Benita's Big Bad Book Pile 2019

Talk2019 ROOT (READ OUR OWN TOMES)

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1benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 1, 2020, 11:46 am

2benitastrnad
Jan 2, 2019, 1:50 pm

Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd by Alan Bradley is book 7 in the Flavia de Luce series and in this entry the author returns to the fine form of the earlier books in this series. The author is allowing Flavia to grow up in each book and in this one she takes some giant steps toward adulthood.

The narrator/reader of this series - Jayne Entwhistle - is excellent and her voice and characterizations allowed me to pass many a mile absorbed in the life of Flavia de Luce. I am sure that she is a large part of why I enjoy this series.

3Jackie_K
Jan 2, 2019, 4:00 pm

It's good to see you back again in 2019, Benita!

4connie53
Jan 2, 2019, 5:24 pm

Welcome back, Benita. Glad to see you again. Happy ROOTing.

5rabbitprincess
Jan 2, 2019, 7:11 pm

Welcome back and have a great reading year!

6MissWatson
Jan 3, 2019, 8:04 am

Welcome back! I really need to get back to Flavia!

7benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 5, 2019, 9:09 pm

The October 2018 category for the 75’ers NonFiction Challenge hosted by Suzanne McGee was “First Person.” Suz suggested that books of letters and correspondence would be good for this category. On October 12, I started reading What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell edited by Suzanne Marrs. I finished it last night and I really liked it.

I have never read anything by either one of these authors and am not sure that I am likely to do so, but I have read their edited letter collection. At first it was letter after letter about roses and her mother’s eyesight, but gradually I got interested in the lives and friendship of these people, and I ended up sharing in their friendship by reading their letters.

My 2019 New Years Resolution is to write more letters. I got about a dozen Christmas cards and I sent out many many more than that because I wanted to communicate with my friends what has been going on in my life in the last year. The act of writing something personal is an act of friendship and I wish I had gotten more Christmas cards and letters from people.

Thanks Suzanne for having this category and suggesting books of correspondence. It was a good experience and I am glad I purservered and finished it.

8connie53
Jan 6, 2019, 3:32 am

If you like to read more books about letters I can recommend Het Literaire Aardappelschiltaart Genootschap van Guernsey by Mary Ann Shaffer. I bought that book just because the title catched my eye. It was an excellent book and I got to know things about WO II I did not know.

9benitastrnad
Jan 7, 2019, 11:37 am

I actually have a copy of Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society in my collection on the shelves. Maybe this is the year to ROOT that one.

10connie53
Jan 7, 2019, 1:30 pm

>9 benitastrnad: That was meant to be, Benita! ;-))

11benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 10, 2019, 11:20 am

I was inspired to read this biography Straight On Till Morning: The Biography of Beryl Markham by Mary S. Lovell after I read Markham's autobiography "West With the Night" late last year. West With the Night presented the life of a fascinating woman with grand brush strokes but didn't give me some of the documented detail that I wanted. Plus, it ended in 1936. I wanted more and had this book on my shelves. I wanted to read an unbiased opinion about this very interesting woman. This biography cleared up many of the questions about Markham that rose from the earlier book. It was a biography with no frills that explained, with documentation, Markham's life. The subject of the biography lived an exciting life. The biography is a straight forward biography - just the facts, that acted as a counterpoint to the very visceral experience of reading "West With the Night." I recommend reading the two books as a together they give the reader the facts and the flavor of Markham's life.

12benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 11, 2019, 5:01 pm

A Daughter of No Nation by A. M. Dellamonica

This is book 2 in the Stormwreck series by the author and is a book I read here at work over my lunch hour. When the students are here my lunch hours become more like lunch minutes, so that is part of the reason why it took me so long to read this book. I read the first book back in 2016 and thought it was pretty good. This book probably suffered from second book syndrome. It didn't grab me like the first one did. However, in fairness, my reading time with it was not sustained, so that accounts for some of the disjointed feeling I had while reading it. This would make a good YA book, because of the emphasis on the scientific method and the reasons why it is so important to be able to replicate and record results, as well as to do careful observations. There is an ecological mystery at the heart of this novel that is used to bring all of the plot points to a neatly tied up bundle, but the writing at the end just doesn't live up to those elements. It had all the elements of a very good YA fantasy and it fell just a little short.

13benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 31, 2019, 2:25 pm

Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel is a woman's take on the women involved in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. Unfortunately, the only women involved in these ventures into space were the wives of the astronauts. In all, I found that the book was rather light weight. There had to be much going on in all these women's lives, and the book didn't go into any of these multifaceted personalities and their relationships with husbands, children, communities, the government, or NASA. All or any of these would have made a great book. Because the lives of the astronauts were so closely controlled by NASA the lives of their families and their wives was as well. It was apparent that the contracts with NASA allowing the press unlimited access to these families was a grave interruption and imposition into the lives of these women. How they coped with it was the main focus of the book, but I thought the author let the government and NASA off lightly. There was no bad word in the book about the way NASA treated these women or about the outlandish requirements that they made of them. I would call this a good basic women's history of this part of the space program, but if you want to know what really went on this might not be the book for you.

14mstrust
Jan 17, 2019, 6:39 pm

Good luck with your ROOTs this year, Benita!

15benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 31, 2019, 7:18 pm

Doubt by C. E. Tobisman was my first MP3 recorded book. It came with one CD and played on my car's CD player. It is also the first book by this author and is the first in the Caroline Audin series by Tobisman. The second book in the series won the Harper Lee Award for Legal Fiction that is given by the University of Alabama Law school. When I went to get the CD of the second I saw the first one was only $7.00. Why not I said? So I did. I liked this legal thriller. It had just enough action to be dangerous, but not that bloody over the top shoot'em up bang-bang action thriller type. It was very realistic. It was the right combination of footwork and moving around in conjunction with cyber work. This is an author who should get more publicity. Read this one, then talk it up to all your friends. That is what I am going to be doing.

16barichardson
Edited: Jan 25, 2019, 11:26 pm

#2

I haven’t read this one. I just grew tired of solving crime but Flavia never actually seemed to accomplished much. Give me more Deiter! Why can’t we get some character development with him? Maybe I should try this one again...

17benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 31, 2019, 7:21 pm

I finished Minnesota Rag by Fred W. Friendly while flying out to Seattle for the American Library Association Mid-Winter conference. The book was the Silver Gavel Award winner in 1982. The Silver Gavel Award is given every year by the American Bar Association for a work of nonfiction that best illuminates the legal system in some regard. This book was written by a proponent and protector of Freedom of the Press, about the 1931 Supreme Court case that defined (some say redefined) the meaning of Freedom of the Press. The case was interesting, but where this book really excelled was in the description of the Supreme Court at that point in time. Reading this book just proves that the controversies about the politicization of the Court have been going on for a long long time - probably from the beginning. It may be that I found that part the most fascinating because it was like reading about the Court of today and realizing that the same political fights about strict or liberal interpretation of the Constitution are still going on. At the time of this court case, Chief Justice William H. Taft (the former President) had just died and Charles Evans Hughes became the new Chief Justice. Hughes was a more liberal justice than Taft, which was a surprise to the Harding administration, and his influence allowed the decision to go as it did. This book was written to explain what the Doctrine of Prior Restraint was and how dangerous it is for democracy. It does that, and makes me want to go read more about the history of the Court.

18benitastrnad
Edited: Jan 31, 2019, 2:18 pm

Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg
I have to say, that this mystery novel was not what I expected. Scandicrime novels are usually dark, bloody, and very descriptively violent. Or at least the authors that I had previously read - Jo Nesbo and Steig Larsson. This novel was not that way. It was a good solid mystery in the same way that the Maisie Dobbs series is. Just good reading.

The plot was not that inventive and like some of the previous commentators in the Lackberg/Leon Comparison Read over on the 75'ers Group have observed - there were a couple of plot points that I did see coming, and so were not many surprises in this book. However, I found the overall novel to be well constructed. The descriptions of life in a smaller town in Sweden were enlightening. There were several times in the reading when something was brought up - then dropped, that I figure will show up later in the series. For instance, why was Eilert's little bit at the end, even in the book? My suspicion is that he will show up later - in another book. This is a good solid beginning to a series and I look forward to reading more entries in the series.

19benitastrnad
Edited: Feb 18, 2019, 2:30 pm

Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean was one of the first books I added to LibraryThing back in the day and I finally got around to reading/listening to it. I think it was 2008 when I joined and it was soon after that when I put this book into the library. I picked up a recorded version of the book somewhere along the way. That enabled me to have this as a commute listen. It turned out to be a good book to listen to while cummuting and running around town.

This book was narrative nonfiction and this form of nonfiction was new when this book was published back in 2000. However, I did not find this book that engaging. It seemed to wander off topic for large sections of the book. For instance, I had trouble figuring out why a huge section about Chief Billy was in the book. It is not a long book, so my guess is Chief Billy was filler. I would have liked to hear more about the habitat loss and how that is effecting the plants of the Everglades, but that was not in this book. Instead the author concentrated on weird characters. A few of those would have sufficed. She should have had more orchids and less weird characters and she would have still made her point about beauty and obsession being in the mind of the beholder.

20benitastrnad
Edited: Feb 10, 2019, 2:53 pm

It seems that tree and forests are all over my reading for about the last year. I didn't plan it that way, but it seems to be happening on a serendipitous bails. Likewise, I didn't think that I was going to like At the Edge of of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier, because I haven't liked the last couple of books by this author that I have tried to read. However, I liked this one.

The book starts in Ohio in 1838, and ends in San Francisco in 1858. (Really it still hasn't ended because the trees in the story are still growing in California and in Wales.) It begins with apple trees, Johnny Appleseed, and the Ohio wilderness, and ends with Giant Sequoias, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean. It starts with dispicble characters and ends with people you would like to get to know.

In short, this is a fine example of historical fiction that ties in with several books I have read lately.

21benitastrnad
Edited: Feb 14, 2019, 9:48 pm

I read Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to GLobal Warming by Naomi Oreskes. I read this one for the Librarything Non-Fiction Challenge that is over on the 75’ers challenge groups. It was my book for February. The topic this month was science. For a book published in 2010 this one was still remarkable. It is not narrative non-fiction, because the author cites and footnotes everything, but still it is easy to understand. You wouldn’t believe the shannanigans scientists get up to when arguing amongst themselves in an effort to sway public opinion for political reasons. Read this book and find out.

22connie53
Feb 18, 2019, 2:41 am

>19 benitastrnad: Shouldn't that be Orchid Thief?

23benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 17, 2019, 1:38 pm

Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon was another entry in the Guido Brunetti series that I read for the Leon/Lackberg challenge.

I have wondered for a long time why this series has remained so popular with readers. It surely isn't the mysteries themselves as they are quite standard and certainly aren't thrillers in any sense of the word. I believe that the answer lies in this author's ability to capture the relationship between Guido and Paola and make it interesting to the reader as well as making it become part of the unfolding story of Guido's life.

In this novel Guido struggles with his wife's intractable sense of right and wrong and the fact that she is a child of privilege, which makes her immune to prosecution and protects her sense of righteousness. The fact that her deviant "rights" might hurt somebody else, in this case, Guido's job, doesn't enter into her thoughts when she decides on her course of action.

This makes the entire novel interesting even if the murder mystery isn't.

24benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 24, 2019, 7:25 pm

Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge. This is a food history of the American South from the end of WWII to the present. Edge is the Director of the Southern Foodways ALliance based in Oxford, Mississippi. This group is doing great work to keep the food history and heritage of the South alive and well. Edge does a good job with this book. He starts out reminding readers that the food history of the South is tangled up with the racial history of the South and there is no way to separate the two. That thread occurs throughout the decade by decade format of the book. Edge does not shy away from this controversy and basically tells readers that it is the history of the region and they should embrace it and move on.

Famous chefs and restaurants of the area are discussed but also lesser known cooks and restaurants get time in these pages. These are mostly cooks and chefs of places that did not get recognition while they were in business.

25benitastrnad
Mar 5, 2019, 5:22 pm

A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary. This book has been part of my professional life for years. Beverly Cleary was a librarian who became a noted author of children's books. She won a Newbery medal and had several Newbery honor books and is best known for her Henry and Ramona Quimby books. This book came back to my attention because of a Tuscaloos Wine Club program in February. The presenter has a daughter who lives in McMinnville, Oregon and her husband is the business manager for a winery. One of the towns that was part of the pinot noir program was Yamhill. I kept thinking that I knew the name of that town, but it took me some time to remember why I knew that town. I knew we had this book in the library, so I got it off the shelf and started reading it during my lunch hour. It is an autobiography aimed at children, and that is clear from the style and structure of the book. It is nothing earth shattering and nothing that I would recommend, but because of this book and that wine program I have been inspired to go to the Willamette Valley in Oregon on a wine tasting trip.

26benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 7, 2019, 10:22 am

I finished reading another in the National Geographic Society Directions series. This one was Island Martinique by John Edgar Wideman. This is the first book in this series that I have actively disliked. It is written in stream of consciousness prose and I hate that. To me that kind of writing becomes more and more like a screed than anything else, and I don't like reading screeds. I might be forced to listen to them at times, but I don't have to read it. There was a part of the book that was written in a diary format and that portion was OK. There was little about the history or the landform in this book. There was a whole lot about his feelings about slavery. I get that, and I think that it is impossible to separate slavery from the history of the Caribbean islands when traveling there. That is why I have never gone to the Caribbean and don't plan to do so, but I wanted this history mixed in with details about the country and land. This is not that kind of book.

27benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 8, 2019, 12:58 pm

For the Nonfiction Challenge here on LT the March topic is true crime. This is not one of my favorite categories, but when I started looking through my books, I found many works on theft of books and art. I picked one of the books I have had in my collection for a long time as the title to start the months reading - Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by the husband and wife team of Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo. I read this book in a week because I found it so interesting. How people were so deceived and sucked in by John Drewe was interesting but because I am a librarian I was really interested in how Drewe was able to adjust archive records in order to give his forged art works an impeccable provenance that was able to deceive art critics and historians at the highest level was simply amazing. And to keep doing it for twelve years before he was caught. There are probably hundreds of paintings out there that are forged and the investigators for Scotland Yard know they didn't recover all of them. This was a great story on many levels, but for art lovers and librarians it is a warning to always be on your toes and let the buyer beware.

28benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 26, 2019, 10:45 am

Static Ruin by Corey J. White This is book 3 in the Voidwitch series by this debut author in the world of Sci/Fi. I found this book (novella really) to be the weakest of the three titles. It is all shot 'em up, bang bang action, some of which seems gratuitous and not part of the story, and then we have Mars almost in a state of mental breakdown. Was the only thing keeping her on an even keel the idea of revenge? Or of finally finding a family? Since this is a trilogy we may never know the answer. From a readers point-of-view I think the author could have ended this much better and provided some closure. My suspicion is that the author is going to write more books about Mars. If so, this was a clumsy way to introduce that idea, and it comes close to ruining the fun of the first two novellas.

29benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 26, 2019, 10:51 am

Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale I requested this recorded book from Inter-Library Loan and it took almost a month to get it to UA. I listened to it on the drive home and I found it a very hard slog to listen to. I had heard that this was a very interesting book, and I have to say it is like a hundred other academic tomes that I have read. I did not find it extraordinary. It turns out to be a treatise on the development of the detective during early Victorian times and then covers the development of the fictional idea of the police detective from the works of Charles Dickens to that of Wilkie Collins through Arthur Conan-Doyle by using the prism of the investigations of Police Inspector Whicher and the murder of a 5-year old child in a country house in Great Britain in 1861. For me this schema didn't work that well. But the book was tremendously popular, so I am in the minority.

