually read one already.  I found Little Tiny Teeth, by Aaron Elkins, in one of the mystery sections.  Elkins writes a series about forensic pathologist Gideon Oliver, and I’ve read and enjoyed several of them.  Problem is, I have a terrible time remembering the author’s name, and whenever I’ve found Elkins’ books in the library or a bookstore, it’s always been by luck, not design.  The little tiny teeth in the title are piranha teeth, and the setting is a dilapidated river boat taking a botanical expedition on the Amazon.  The plot was a little tricksy, but the descriptions of the characters and the boat and the river were a lot of fun.   Now that I have Aaron Elkins’ name straight, I can look for more of his books in the library.

Discovering new (to me) authors

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I’ve been reading a lot since March, and have a lot of catching up to do in writing blog posts.  I need to organize the reading into a few broad categories, and I’ve already started with the Tried and True and Book Club posts.  I’m pleased that so many of the books I’ve read are by new authors, and I want to start by loosely organizing those books and authors into this post.  I will write in more detail about some of them in other posts.

I discover most new authors through recommendations from readers I know.  Two of the best recommendations I’ve had this year were for Jacqueline Winspear, author of the wonderful Maisie Dobbs series, and Susan Elin MacNeal, who writes the Maggie Hope series.  A member of the CCR book club recommended Maisie Dobbs, and my friend Lois G. recommended Maggie Hope.  I might have discovered these wonderful historical mysteries on my own sooner or later, but it’s just as likely that I wouldn’t have. 

I heard about another author, Steve Berry, at a picnic to celebrate our friend Ann’s U.S. citizenship.  During a group conversation about books, the topic of Dan Brown’s historical conspiracy-based bestselling thrillers came up, and, while most of us had read all or some of them, there were a couple of disparaging remarks about Brown’s signature writing style and lurid far-fetched plots.  Somebody remarked that an author named Steve Berry was a better historian and better writer than Dan Brown, and that his Cotton Malone series is good.  I just finished my third Cotton Malone novel, and I’ve also read one of Berry’s stand-alone books, so I’m enjoying this recommendation.        

I also find new authors in the book swap at the once-a-month lunches organized by Dave (Dave’s Lunch Bunch).  I enjoyed The Two-Minute Rule, by Robert Crais, and this accomplished author of thrillers is a great find.  I didn’t find The Alibi, by Sandra Brown, that good.  Sandra Brown is a prolific mystery/suspense writer, and I should give her another chance.  It looks like the library has a lot of her books.

Amazon is a good source of recommendations on new-to-me authors, as well as new books by familiar authors.  I love browsing the book titles that show up in the ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ scroll bar.  This is how I found The Monuments Men, by Robert Edsel, an unusual non-fiction take on World War 2:  Army art curators and architects who were assigned to protect and retrieve some of the great art treasures of Western Europe.  Sometimes customer reviewers mention authors who they find similar to or better than the books under review.  And the Kindle Deal of the Day has introduced me to many new authors.  I have bought several $1.99 Kindle Deal books, and have even read some of them.  Sometimes a little new-author overlap goes on with the Deals.  I bought, read and enjoyed Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais, the author I discovered in the swap pile.  I bought, read and found silly Lady Fortescue Steps Out, by M.C. Beaton, an author recommended in a customer review.  Books and authors I took a complete $1.99 chance on and liked are Berried to the Hilt (Gray Whale Inn mystery), by Karen MacInerney, and Dead Insider (Loon Lake mystery), by  Victoria Houston.  These are from detective series set, respectively, on an island off the Maine Coast and in northern Wisconsin.  The rest of the Deals purchased to date are awaiting my attention in the Kindle Stash.

Movies and TV shows based on books can also lead to some good reading.  I ordered a delightful Australian TV series called “Miss Fisher’s Mysteries” from Netflix, based on Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series.  I read Cocaine Blues, the first book in the series, and the tone of the book is quite different than the TV series, and will take some getting used to.  Some of the recurring characters I liked most on the TV show have very minor roles in the book, and Phryne is sadder and more brittle than the sprightly, gorgeously dressed heroine on the show.  But – Phryne’s back story, thoughts and motivation are much more fully developed in the book, and she is a compelling and interesting character on the page.  And a beautiful little film called “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” led me to the excellent novel of the same name, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday.  The novel is written in the form of e-mails, memos and interviews, and anyone who has ever worked in a bureaucracy will recognize the inexorable forces that can compel a competent, sane bureaucrat to work on a project as bonkers as introducing salmon to a river in the Yemeni desert.  The main characters in the book and the movie are the same, and the scheme to help an enigmatic Yemeni sheikh to transplant his beloved sport of salmon fishing to Yemen is still the same, but the characters’ fates are different.  In the movie, Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt logically have a happy ending; in the novel, the ending is sadder but just as logical.  Somebody did a great job of adapting a wonderful book into a wonderful movie.  The stories may vary, but the moral and emotional impact are the same. 

Newspaper book reviews and articles are also excellent resources for learning about new authors.  For me, the find of the year so far is The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith.  Except, this is a bit of a new author cheat, since Robert Galbraith is a pen name for J.K. Rowling; her name was in the title of the online article, so I clicked on it.  The Cuckoo’s Calling is a detective novel, and the hero, Cormoran Strike, was in the military police until he lost a leg in Afghanistan.  J.K. Rowling is a wonderful author, and she sets up a great plot when Strike is hired to investigate the death of a fabulously successful fashion model, who was also the adopted daughter of a wealthy and spectacularly disfunctional family.  Like the later Harry Potter books, Rowling does get bogged down with too much detail and more plot twists than necessary toward the end of the book, but that is a comment, not a complaint.  The book is a great read and I loved it.  To make it extra special, a couple of pubs we visited on our trip to England had Doom Bar, Cormoran Strike’s favorite beer, on tap. It is delicious, although I didn’t drink it eleven pints at a time, like Strike does.

