I love finding discounted, really cheap, or no-cost books, but sometimes I do splurge on regular-priced books. These are nearly always books from Amazon, so even their ‘regular’ prices are pretty reasonable. I have bought most of the CCR book group books we’ve read as regular-priced Kindle books. The group tends to choose recent books that are not yet available in paperback, and the Kindle editions are cheaper and less bulky than hardbacks. I did luck out on Madonnas of Leningrad, which was $2.99 on Kindle, and I bought Mornings on Horseback in a very nice trade paperback edition; it was published some years ago, and I prefer to read nonfiction in print editions, especially if the book has photographs (or maps). I also bought some of the Maisie Dobbs books at regular price, and several other new-to-me-author books at regular price, but I’ve already written about them. Here are three I bought and read recently:
Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose: The book is about the men of Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and fought their way through France, the Low Countries and Germany all the way to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. I’d been wanting to read this since I saw the mini-series, even more so after I read The Wild Blue and realized what a good writer Stephen Ambrose was. It’s a nice trade paperback, and it was definitely the right decision to get it in a print edition. There are so many people in the book, and they keep moving between companies and platoons and battalions so much I had to keep flipping back to keep track of who was who. Not to mention I had to keep going back to read the definitions of companies, platoons and battalions.
I loved and appreciated the honesty of the Easy Company men Ambrose interviewed for the book, and he did a phenomenal job of working their stories into a fast-paced, coherent narrative. The consequences of the higher-ups’ good planning or arrogant folly or dumb luck are starkly clear in Ambrose’s swift scene-setting details of the D-Day landing, the shambles of Market Garden, and the intelligence failures leading to the Ardennes trap in the Battle of the Bulge. Ambrose also explained how thoroughly the paratroopers were trained; in the movies, it always looks like the group of geographically and ethnically diverse soldiers are plucked from the cities, towns and farms of America, and are in combat the week after basic training. I was impressed at the planning, selectivity and time the U.S. Army put into the paratroopers’ training, similar to the care that went into training the bomber pilots in The Wild Blue. It’s unusual for me to think of ‘training’ as heroic and life-saving, but Ambrose makes it crystal clear that even the bravest men benefited greatly from their thorough preparation for the terrible things they had to face in combat.
I remembered some of the men and incidents in the book from the HBO mini-series, and it was good to be able to slowly read and understand many of the dramatic but confusing things in the series. The Afterword in the book was a heartfelt, inspiring and sometimes tragic synopsis of what happened to the men who survived their service in Easy Company.
The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe: I was attracted to the title of this book, but quailed a little when I read that it’s a memoir Will Schwalbe wrote about books he and his mother Mary Anne read and discussed during the long months of her treatments for pancreatic cancer. The title makes it clear that the treatments did not save Mary Anne, but the idea of facing death by reading was intriguing; I thought it would either be inspirational or unbearably grim, and it was worth the risk to read and find out.
The overall effect was: inspiring. Will and Mary Anne and the Schwalbe siblings, spouses and grandchildren are excellent company, without being gooey or pompous, things I find irritating in most memoirs. I usually feel cynicism coming on when I get an inkling that a book is about ‘celebrating life’ and ‘giving back’ and so on, but the Schwalbes come across as genuinely accomplished, interesting, worthwhile people. The descriptions of Mary Anne’s extensive high-level work with refugee and development NGOs are matter of fact and highlight the importance of the work and her joy that she can be part of it. I often think that the lack of self-awareness is a debilitating and annoying personality trait, and Mary Anne is gloriously self-aware about the blessings and good fortune of her cultured, prosperous life, and it serves to make her kind and generous. Of course, the book’s author has a lot to do with the positive way that Mary Anne and her family are portrayed, but Will seems like an honest broker as well as a loving son, self-aware in his own right.
But all the above is basically background: the books are the heart of the story and satisfyingly central to it. Will and Mary Anne think and talk about books the way I do, and I enjoyed the sense of eavesdropping on their conversations. There is also a list of all the books discussed or mentioned in the book at the end; useful, since I’m interested in reading some of them (yet more books for the list). Finally, I was surprised that the description of the cancer treatment was so honest and interesting. The doctor tells Mary Anne her cancer can be “treated, not cured”, and the details of the medicines, side effects and complications are so deftly handled, the impression is of a quest, not simply an ordeal. I found this book moving and very satisfying, I learned a lot and felt a lot.
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler: The Kindle edition was $10.99, an excellent price for 59 stories with a print length of 674 pages. I’m still working my through this one. It’s always comforting to have a good mystery anthology at hand, and this is a very good one. I wasn’t aware of Otto Penzler before, but it seems he is a well-know editor of mystery anthologies, so I’ll want to get to know him better. I like the way this book is organized; there is an easy to use table of contents divided into different categories of stories (traditional, funny, hard-boiled and so on) and I can link to any story I want and jump around in the book the way I like to. But I still can’t tell how long a story is: I’ll want a quick story to finish before I go to sleep, but the one I’m reading goes on and on and on, with no way of knowing how much more of it there is. At least I don’t have to find someplace to put a 674 page book.