I also think that the narration had something to do with my boredom with the book. Simon Vance was the narrator and I usually find him to be a good narrator. That was not the case this time around. Even he couldn't make this interesting for me. I did listen to the entire book, but it will not be one of my favorites for the year.

30benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 26, 2019, 10:58 am

Preacher by Camilla Lackberg - I read this book for the mystery group read here on LT. I really enjoy the descriptions of Swedish life and the universal problem faced by those who live in wonderful tourist spots. Everybody wants to come visit but nobody wants to pay for that expensive playground. I also like the goings on in the police department. The author does a great job of giving the reader a realistic picture of how a police department in a small town in Scandinavia really works. I found parts of this book really gruesome and am not sure that I wanted to continue to read those. I think those vignettes could have been left out and the book would have been successful. The mystery was better developed than in the first book, so the writer is growing and getting stronger. The mystery is an old one and a new one, and I admit that I had trouble with the connection the author made between the 30 year-old murders and the current murders, but sometimes that happens. The idea that an uncle/father was crazy and killed two girls and then the nephew/son finds the diary the first murderer kept, and replicates the murders seemed a bit far-fetched to me. But it did keep me reading all the way through the book, so in that sense it was successful.

I totally get why this author is so popular in Sweden. She manages to walk that line between gruesome thriller and staid police procedural. And she does it very well by giving the reader a little bit of both.

31benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 26, 2019, 11:05 am

Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert - if you like dark and twisted fairy tales try this one. This YA novel was on the ALA's Best Fiction for YA's and the Notable Children's Books list for 2019. I listened to it, and all the while I wondered if this was really a YA novel. I think it is another case of an adult novel that was moved to YA so that it would have a less crowded field in which to shine. In that it totally succeeds.

This is a take on the twisted fairy tale trope. It is the story of a mother and daughter on the run from unknown calamity. The mother gets kidnapped and the daughter, with the aid of the faithful sidekick, hies off to the rescue with no thought or preparation. It is a quest journey and both the journey and the novel succeed in providing an entertaining ride to the end. The heroine learns much about herself and through her history finds a way to deal with some of her inner character faults and her current trauma.

The narrator for this recorded book was excellent. It just goes to prove that a great story/plot can make any reader sound good.

This is one YA novel that I will be recommending to others. I am not sure that it will make my best of the year list, but it will be a contender.

32benitastrnad
Edited: Mar 22, 2019, 1:42 pm

I had heard good things about Seanan McGuire's writing and about this unusual ghost story - Sparrow Hill Road so decided to read it. It was interesting and fun to read for about the first 200 pages and then it simply ran out of gas. The novel starts out with a great premise, the ghost story of the girl who dies on prom night and extends it. However, it just keeps extending and the story gets lost in its own details. This novel should have been edited and cut and it would have made a great novella, but at 302 pages - it was simply wordy and boring. I don't think I will read the sequel.

33benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 11, 2019, 6:39 pm

Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer This book was for my local Barnes & Noble book store book discussion group. It is not one I would have picked simply because I don't like the title. I think that kind of title is designed to attract attention for shock value. Don't get me wrong, I like shock value as long as it is clever and not vulgar. After reading the book, I still think that word is "common" and the author could have used another title that would have been clever and descriptive of what was in the book. This title is neither of those things.

In fact there are no bad-ass librarians in Timbuktu and I found myself ambivalent about the "hero" librarian. The librarian who is featured broke every rule in the book about libraries and library collecting. He also misused funds given to him. All of this resulted in his having to smuggle books out of Timbuktu when they should have already been scanned and preserved digitally. Don't get me wrong - what El Quaeda does in destroying cultural treasures is wrong too. Very wrong. It just seems to me that there are no Heroes here.

What this book does best is explain why the Sub-Saharan countries of Africa are having such a hard time with fundamentalist terror groups. It takes the time to trace the development and spread of these groups and ties them into the current and immediate past history of countries like Algeria and Libya. It is hard to believe that a good thing like the Arab Spring could turn out to be such a blow to the Sub-Saharan countries and resulted in the spread of fundamentalist terrorism, but that is what happened.

This is a very eye-opening book. It is somewhat about books, manuscripts, and libraries, but that is not all it is. If it just didn't have such a cutsy title I would have liked it much better.

34benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 4, 2019, 2:36 pm

Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India by Kief Hillsbery This work is a bit of a hybrid between narrative nonfiction and memoir. The story toggles back and forth between the past and the present and the author does a supremely good job of making that interesting and both parts of the story relevant to each other. That is not an easy trick. The story starts in the present with the author learning about one of his family members who worked for the East India Company starting in 1840 and after being employed with them for ten years disappeared. The family kept some of his letters and artifacts, but essentially he dropped off the family map. The author makes a trip to Nepal as a student in the 1970's and since he was intrigued by the story of this lost family member begins a decades long investigation that takes him deep into the history of India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. The history that is inside the very readable volume is so relevant to the present that it should be read for that reason alone. However, the truth is that the author just has written a good story and managed the trick of making it relevant as well. So read it because it is just a good story. The narrator for the recorded version was very good and that enhanced the basic story. This one made my best of the year list! More people should be reading this one.

35Jackie_K
Apr 4, 2019, 4:23 am

>33 benitastrnad: This book is on my 'buy this for me this year' wishlist - I hope someone takes the hint (if they don't I'll buy it anyway), I think it sounds great!