And then, there is browsing in bookstores, guaranteed to bring new authors to my attention, and new books onto my already crowded bookshelves.  This is why I very seldom go into bookstores, unless the bookstore is very special, like Blackwell’s in Oxford.  Blackwell’s is not only a thoroughly wonderful historical bookstore, it was also the sponsor and starting point of a walking tour of sites associated with the Inklings, the literary drinking club famously attended by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Naturally, I bought The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends, by Humphrey Carpenter when we got back to Blackwell’s. I’ve since read most of it, and flipped through the rest, and all I can say is:  Nearly all of the book is about C.S. Lewis and C.S. Lewis was one strange person.  While I was in Blackwell’s, I resisted browsing further, but did pick up a book called The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer.  I’d seen the book in the giftshop at Clifford’s Tower in York, along with a novel called The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory, but didn’t have time to buy them then.  I bought The White Queen at a W.H. Smith bookstore in Heathrow Airport, my last chance, last book fling in the U.K.  There was a good “buy one, get one half off” deal there, so I also bought Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin.  The White Queen is Elizabeth Woodville, the unsuitable woman who married England’s last York king, Edward IV, and the book is high-grade historical romance, with surprisingly good details about the last years of the Wars of the Roses underpinning the romantic doings.  A good, fun plane flight read.  The Ian Rankin book is his latest Inspector Rebus mystery, and it was excellent, so I’ll be looking out for more of his books.  I especially enjoyed Rebus’ comments on the extensive, disruptive roadworks in his hometown of Edinburgh; we had just visited Edinburgh, and the roadworks were still in full swing a year after the book was published.  

Great finds in new authors and new series, no worries about fulfilling my need to read for a while.

CCR Book group

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I have been participating in the Center for Creative Retirement’s (CCR) book group, and it has introduced me to some very interesting reading.  After Caleb’s Crossing, the next book was called Deerhunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, by Joe Bageant.  After many years, Joe Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, and found that old friends and neighbors were falling farther and farther behind in the American quest for the good life.  Joe got pretty upset about the economic and political forces that were making mincemeat out of the decent, hardworking, goodhearted people of Winchester, so he wrote this interesting but uneven polemical book.  For me, the most fascinating part was the chapter on the mortgage racket that has trapped so many people in terrible debt – fascinating because the book was published in 2007, before the sub-prime mortgage induced crash hit.  So many people knew about systemic mortgage abuses, and tried so hard to get the word out, well before the whole stinking pile came crashing down in 2008 and could no longer be ignored.  OK, I am clearly with Joe in being angry with the sleazebags ripping off working America.  But the chapter on guns was convolutedly weird.

Since I was reading about the class war, I decided to go ahead and get a couple of books that had been on my list for a while:  The Great Divergence, by Timothy Noah, and Coming Apart, by Charles Murray.  I had read and appreciated Timothy Noah’s series of articles, also called The Great Divergence, on Slate.com, and thought it was worth having the expanded version in book form.  Noah’s writing about growing inequality is more analytical and less anecdotal than Bageant’s, but the book’s impact is even more powerful.  I read a little at a time, because it is really depressing.

Coming Apart is subtitled ’The State of White America, 1960-2010′.  Charles Murray is the controversial but very erudite libertarian author of The Bell Curve, for which he was much critcized by people whose opinions Charles Murray doesn’t care about.  Basically, in this new book I think Murray is saying that the white working class is in trouble because they’re shiftless, with weakened morals and no ambition, but Charles Murray doesn’t care what I think either.  While I don’t agree with Murray, his work is not mean-spirited and his careful research raises interesting and important points about income inequality, whether Murray believes in such a thing or not.

I joined the book club too late to discuss Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, but it has been on my reading list for a long time, and I decided if it was interesting enough for the book group, I’d might as well read it.  I enjoyed the story of the culture clash that surrounds the endearing friendship between the retired British major and the widowed Pakistani shopkeeper.  The very British family feud about a pair of heirloom shotguns and the generational problems in the Pakistani family struggling with assimilation were realistic and the resolution of the two plots was satisfying.

Although I read Madonnas of Leningrad, I didn’t make it to the book group’s discussion, which I heard was very good.  The heroine’s memories of her experiences sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the Nazi siege of Leningrad are vivid and detailed, much more real to her than her present day life as an old woman suffering from dementia in the U.S.  The madonnas of the title are the subjects of some of the Hermitage’s most beautiful and precious paintings, present only in the memories of the museum employees during the siege since the paintings had been sent away for safekeeping as the Germans advanced on Leningrad.  The tenuous relationship between memory and reality is deftly presented through the story, with an ending that I found intriguingly ambiguous.

