In the post about new (to me) authors, I wrote about some of the Kindle daily deal books I’ve read, not surprising since the daily deals are a good chance to try new authors at a low cost.  Orphan Train, a novel by Christina Baker Kline, was an especially exciting find.  I bought the book because I was interested in the subject:  the orphans sent to the Midwest from New York City by the Children’s Aid Society from the mid 19th century through the 1920s. Theodore Roosevelt senior was one of the founders of the Society, one of his many philanthropic ventures described in Mornings on Horseback.  I had found the brief mention of the Society’s practice of shipping orphans out of New York intriguing, and this new novel seemed like it would have more information.  Not long after I forked over my $1.99 for the book, a book club member mentioned that she had read it and liked it, and I saw that it was on the NYT bestseller list: promising indicators that the book would be a good interesting read as well as a good buy.  I started reading, and the two story lines of the Irish immigrant orphan in 1929 and the modern day foster child in Maine were immediately gripping.  I loved this book because the writing about the orphan train children’s experiences is dead-on realistic about their vulnerability and the hardships and dangers they faced, but it isn’t degrading and gruesome like some of these books can be.  The author doesn’t tell you about the emotional price her characters had to pay to survive, she lets the characters show you.  Descriptions and reviews of Christina Baker Kline’s other books look promising and I want to read more of her work.

Kindle daily deals can also be a source of guilty pleasure and/or nostalgic rereading in a low-cost impulse-buy sort of way.  I bought Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie, for $1.99 and read it immediately.  I knew it would be a surefire fun quick read.  This one has Hercule Poirot investigating an old murder at the request of the young woman whose mother was convicted of the murder and had died in prison.  It had been a long time since I read this book, and I couldn’t quite remember who the murderer was and how it had been done, which made it more fun.  Christie wrote several books on the theme of looking for the true perpetrator of an old crime, all solid Christie quality work, but this is one of the better ones.  I consider all my Christie books keepers, and the best thing about the Kindle versions is that I don’t have to find room for them in my crowded bookcases.

Another nostalgic favorite that turned up as a Kindle deal is Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman.  I read this book about a teacher’s challenges and triumphs dealing with students and educational bureaucracy when I was in high school, and reread it a couple of times later.  I hadn’t seen or thought of it in a while, but welcomed this old friend into my Kindle stash.  I made the mistake of reading the introduction by Bel Kaufman, which turned out to be incredibly long and repetitive.  This is the problem with Kindle reading; you can’t tell how long and drawn out something is going to be.  By the time I got to the actual book, the glow of anticipation had faded somewhat, and I didn’t get the in-your-face experience of realizing that nothing in bull-headed wasteful education administration or undisciplined students has changed for the better, just gotten much worse.  Ms. Kaufman had already made this point repeatedly in her introduction.  Also, the great charm of the book was in the format of reproducing memos, notes, tests and other documents on the pages of the book.  The impact of this (at the time) innovative book design is much less in the eBook version.  I haven’t gotten very far into this book, but will probably dip into it again from time to time.

I scored a great cheap book coup when I looked on Amazon for World War Z, by Max Brooks.  The Kindle version was $2.49, and I could buy it and start reading it immediately; great, because I was eager to read the book after seeing Brad Pitt’s movie World War Z.  This has got to be one of the strangest book to movie adaptations ever: the book and movie had exactly ONE character in common, the Israeli government official who was the driving force behind a plan to quarantine part of Israel from the zombie infection.  The book is a series of interviews from a UN investigation report done after the zombie war, and the movie follows a UN investigator who travels to various locations trying to work out a way to stop the infection from spreading.  Nice to see the UN getting some positive recognition, and that Max Brooks and Brad Pitt seem to think that the organization is tough enough to survive zombie hordes.  A fast, engaging, cleverly constructed read.

I read an article about three lawyers who are successful authors of legal thrillers.  I was very familiar with Scott Turow and John Grisham, but had never read anything by the third, Lisa Scottoline.  I checked Amazon to get an idea of what she has written, and found that most of the Kindle editions of the early books in her Rosato and Associates legal series were available at very reasonable prices.  I managed to figure out that Everywhere that Mary Went was the first book in the series (this usually takes some doing) and bought it for $3.79.  I liked the lead character Mary DiNunzio and the details about her work as a trial lawyer.  The mystery plot about the supposedly accidental deaths of two people close to Mary, and her grief and determination to find out what happened, was well-written and engaging and I look forward to reading more in this series.  Lisa Scottoline seems to be a very prolific writer, with a lot of books in the Rosato and Associates series and several stand-alone books.  Such a popular writer should be well-represented at the library, and free books are even better than cheap books.

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.