36benitastrnad
Apr 8, 2019, 11:46 am

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan. I first heard about this book through reading book reviews for work. However, it went on TBR list when it came to my attention when Mark Freeberg warbled about it on his thread several years ago. While I was cruising through the nonfiction recorded book selection at the Tuscaloosa Public Library in preparation for the drive to Kansas for Spring Break, I came across it. It was the right length to fit with the other titles I had selected, so I nabbed it. i started listening to it on the drive back to Alabama and was thoroughly engrossed in it, but hadn't finished it by the time I got back. When I got to Tuscaloosa, I found that ILL had Empire Made waiting for me. I had to put Brain on Fire aside while I listened to the ILL recorded book. I didn't have much left of this one to listen to, so when I did get back to it, I took up where I left off.

This book belongs to what I refer to as a "disease of the month" genre. Fictionalized accounts of exotic diseases are very popular in YA fiction, but this book is not fiction, and it is for adults. Technically it is an autobiography - or a memoir. I think it is autobiography because what the author writes is backed up by documentation. This documentation ranges from interviews with doctors to colleagues and family members. The author is stricken with a disease that, at the time, was unknown and therefore, she was misdiagnosed. Fortunately, one of her doctors ran one psychological test on her and recognized the results as matching those of an article he had recently read. She was treated and returned to functionality. The book is the story of that month and the accompanying slow recovery she made.

The book is very well written, and while full of scientific and medical terms, the author takes time to explain them and makes this story unique and meaningful. She brought insight into a difficult subject - mental illness, and the confusing diagnosis that many people get from the experts in the field.

37benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 11, 2019, 6:39 pm

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman This is book 3 in the Seraphina series by this author. I Pear Ruled it. I read/listened to about 180 pages (5 CD's) and then gave up on it. It was boring and I never got into the characters. This one was about Tess, a half sister to Seraphina. Tess is an angry rebellious teen, and not at all likeable, at first. Her story is told in sort of flashbacks, and the literary technique doesn't work in this book. It is too piecemeal, and to confusing for the reader. It was not at all like the first two books in this series.

There were problems with the narrator as well. The twin sisters name is one. Is it John, Jean, Jeanne, Shaun, Shin. The narrator pronounces it several ways in the portion that I listened to. It wasn't until I got the book that I was able to establish that her name is Jeanne. When a book is recorded it is little details like that which cause irritation amongst the listeners. I expected better from a Listening Library production. Their recorded books are always of high quality. This one isn't. So now it is on to another book. I doubt that I will come back to this one. For me the Seraphina series is done. It would take much for me to enticed back to this series.

38benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 12, 2019, 1:28 pm

Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry. I read this book for my real life book discussion group. This is not narrative nonfiction. This is an academic work and it concentrates on the academic work of others to explain the 1918 Flu Epidemic. To do that the author starts with the state of medicine in 1918. He works backwards from there to tell the story of the medical profession as it was after the American Civil War. He then brings that history forward to tell the story of the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, which was the first scientific, academic, and academically rigorous medical training available in the U.S. until the early 1900's. I suspect for many people this is the boring part of the book. I found it interesting. The middle sections of the book were about the epidemic itself. Where did it start? Why and how did it spread? And What were the results? This section is more like narrative nonfiction and many people would find it much easier to read. The last sections of the book discuss the aftermath of the epidemic and tell what happened to many of the major figures in the medical part of the story. There was a great deal of science in this book and explanations of the differences between virus' and bacteria's, as well as the differences between flu and pneumonia, and how vaccines and antitoxins are produced. This was an excellent book, and full of great detail. If you don't like detail in your reading - find another book on the subject.

39benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 28, 2019, 9:17 pm

Friends in High Places by Donna Leon This was another fine entry in the continuing mystery series starring Guido Brunetti. This one was again about the corruption in the Italian police and other other government agencies.

40benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 18, 2019, 11:07 am

Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey. I started reading this one for the 75'ers Nonfiction reading challenge hosted by Suzanne. That was the March category and I and didn't finish it until this month. This started out with an intriguing plot. A man is arrested at the Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland for stealing rare and historical maps out of old books. It turns out that he had built a whole business out of stealing and reselling these old maps that he illegally removed from books owned by public and university libraries. I would have liked to hear more about cartographic crime, but the book turned out to be about maps and then about the psychology of "collecting" and then the author's pursuit of the criminal. In short it got lost in the weeds. I think that happened because there really wasn't enough material to make a book. It was more like a nice long article for something like the New Yorker. Good idea, poor execution.

41benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 28, 2019, 9:20 pm

Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi This book was the fictional account of the book I read earlier this year titled "Merchants of Doubt." Doubt Factory took the same premise as the non-fiction work and worked it into a plot that was aimed at YA's. The boogie men in this novel were the PR people, security organizations, and big industry, particularly Big Pharma that deceive the public through obfuscation and downright obstruction. The narrator for this sound recording was good and even though the plot was somewhat predictable, on the whole this was a well done production of a workman like novel.

42benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 28, 2019, 9:25 pm

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich This is book 14 for me out of the 23 book in the National Geographic Directions Series that I have been reading through. The original version of the book was published in 2003, but it was reissued in 2014 with a different cover and an epilogue. I read the 2014 edition.