The most recent book group selection was Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough.  Although McCullough is an exceptional author and I have enjoyed his books, I had no particular interest in the subject of this book:  Teddy Roosevelt’s life until he was 27.  Without the book group, I would not have read it, and I would have missed out on something fascinating.  I thought I knew everything I would ever need to know about TR’s sickly childhood, wealthy family, and cowboy doings in the West, but I was wrong.  The quirks, accomplishments, travel and tragedies of the Roosevelt family were unexpectedly enthralling, but I did find the dude experiences of Teddy and his dude friends in the Badlands oddly superficial.  For me, the best and most memorable part of the book was TR’s early political career, in what I had hitherto thought of as the very boring “Presidents with Beards” period of the late 19th century.  Wow, those politicians dealt with some momentous political issues, and their wheeling and dealing was blatant and effective.  The big eye-opener was that TR’s ultimately successful foray into politics was completely unprecedented for a wealthy young New York City gentleman.  He barged in where he was unexpected and not especially welcome, and made a place for himself.  Also, I loved all the details about his sumptuous wardrobe, the man was a snappy dresser.  The buckskin suit is to die for.

The next book is The Round House, by Louise Erdrich.  I think I’ll read it on my Kindle, and experiment with the highlighting feature.

Tried and True

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I’ve been so busy reading that I haven’t made time to write in quite a while.  I have been keeping a list of what I’m reading, and the books kind of sort themselves into categories.  First one is the Tried and True, all books that I own by some of my favorite authors.

In my last post, I had just started reading Fatherland, by Robert Harris.  I read this book years ago, and the only thing I really remembered about it was the setting in a post World War II world where the Nazis didn’t lose.  I had a vague idea that the story was a murder investigation by a homicide detective in occupied Britain, but the murders and investigation happen in Germany.  I thought Harris did a great job of establishing the historical base of real people and events in Nazi Germany, then extrapolating forward to 1964, just before Hitler’s birthday celebration and a state visit by the U.S. president.  Harris’ hypothetical Berlin is a plausible setting for a standard issue maverick homicide detective with ex-wife issues who gets a lot more interesting as he stubbornly persists when a murder investigation takes him deep into the worst of past and present Nazi evildoing.  Robert Harris is a true favorite of mine; I wish he had written more books.

I have never been that interested in John Le Carre’s post Cold War books; I have several that I had bought but never read.  Our Game, written in 1995,  is one of the first, about a British intelligence cold warrior put out to pasture when his experience is no longer considered useful.  I found the storyline about the former agent and his gorgeous much younger girlfriend tedious, but then the girlfriend runs away with another former agent whose unquenchable idealism and adrenaline addiction take the story into the Chechnyan separatists’ fight against the Russians, and the history of their struggle is tragic and still timely.  I finished this book not long before the Boston Marathon bombings, and the way the information about the bombers and their family’s background in Chechnya and Dagestan meshed with the grim details in Our Game was eery. 

I read Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, and trusty Dorothy Gilman did a believable job with the cultural and political atmosphere of this good story set in the imaginary African country of Ubangiba.  Unfortunately, this is the last Mrs. Pollifax book and there will be no more.  Good thing I enjoy rereading books from this series.

My Deborah Knott series reread book was Killer Market, set in the furniture showrooms in High Point, North Carolina.  I haven’t been to High Point, but we’ve visited the huge furniture mall in Hickory NC; bought furniture there too.  Margaret Maron is good at researching the details for her books, and even better at folding them smoothly into the plot.  Love this series, am waiting impatiently for the next book.

I always need a collection of short stories on hand as a break or a stopgap.  The most recent ones I’ve read are by longtime favorites Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse.  Christie’s Thirteen Problems (Miss Marple) and Labors of Hercules (Hercule Poirot).   were packed away in boxes for several years, so it was good to see them again.  I have several Christie short story books, but need to do research to see if there are any more of hers out there.  My current ‘need to read’ book is Meet Mr. Mulliner, by P.G. Wodehouse.  No Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in these short stories, but Mr. Mulliner and his many relations are classic in their own right. 

I have to admit that even I can reread books too many times:  I just about have the short story collections on my shelves committed to memory.  So I’ve started reading my Calvin and Hobbes books again, still incredibly good.  

 

Time flies …

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I drafted this post in March, but never published it to the website.  Not quite sure how that happened.  Here it is:

Seven weeks since my last post, and I’m surprised and dismayed that I have read so few books and have so little to write about.

Thanks Carol!

My friend Carol suggested I read Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks, this month’s selection for the Center for Creative Retirement’s book group.  I bought the book for my Kindle on March 1, and finished it in time for the book group’s meeting on March 6.  This is a beautifully written, highly enjoyable book, and the group members had a great discussion about it.  Caleb’s Crossing is set in 17th century Puritan Massachusetts, and the characters, language and style of the book feel just right for the time and place.  I read another book, March, by Geraldine Brooks a couple of years ago, and didn’t like it.  Now I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.

Geraldine Brooks is married to Tony Horwitz, one of my favorite non-fiction writers; I read his latest book Midnight Rising not long ago.

Where did the time go?

In my last post, I outlined my plan to reread Lord of the Rings, and compare the books with the movies.  So far, I’ve read The Fellowship of the Ring (Books I and II) and the first part of The Two Towers (Book III).  And these are pretty much the only books I had read since my last post until I started Caleb’s Crossing on March 1.  I resolved to read the whole trilogy in order, no skimming, no page flipping, and it is amazingly slow going.  Wonderful books, as good or better than I remember; I guess I’m savoring every word.

I did pull a mystery anthology off the shelf to take a break from Tolkien from time to time.  It’s a pretty good one:  The Night Awakens, edited by Mary Higgins Clark.  Some well-done stories by good writers; most of the authors are actually better at writing than Mary Higgins Clark, in my opinion.  Her plots are fine, but her writing can get kind of clunky.  Nice choices for the anthology though.

Did I at least try to read anything else?  Yes, I started The World is My Home, by James Michener.  It should be subtitled: and I’m the Most Interesting Person In It.  It is a long book with all of Michener’s most irritating writing habits: rambling, tangential, overly detailed, lots of padding.  You don’t have to tell me how awesome you are in such excruciating detail, James, it’s boring.  I’ve given up; it’s back on the shelf for now.

I also reread some of the most interesting parts of Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden’s detailed account of the American hostages’ experiences in Tehran.  After I saw Argo, I took the book off the shelf to see what Bowden had to say about the six Americans sheltered by the Canadians - not very much, just a passing reference.  His focus is on the hostages who had to deal with the horrors of Iranian captivity, and the planning and tragic outcome of the attempt to rescue them.  Excellent book, with intense, gripping interviews with many of the hostages.

I just started reading Fatherland, the first novel by one of my favorite authors, Robert Harris.  Harris imagines a police detective’s investigation of a murder in 1964 Berlin, in a German Empire ruled by Adolf Hitler, who won World War II.  I’m already halfway through, terrific suspenseful writing.

So where did the time go?  Reading too much online news and commentary about fake budget crises, other worldwide miseries, and the dingbats who cause them.  I’m trying to go cold turkey on Internet news, and read more interesting stuff that’s better for my frame of mind.

Tolkien rules

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Alan and I went to see Peter Jackson’s new movie The Hobbit.  We enjoyed it a lot, but got into a discussion about how much Jackson had added to Tolkien’s original story, and about how on earth Jackson was going to spin three long movies out of such a short book.  So there were shiny unread paperbacks of The Hobbit and all three Lord of the Rings books on the bookshelf, bought to replace my loved to tatters old paperbacks, and Alan decided to reread The Hobbit to figure out some of the answers.  Nearly all of the cool Radogast the Brown’s hedgehogs and rabbit sled stuff is new for the movie, but everything else is very close to the book.  I read the book again too, and it is great, lots of adventures and action; it’s short because a lot is crammed into a much faster pace than The Lord of the Rings.  I think Jackson and the screenwriters will have plenty for three Hobbit movies, and I want to see them all.  More new material like Radogast and his animals is fine with me.  Not sure how Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug AND the Necromancer will work, but hey, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch, yowza.  Also Lee Pace as Thranduil in the next movie, he’s good too.

I enjoyed The Hobbit so much, I’ve started The Fellowship of the Ring.  I used to be one of those people who read The Lord of the Rings once a year, but I haven’t really done that since the movies came out; I’ve been watching them once a year instead.  It’s high time to read the books again.  Then watch the movies again to see how they are different from the originals.  What a great plan.

 

Chewing gum for the brain

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Reading only “chewing gum” type books for a while is not a bad thing, I tell myself.  Nothing wrong with a well-written fast read with appealing characters and a good plot.  So I enjoyed popular novels by some old and new favorite authors over the holidays, and now I’m ready to get back to a mixed diet of solid non-fiction and more challenging novels, with some fun skim-through-the-middle stuff on the side. 

I read my last library book, The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer, and enjoyed it very much.  This is the second Milo Weaver book, and is even better than The Tourist.  Good backstory about meeting his wife years before, and a well worked out plot.  I usually don’t like flashback books that much, but these flashbacks are really well done and serve the story.  I’ll try some of Steinhauer’s East European novels next.

Christmas Stalkings was a seasonal selection, a good anthology of new (in 1991) and classic mystery stories, all set around Christmas.  This is my book, and I’ve read it before, but it was in storage for several years and the stories seemed fresh, as well as very good fun.

I also skimmed through Bloody Kin, by Margaret Maron.  This is the first book she wrote with the Colleton County NC setting; Deborah Knott, who later got her own excellent series, is a secondary character in this book.  Deborah’s brother-in-law. his wife Kate and her extended family are the main characters in Bloody Kin, and their family has an important role in the latest Deborah Knot mystery, The Buzzard Table.  It has been a very long time since I’ve read Bloody Kin and I wanted to refresh my memory of these characters’ story.  Good book, worth digging it out of my paperback stacks.  It also inspired a fit of nostalgia about two other favorite writers, Dorothy Gilman and Helen MacInnes.

Dorothy Gilman wrote some good stand-alone novels, but she is best known for the Mrs. Pollifax books, another favorite series of mine.  Mrs. Pollifax is an elderly lady who spies for the CIA from time to time: feisty, open-minded, not as twee as she sounds.  Gilman does a credible job of researching the people, geography and current political issues of the times and countries where Mrs. Pollifax has her adventures, which makes them informative as well as fun.  Although the author and her character have both sometimes been gushily positive over foreign political movements that look less attractive in retrospect, Mrs. Pollifax is an endearing, honest and moral character and I always enjoy spending time with her.  Amazon had the last three Pollifax books – Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled (set in Syria); Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist (Jordan); and Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer (the imaginary but credible African country of Ubangiba) - in inexpensive paperback editions, so I bought them to complete my Mrs. Pollifax series.  I also bought the second Madame Karitska book, Kaleidoscope, for my Kindle, reasonably priced and the only version currently available in print.  Kaleidoscope, and the first book, The Clairvoyant Countess, are episodic novels that are almost like individual short stories, so great for picking up, putting down and picking up again later.  I have read all of the new purchases except Lion Killer; I got sidetracked by one of my old Pollifax books, Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief (set in Sicily). 