This was one of the better essays in this series. The author truly tries to bring the reader into the scenary, and the people who live in the area populated by the Ojibwe people. She also brings in her story and her love of books. The part about her visit to the island owned by the author and the present day use of it as a retreat for book people and people learning to speak the Ojibwe language was of special interest. This was an enjoyable travel essay.

43benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 28, 2019, 9:31 pm

Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin. This novel is published by Europa Editions and is translated from the French. In France it won several prizes for fiction and after reading it I can understand why. It is a very good story. It is a short novel - about 190 pages, but it packs a whole bunch of ideas into those pages. It also enlightened me about another little known aspect of WWI. I had no idea that the French and English fought the Austrians, Russians, and Bulgarians in Greece around the city of Salonika. In fact it was a major engagement in a minor theater of the war, but tell that to the troops who fought and died there. A reader can learn much from a work of fiction.

The action in this novel takes place in France after WWI. The French army is still prosecuting soldiers for acts of defiance and disobedience. This story involves a loyal dog and fortunately everything turns out alright for the people in the story and the dog. Justice is done. I liked this one. Good job Europa.

44connie53
May 3, 2019, 3:32 am

WOW, you have been reading a lot of books, Benita!

45benitastrnad
May 3, 2019, 11:43 am

>44 connie53:
Alot of these were short and some were audio books that I started while driving during spring break, so technically I finished them in April rather than March. I have been trying to get things read during my lunch hour and now will start spending time at the swimming pool on Sunday afternoon's. That gives me a couple more hours of reading time per week.

46benitastrnad
Edited: May 11, 2019, 8:46 pm

The Grave's A Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley the 9th and penultimate book in the Flavia De Luce series. Like most of the others in this series that I have read, I actually listened to this one and like the previous books in the series, it was a delight. The narrator does such a good job. This one makes the miles sing by. Which raises the question of is it the voice or is it the plot that I like? Oh well! It is all fun and an enjoyable way to pass the time. Not to mention all the chemistry in the series.

47benitastrnad
Edited: May 11, 2019, 8:52 pm

Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas

This book had such a good review in Publisher’s Weekly that I preordered it from Amazon. The publisher is new - Felony & Mayhem - and I want to support new talent and new publishers. It is a hard business to break into. The question is - was the book worth reading? I found it average. This is meant as a comedy and as such it falls a little bit short. In this novel the author twists and plays with every literary trope to be found. As a result it is over-the-top in many ways. Here is an example. The Prime Imperative from Star Trek does not apply to her. She brings all of her 21st century ideas and ideals into her mission. To make matters worse, the heroine is obtuse and full of herself. She is a terrible detective and time traveler. I am sure that the author means that to be funny - but at times it fell flat and it got old.

The book needed serious editing. It was at least 50 pages too long.

The novel has some really good ideas and twists on old tropes that could be funny. Some better editing would have a profound effect for the better on this novel. I think it would have made a great novella, but as is, it fell short of the hype. The big question is would I read another in this series? The answer is no. Even though there was a spark of a good novella here, I ended up not caring about Shone McGonigle enough to read about her again.

As to the publisher - They now have a second murder mystery that has had great reviews listed in Publisher’s Weekly. It is a reissue of a 1930’s novel that has gone out of print.

48benitastrnad
Edited: May 12, 2019, 6:51 pm

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I loved this book! I gave it 5 stars. It will most certainly be on my best of the year list.

I got this book at ALA Mid-Winter in Atlanta at a publisher's lunch. The author was one of the authors who spoke at the lunch. The event was the same day as Trump's Inaguration and the Women's March. In Atlanta there were 50,000 women marching that day. The author got very emotional when she started talking. She said her book was about immigration and that she had fears that the U.S would limit immigration. Of course she was against this because she is a first generation immigrant. At the time the book and the author didn't impress me much, so I was surprised when it was nominated for a National Book Award. I had read the author's first book and even though I finished it, I was not that impressed with it. After reading this book I understand why it has accumulated the accolades it has. This is a darn good book. It's only fault is that it starts out so slowly and understated that I am sure that people give up on it. It is one of those books that is worth the buildup and the waiting.

The story is set in Japan and is about Korean immigrants to Japan just prior to WWII. The story starts in the 1930's and ends in the early 1990's and covers the war years, the Cold War and the explosion of the Japanese economy. It is about immigrants and the hardships and discrimination that they face everyday in building and establishing business's and in living and moving up the economic ladder - if that is even possible.

I cried at the end.

49benitastrnad
Edited: May 19, 2019, 9:45 pm

Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

This was the June book discussion selection for the Barnes & Noble Book group in Tuscaloosa. At first I was not going to participate in this discussion because it was the same day as my other book group. However, I ran across the recorded version of this book at the Tuscaloosa Public Library and decided that I could probably get it listened to in time for the discussion. If I made it to both discussions - fine. If not - fine too. I made it to both.

I first took note of this book when it was listed in the Martha Stewart Living magazine as one of the books to consider reading in their monthly book blurb.

Essentially, the book asks the question How would you live your life if you knew the date of your death? In my opinion it doesn’t answer that question very well, but it tries. The book starts out promising, but it ends badly. I also thought it could have dropped the sex scenes, or at least not been so explicit.

The narrator for this book was good. I think that helped to keep me listening.