All of Helen MacInnes’ books are currently out of print, and the library doesn’t have them, so I bought North from Rome (1958) and The Venetian Affair (1963) from two of Amazon’s used booksellers – one even had free shipping through Amazon Prime.  Both are in good condition considering their very reasonable prices; I’ve had good luck so far in all my Amazon used bookseller purchases.  The books are two of MacInnes’ best Cold War thrillers; rather earnest and prim, which I suppose fits the time in which they were written, but good, exciting, well-written novels.  A publisher will start issuing reprints of the MacInnes books in both paperback and Kindle editions starting with Above Suspicion and Pray for a Brave Heart at the end of January, with more following every four to six weeks.  Very glad to see this author’s books on the market again and available to new readers.   

I also bought a used copy of Crime through Time II through Amazon – the book cost 1 cent, and 3.99 for shipping, which is a pretty good deal for a paperback in good condition.  The book’s short stories are a mixed lot as far as quality, and too many are set in Ancient Times, the most boring and un-credible settings for me.

Last, I read two books from the monthly senior lunch book swap:  Lie Down with Lions, by Ken Follett, and The Jackal’s Head, by Elizabeth Peters.  I have never enjoyed any of Follett’s books as much as I did The Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, and I’m no more enthusiastic about Lie Down with Lions.  The setting in Afghanistan during the Soviet Russian occupation is interesting, but the characters and plot are clunky and over familiar.  I know Follett wrote a lot of books, so I’ll keep trying, as long as I don’t have to pay any money for them (keep checking the library).  The Jackal’s Head has Peters’ (too) familiar Egyptian archaeology setting, but in modern times for this one.  Libraries always seem to have lots of Elizabeth Peters’ books, and they turn up often in book swaps, so I can easily indulge this guilty pleasure (they are fun), and then take the books back where they came from, or pass them on to another book swap. 

 

Eight weeks and counting …

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Eight weeks and counting since I posted anything on the blog.  Spending too much time playing Every Word and watching new episodes of TV shows.  Also, my reading speed for non-fiction books and literary novels is still  v e r y  v e r y  s l o w, and I have trouble sitting still and concentrating for the three or four hour sessions I need to really get involved in these books.  Maybe my concentration will improve as I get more stuff sorted and put away, given away or thrown away. I did manage to finish eight books – an average of one per week – since my last post, so I do have something to write about.

Library trip #1

I checked out The Jury Master, a ”lawyer mystery” by Robert Dugoni; Death Comes to Pemberley, a fake sequel to Pride and Prejudice by P.D. James; The Wild Blue, a non-fiction book by Stephen Ambrose about bomber crews based in World War II Italy; and 1861: The Civil War Awakening, a non-fiction book by Adam Goodheart.

I enjoyed The Jury Master; lawyer David Sloane is an interesting protagonist and the plot had a great twist.  The writing is a little clunky, but the good story makes up for it.  The best thing about this book, though, was my epiphany about reading light fiction:  you don’t have to read every word to get through the story without cheating and flipping to the end.  It’s better to skim through the middle of the book, and get more fun out of the character and plot high points while making a fairly orderly progression to the end of the book.  This method has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the library novels I have read since the epiphany.  The method was especially useful in getting through Death Comes to Pemberley.  I was looking forward to this book by the great mystery novelist P.D. James, with Elizabeth Bennet Darcy as detective, but it was a letdown.  P.D. James came up with a pretty good plot and some cute details about the post-Pride and Prejudice lives of the Bennet sisters, but I thought it was a skim-through-the-middle book.  Better writing and a better effort than A Presumption of Death, the fake Lord Peter Wimsey sequel, but still disappointing.  Once again, I’m grateful that the library had a copy and I had a chance to read it without buying it. 

There’s a back story to my choice of The Wild Blue, a book I hadn’t heard of before finding it in the library.  The story starts with “The National World War II Museum” in New Orleans: Alan and I were fascinated and moved by its detailed exhibits about the D-Day landings in Normandy and the amphibious landings in the Pacific war theater.  I had never read anything by Stephen Ambrose, the popular historian who was one of the people instrumental in establishing the museum, but we did have the blu-ray edition of the TV series Band of Brothers, based on Ambrose’s book of the same name.  The series is excellent, but some of the details about the men of Easy Company got lost in the action on the screen, and I wanted to know more about them, so reading Band of Brothers was the next logical step.  I am trying to make the library my first stop in looking for books – my bookshelves are already overcrowded, and I still prefer reading real books over e-books.  No Band of Brothers at the library, but they did have The Wild Blue.  The book is about the training and bombing missions of B-24 Liberator crews flying out of Italy in World War II, and the main focus of the book is George McGovern and his bomber crew.  George McGovern had recently passed away and there had been many obituaries and articles about his life and career, so this was a timely choice and a good way to check out whether I like Stephen Ambrose’s writing style.  Yes!  Good choice by a talented writer with a gripping writing style.  Ambrose interviewed McGovern, members of his crew, and other fliers, then put their stories together into a compelling narrative.  It’s a history of Army Air Force training methods, aircraft production, and bombing missions over Germany, told through the skillfully interwoven recollections of the men and families who lived through the story.  Very readable, very informative.  I’m looking for space on the bookshelves for Band of Brothers, which is, I understand, written the same way.

Bringing me to 1861.  I was pleased and a little surprised to find this well-reviewed, well known book just waiting for me on the library shelf.  I was really looking forward to reading it, but decided to read The Wild Blue first.  As noted above, my reading speed for non-fiction is slow, even for interesting, well-written ones.  So I found myself with two days left until 1861 was due, started reading it, decided it was terrific, and crossed my fingers that I would be able to renew it.  Success, I renewed it for three more weeks, as well as another book called The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared.  To keep my focus on these two books, I didn’t check out any more; no distractions.  (to be continued)

1861, The continuing saga of.  Or, Library trip #2

After library trip #2, I set myself to reading 1861 with a will.  It’s about the months leading up to the beginning of the Civil War, largely from the point of view of those dedicated to preserving the Union.   Goodheart structures his history around the stories of individuals in places like Ohio, St. Louis and San Francisco, although the book starts, as many Civil War histories do, at Fort Sumter.  However, this Fort Sumter narrative has many more details about the thoughts and motivations of Major Anderson and the other, lesser known, officers and men holding the fort, and much more about the impact of their heroic efforts on public opinion in the north and the mid-west.  Goodheart continues with variations on this narrative model:  individuals act with conviction, their actions are catalysts for changes in public opinion, which then feeds an ever-widening determination to save the Union.  Some names of the individuals Goodheart highlights are mentioned in passing in more conventional histories of the Civil War, but in this book people and events and places, usually lying well outside the main Civil War narrative, reveal a new and exciting perspective on the communities that answered Lincoln’s call to preserve the Union.  I get excited just writing about this book, and savored every word I read; so much so, that I didn’t finish the book before its second due date.  This time, I was out of luck; somebody had a hold on the book so I couldn’t renew it.  Only one chapter to go once I get the book back in my grasp (to be continued).

Library trip #2.5

 Since I couldn’t renew 1861 on this trip, I decided to check out more books of a less demanding nature, just to get back in the habit of reading new things and practice my skimming technique.  I also decided to hang on to The Reading Promise, since it was available for renewal. 

I’ve already finished Bodily Harm, another David Sloane mystery by Robert Dugoni.  Not as good as The Jury Master, but still entertaining.  Next I finished Christopher’s Ghosts, by Charles McCarry.  I understand that McCarry wrote a series of spy thrillers about Paul Christopher, then retired from writing.  In 2004, he came out of retirement to write a book called Old Boys; Paul Christopher is a character in this book, but isn’t one of the main protagonists.  I read Old Boys (bought at a used bookstore) a couple of years ago, and thought it  was great, with a genuinely thrilling story and wonderful exotic locations.  Christopher’s Ghosts was written after Old Boys, and is about 16 year old Christopher, his parents, and his first love in 1939 Berlin, with the events of that time coming to resolution in 1959.  Sort of a prequel to the main Paul Christopher series, none of which I have read.  It’s a pretty good, well written book, but it doesn’t have the punch of Old Boys.      

I just started a book called The House at Sea’s End, by Elly Griffiths, from yet another forensic archaeologist series; this character is named Ruth Galloway.  It’s pretty good so far, I like the slightly off beat writing, and the mystery about six bodies revealed in a cliff fall seems interesting.  I have the first book of the series, The Crossing Places, on my Kindle, but haven’t read it yet.

The fourth novel I checked out is a spy thriller, The Nearest Exit, by Olen Steinhauer.  I read Steinhauer’s The Tourist, an earlier book also featuring the spy Milo Weaver, a few months ago.  I wasn’t overwhelmed, but it was entertaining enough and I think this one will be too.

The Reading Promise is short and looks like a sweet book, but I can’t quite get started on it.

Keeping count of the eight books I read in eight weeks:  in this post so far I’ve written about five library books I finished and 1861, the library book I almost finished.  Two more to go.

Old book, new book.

My only mystery short story book for this time period was Crime through Time (the first one – my book).  Good stories, better collection overall than Crime through Time III (also my book).  There must be a Crime through Time II, I’ll have to see if I can track down a copy.

The new book is, hooray hooray, The Buzzard Table, the latest Deborah Knott mystery by Margaret Maron.  I bought it for my Kindle the day it was released.  The Kindle is fine for books like this; I knew I was going to zip right through and read every word.  I liked this book more than the last one, Three Day Town; Deborah is back in Colleton County NC with her exuberant extended family and the mystery plot is better.  New York detective Sigrid Harald, from Maron’s other series, is also in this book, on a family visit with her mother.  Margaret Maron’s switches between her characters’ points of view get a little frantic in this book, and Deborah’s first person narrative, the best feature of the series, gets too lost at times.  But any Deborah Knott is better than no Deborah Knott, and right now books in this series have the distinction of being the only ones I buy as soon as they come out.  

Pending books

I’m working through Eats, Shoots and Leaves (my book) one delightful chapter after another.  I just finished the one on the apostrophe, its distinguished history and its use, misuse and abuse in contemporary times.

The Scramble for Africa (my book) went into hiatus and probably won’t come back out for a while.  I read 380 of 680 pages and after the exciting exploration and derring-do parts I got stuck in the important but depressing and intricate details of the full-fledged European colonization of Africa.  Pakenham carefully describes the bumbling and manipulation of clueless governments floundering into poorly planned adventures while doing great damage to the Africans, and it got me down.

It’s better to have a book of my own on hiatus, and know I can start it back up any time I want.  I’m still a little bit in shock from the 1861 forced hiatus, which I admit is mostly my own fault.  Maybe I should put myself out of my misery and just buy the book.

Long Hot Summer

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I thought that I would read more books and post more blog entries as I stayed housebound during Charleston’s hot and sticky summer, but it didn’t turn out that way.  A lot of this dereliction was caused by a Kindle game called Every Word, an addictive scrambled word game that the friendly Amazon people give Kindle owners for free.  A big time-suck, but so much fun.  I did get some reading in, though.

New (to me) books

I finished the second half of Midnight Rising (my book), an exciting and sad account of John Brown’s inexplicably nutty attack on Harpers Ferry.  Tony Horwitz finds heroism and cruelty on all sides of the attack and during the subsequent trial and execution of Brown and his captured men.  The story of John Brown and Harpers Ferry is familiar to me, but Horwitz makes a particulary detailed and compelling case that Brown’s actions and their consequences were pivotal in the run-up to the Civil War.  There is a long period between publication of each of Horwitz’s books, but they are always worth the wait.

I read half of The Potter’s House, by Rosie Thomas (library book), then flipped through to see how it turned out. Slow, boring, silly.  I liked Thomas’ Kashmir Shawl, so this was a disappointment.  I’m glad I didn’t spend any of my money on this thing.

Same thing with False Mermaid, by Erin Hart (library book).  This is Hart’s third book about a pathologist named Nora Gavin.  I’m a bit tired of pathologists in mystery series, but I really liked the first book in this series, Haunted Ground (Kindle book), especially the setting in Ireland and the details about ancient Irish history.  I thought the story about the years-back murder of Nora’s sister, heavily referenced in the first book, would be compelling, but it felt kind of flat.  Glad the library had it and I didn’t have to buy it.  I still want to read the second book, Lake of Sorrows, because Hart can be that good. 

I also read two books (library books) that aren’t just new, but by a new author:  Alan Furst.  I read about Furst in an article about a new British mini-series starring the former, fabulous Doctor Who, David Tennant.  The series is called The Spies of Warsaw, from the book of the same name by Alan Furst, “master of the historical spy novel”, according to Amazon.  So I added Alan Furst to my library list, and the library had two of his books. The World at Night is set in Paris just before and during the first part of the German occupation, and Dark Voyage is set on a Dutch tramp steamer in May and June 1941.  In a nutshell, The World at Night is about a French guy who has sex with different women and one fairly simple spy mission.  Boring both as a spy story and a love story.  Dark Voyage was a lot better with more interesting characters, and I liked the stories about the ship’s clandestine work for the British in the Mediterranean and the Baltic.  Still, Furst is a library and maybe used book store author for now.  On the other hand, I can hardly wait until January to see David Tennant in the new series.

Old Favorites

 I picked Archangel, by Robert Harris, off one of my shelves, read every word and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I read it years ago, but remembered hardly anything about it so it was almost like a new book.  Great characters and a really good story, based on events that started with the death of Stalin, and continue in post-USSR Russia.  Reading one of Harris’ novels is always a treat, but unfortunately he hasn’t written very many of them.

 I thought I would be reading a new book when I picked John LeCarre’s The Secret Pilgrim from another shelf, but realized fairly soon that I’d read it before.  I’ve bought several of LeCarre’s post-Cold War novels, but never really got into them.  I thought The Secret Pilgrim was one of those, but it consists mainly of an old spy named Ned reminiscing about (cold) war stories while George Smiley talks to a class of new spies.  The book was written in 1990, just after the break up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and John LeCarre, through George Smiley and Ned, has some prescient things to say about how the world would change after the victory of the West and capitalism. 

I then read a book, Pray for a Brave Heart (my book), by another great espionage author, who has a different perspective on the Cold War than LeCarre.  British author Helen MacInnes wrote Above Suspicion, one of my favorite spy novels, just before World War 2, followed by a couple more books set in occupied Europe.  MacInnes and her husband moved to the US after the war, and, after two lackluster novels, she found her niche in writing bestselling books about innocent Americans caught up in the Cold War struggle against Communism.  MacInnes tends to be earnest in these books, and seems to have lost her British sense of irony after she came to the US, but she is a fantastic storyteller and idealistic without being dogmatic.  Starting with Pray for a Brave Heart in 1955, she wrote six superb espionage novels set in various interesting European locations, good reads every one.  After 1968, I find the quality of her books a little more hit and miss, but even at less than her best, her books are very good.  Most of Pray for a Brave Heart is set in Zurich and a small mountain town not far away, and I enjoyed the descriptions of these places and how they were used in the plot.  The central plot concerns smuggling notable East Europeans out from behind the Iron Curtain, very current affairs for 1955, and still exciting to read about.  I was pleased to see that this book, as well as Above Suspicion, will be available in new editions in early 2013.  Nice to see this author getting attention again. 

Instead of reading the good non-fiction book I bought about the Indian Mutiny, I reread Flashman and the Great Game (my book), in which Flashman is caught in besieged Cawnpore and Lucknow and sees and experiences conditions similar to those in The Siege of Krishnapur.  As usual, he has many other adventures involving real historical people, he fornicates freely, extricates himself from deadly situations by the skin of his teeth, and n-words every non-European he comes across.  Love Flashman, get tired of some of the things he says.  While I was reading Great Game, I was also reading Midnight Rising.  After I finished them, I thought I’d read Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, which is also about John Brown and Harpers Ferry, again.  But too much Flashman in a row is not a good thing, I put the book back and will take a Flashman break for a while.

I enjoyed rereading Sarah Caudwell’s Thus was Adonis Murdered so much, that I started her The Sirens Sang of Murder, and again it was a problem of reading two books by a talented but very stylized author in a row.  The witty young lawyers and their clever bantering lose too much of their charm when taken in too much quantity, so Caudwell needs to also be put aside for a while.

 

Trip to the library

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Finally went to the library, first time in months.  Our nearest branch of the library isn’t very big, but I found a couple of books that are on my list, as well as books by authors I have read before and liked.  I already finished The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer, a standard type spy thriller.  I hadn’t read anything by Steinhauer before, so at least it’s good to find something from a new author.  The book was OK, but I saw the plot twist and guessed the ending way too early.  The characters and locations weren’t that interesting either.  If I come across another book by this author, I’ll give it a try, but I’m not going to be looking that hard.

I finished The Kashmir Shawl, by Rosie Thomas, (Kindle book) last week and enjoyed it enough that I looked for another Thomas book at the library and found one called The Potter’s House.  I liked the settings of The Kashmir Shawl: the city of Srinigar in Kashmir, an Indian state called Ladakh in the north of the country, and Wales.  The best parts of the book were about the friendship of three English women in Srinigar during World War 2; the parts about a granddaughter of one of the women trying to find out the history of her grandmother’s Kashmir shawl were less interesting to me.  Some genteel romantic entanglements, and information about making pashminas, early mountaineering techniques and Welsh missionaries in India moved the plot along and made for leisurely pleasant reading.  My favorite details were ones about the winter weather, I’d never thought about India having snow, but of course it makes sense with the Himalayas on the northern border.  Most niggling thing was trying to figure out how the Welsh names of two of the characters should be pronounced.

The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham, is fascinating but slow going, I read a couple of chapters at a time, which works because each chapter deals with one separate region in one fairly short time period.  I’m almost halfway through the book; the exciting explorer stories are finished and now it’s mostly about European politics and rivalries driving a very messy scramble for African colonies.  Now I realize I need to know at least a little bit about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 in order to get a better perspective on why the Great Powers were so goofy in the late 19th century.  Wikipedia will have to do for now, the library didn’t have anything on 19th century European history.  

Fun facts about Thomas Pakenham:  he is the 8th Earl of Longford, although he doesn’t use the title, and one of his sisters is romance novelist Antonia Fraser.

In between French and English shenanigans in Africa I re-read a favorite mystery that had been packed away in a box for several years:  Thus was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell.  Sarah Caudwell wrote three books about Hilary Tamar, a professor of legal history, and his/her friends, young members of the Chancery Bar in London (lawyers).  I really can’t figure out if Hilary is a man or a woman; I don’t know if it’s just me, or if Sarah Caudwell is being deliberately confusing.  It’s kind of like the young Mrs deWinter’s name in Rebecca – I’m pretty sure Daphne du Maurier left it out on purpose.  I’m not clear on how the British legal system works either; however, in spite of all the confusion the books are very funny and clever and I always enjoy reading them.  A lot of this one is in the form of long letters from one of the lawyers on vacation holiday in Venice.  Book published in 1981, not that long ago but well before the age of Internet and the cell phone.

I’ve started on another library book called Girl Sleuth:  Nancy Drew and the women who created her, by Melanie Rehak.  This one wasn’t on my list, but looked intriguing.  The story so far:  Carolyn Keene didn’t write the Nancy Drew books!  In fact she never existed!  Other people wrote the books!  I think I already knew this, but I didn’t know all the details about the children’s book syndicate that developed Nancy Drew (and the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, among many other series), but Melanie Rehak certainly knows everything and wants to write about all of it.  I’m thinking this might be one of those books with 100 pages of material expanded to 300, but I’ve read and enjoyed lots of Nancy Drew books and I think I can get some good stuff out of this and skim the rest. 

Which leads to a digression:  before I read the all-American girl Nancy Drew detective stories, I read the Famous Five and Secret Seven children’s mysteries by Enid Blyton.  I don’t think many, if any, of Enid Blyton’s books made it to the US; I read them when we lived in southern Africa when I was in elementary primary school.  “Enid Blyton” wrote hundreds of books (most of which I haven’t read) so many in fact that I wondered if her name was the nom de plume of a writing syndicate too.  So to Wikipedia, which says that Enid Blyton was a real person and it’s sufficiently clear that she wrote all her books herself.  It also, in an interesting and fair-minded way, says that she was a Grade A Number 1 Mommie Dearest bitch whose books are racist, sexist and classist, and many discerning people say that the books have no literary merit either.  I have little patience with people who look down on books because they are commercially successful, but there are examples to show that Enid Blyton inserted some language, ideas and characters into her books that were nasty then and are clearly unacceptable now.  I see on amazon.co.uk that the Famous Five and Secret Seven books are still in print.  I loved the books and consumed them like potato chips, I hope I just skipped over bad words and stereotypes and didn’t let them into my heart.  The Wikipedia article said the publishers have made judicious edits to the books and kids still enjoy them. 

Can’t help it, just one more digression:  The Mommie Dearest image of Enid Blyton comes from a book that one of her daughters wrote.  Now I remember that Christopher Robin Milne hated the Winnie-the-Pooh books and didn’t have many good things to say about his father A.A. Milne.  I hope none of J.K. Rowling’s kids write, or have reason to write, a mean book about her.  She seems like a very nice person, as well as a good writer.