50cyderry
May 20, 2019, 2:06 pm

>49 benitastrnad: I read this for one of my book clubs as well, and I agree totally with your assessment.

51benitastrnad
May 22, 2019, 6:43 pm

Finished The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg. This novel was a good read, so I think the author has finally found her style and her footing as an author. It was a bit on the long side, with a large number of plot threads to keep toggling back and for to, but overall, it was the best of her books in this series, so far. I will keep reading this series. The author has slowed her production of these novels so perhaps I will be able to keep up with her as I catch up on the titles.

52benitastrnad
Edited: Jun 10, 2019, 4:16 pm

1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West by Roger Crowley. This book turned out to be a military history of the last siege and final fall of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet. It is one of those books that will make you cry because the history could be so different if the Western Christians had just sent military help and overlooked the differences in religious dogma between Eastern Orthodox and the Western Christianity. What really conqueror end Constantinople was internecine conflict between the Christians. However, in the end, Mehmet followed a policy of religious tolerance and allowed the Greeks and Jews to settle in their own quarters in the city. It was is son who was religiously intolerant and who put into place stricter prohibitions for Christians and Jews. Those laws were loosened in the late 1700's and early 1800's and now those laws are being tightened again under Erdogan.

There are lots of legends and mythologies associated with the Fall of Constantinople and this book was very enlightening. This was a short volume and clearly was not intended to be an in depth analysis of the siege, the political basis, or the long term historical consequences of the fall of Byzantium.

53benitastrnad
Edited: Jun 11, 2019, 5:55 pm

My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and Preoccupations by Howard Norman. This is book number 17 that I have read in the National Geographic Society Directions series. This one was pretty good for this series. There were two chapters in it about local folklore. One chapter devoted to Golskap tales from the Native Americans and one for the portents beliefs that are deeply held by the residents of European ancestry. These chapters were informative and gave me an idea of the local culture.

The author has made numerous extended stays in Nova Scotia that started in the 1960's when he was a graduate student collecting folklore for a research project. At one time he stayed in Sam Sheppard's home while he was writing and then later, he owned a house there and made it his writing escape. This was a nice quiet book that was easy to read in short snatches of time.

I have already requested number 18 in this series from ILL.

54benitastrnad
Edited: Jun 11, 2019, 6:03 pm

Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey. I requested the recorded version of this book through ILL. Research in WorldCat told me that there were 4 libraries in the US that had the recorded version and one was the Carbondale, IL public library. When I made my ILL request I told them to ask for it from that specific library. I don't know if they took my word for it, but I received it from the Carbondale, Illinois public library in time to listen to on the way back from Kansas. The narrator had the perfect voice for reading this book. It was quiet, slow, and precise. Perfect for the book. Not interesting enough for the drive. I am not sure if it was her pleasant tone, her precise rhythm or the contents of the book, but I found myself sleepy most of the time while I was listening to this book. Not good, considering I was driving.

This is a naturalist book. It is a book about nature and about observing nature. The author spent more than a year in bed recovering from an auto-immune disease she picked up in Europe. While she was to weak to hardly move, a friend brought her a wild snail native to Massachusetts. Observing the snail in its daily and nighttime environments soon became the focus of her waking hours. That lead to research about snails and this short little book. The format of the book has poems and writings about snails that are just as intriguing as the book. It made me realize that more people than I would have thought possible have watched snails and written about the experience. This book made me think of my friend who is a fresh water mollusk expert. I wonder if she has read this book.

55benitastrnad
Edited: Jun 19, 2019, 6:48 pm

Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck What's not to like about a book in which the Flint Hills of Kansas are written about eloquently and elegantly on the first page of a book? I really liked this book and it will easily make my Best of 2019 list. I found it insightful and so much fun to read. Two brothers decide to purchase a wagon, a team of mules, and make the 2,000 mile trip from St. Joe, Missouri to someplace in Oregon following the Oregon Trail. What could be more fun to read about than that? The author has an easy breezy style when writing about everything from memoirs about traveling the trail back in the 1840's, to the history of mules in the US, and sights and sounds of the modern trail. There are wonderful line drawings that clearly delineate the intricacies of a three mule hitch, to cattle guards that are really helpful. There are also maps. It is one of my pet peeves to read history books that don't have maps, and this one has them. Thank the gods!

I heard about this book when it first came out and was a best seller, but I didn't take it seriously. How can you take such a book seriously when you grew up along the Oregon Trail and think you know everything about it? However, a trip to Scottsbluff, Nebraska made me take a hard look at this book, and put it on my reading list. The public library in Scottsbluff had the author come talk and the librarian gushed about what a great speaker he was and how much the public enjoyed his speech. I managed to convince the members of my real life book club to read this book as our June selection and they like it! Maybe not as much as I did, but they were all positive about it. This is a book that many kinds of readers will enjoy for many reasons. Quality story tellling being one of them.

56benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 2, 2019, 2:12 pm

Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas This is the fourth book in the Court of Thorns and Roses series by this author. It is a wrap up of the main part of this series and a lead in for a continuation for some of the minor characters. It is clear that the author is going to make some of the minor characters into the major characters of future books and this short, for this author, novel is a lead in for the upcoming part of this series.

57benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 2, 2019, 2:17 pm

Book of Separation by Tova Mirvis. This is a book bullet I took from Suzanne several years ago. I read it for the biography/memoir challenge for the month of July in the non-fiction group. The writing in this memoir is exquisite. It is moody, mystical, and spiritual. The author was an adherent of Jewish Orthodoxy and she ended up divorcing her husband and leaving the sect. This memoir is about that decision. What lead to the decision. What the results were of that decision and how the author has resolved her feelings of separation. It is very well writing with a sense of urgency and not at all desperate. Very well done memoir of a highly sensitive and personal topic.

58benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 2, 2019, 2:19 pm

A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon This is book 10 in the Guido Brunetti series that I am reading for the Lackberg/Leon mystery challenge. It is more of thriller than the previous entries in the series have been and it continues to present different parts of Venice to the reader. This one is centered on environmental issues, and is centered around illegal clam harvesting. Another good entry in the series.

59benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 8, 2019, 2:24 pm

Medusa by Michael Dibdin is book 9 in the Aurelio Zen series. There are only 11 titles in this series, and I have one left to read. I took this one with me to Washington, D. C. to read on the plane.

This was a great plane read. I have enjoyed every one of the Zen books and this one was no exception. This time the mystery was set in the Alto Adige region of Italy and goes back all the way to WWI and the war in the Southern Tyrol. This was a complex mystery and in it more of the political life and corruption of the Italian government is discussed. Zen's cynicism and peripatetic personality combined with the setting, characters, and plot make for great reading.

60benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 8, 2019, 3:13 pm

I knocked out another ROOT over the holiday weekend. End Games by Michael Dibdin. This is the last of the Aurelio Zen mysteries and I have to say I am sorry that they ended. I really liked this mystery series. This one was set in Calabria region of Italy and covered lots of territory both historically and geographically. The history of the region was part of the story as was the food. Always the food. What is it with Italian mysteries and food? All of the detectives love to eat and describe the memorable meals.

This one is the last of this series. I shall miss Zen and these well crafted mystery novels. Dibdin brought the Italian life to the page and gave me characters I loved to read about. I like these Italian mysteries better than the Guido Brunetti series. They seem more realistic to me and I like the fact that Zen was transferred all around Italy in an attempt to get him out of the way. Now all of these books are gone off my shelves. I shall donate these last two books in the series to the used bookstore run by my local library so somebody else can enjoy them. I hope that they do enjoy them. They are to good to just lay around and not be read.

61benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 8, 2019, 3:11 pm

It was a unexpected pleasure to finally read Riding With Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books by Ted Bishop has been on my TBR list for a long long time - maybe since I joined LT. I started reading this one for my real life book discussion group. Each summer we do a round robin book talk of a travel book and this summer I chose this title. I wanted to read something about transportation not in a car, and wasn't in the mood for another snippy Paul Theroux train book. I remembered we had this book in the library and so went and got it. It turned out to be a fun read.

The author is an English Professor at the University of Edmonton whose specialty is early modern English literature. He is also a motorcycle rider. The book is about a literary trip he took by motorcycle from his home in Edmonton to Austin, Texas to do some work in the Stirling Archives. He had purchased a Ducati motorcycle and it was his inaugural trip with that machine. Along the way he stopped at other literary places of interest -like the New Mexico ranch of D. H. Lawrence. In the course of the book, he took a trip to Europe for a literary conference and visited the Ducati factory and museum. The book was full of side trips and lots of motorcycle stories. It was also full of thoughts about archives, books, and the art of reading. It was quite philosophical - even about motorcycling and motorcycles.

62benitastrnad
Edited: Nov 27, 2019, 2:49 pm

I finished reading Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North by Ariel Dorfman. The world's most arid desert is the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. It is the setting for this memoir that is part of the National Geographic Directions series. I have been reading my way through the 23 published titles in this series. This is number 18 in the series that I have finished.

Dorfman was one of the young university students who brought Salvador Allende to power in the early 1970's, and he was lucky to escape and live in exile until the overthrow of Augusto Pinochet in 1990. He returned to Chile to tour the desert region and to track down family members and missing friends, murdered by the military during the years of the junta. He spent two months traveling through the region and he takes the reader along with him while he learns about nitrate mining and now copper mining and the boom and bust economy that mining on that scale brings with it. He also wrote about some of the coastal cities such as Iquique and Antofagasta. Behind all of this is he quest to find the graves of university friends who disappeared during the Pinochet years.

I read this one for my real life book discussion group. July was our month to do a travel book. We will have a round robin book talk because each member read the travel book of their choice.

I only have 3 more books to read in this series. This year should see the end of the series for me. Yeah!

63benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 27, 2019, 9:17 pm

Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester. This was a recorded version of the book and was read by the author. It had been on my shelves since I joined LT in 2008.

I had enjoyed Winchester’s other works and had listened to him read his book on the English geologist. I found him to be a good reader in that book. I did not enjoy him so much in this reading. None of the footnotes were read, and towards the end his overall tone turned to the sanctimonious.

Overall this book was somewhat of a disappointment. I wanted to learn more about the earthquake and less about the geology. I think that might be due to the fact that I had read John McPhee’s excellent book on California and it would be hard to top that work. In my opinion this book doesn’t match that one in depth of information.

Since it is about one event I would have liked to read more of the personal experiences of the people who were there. Perhaps more of a blow-by-blow description of events that just wasn’t there.

None of this makes this a bad book - it just means that it wasn’t what I wanted. It held my interest until the end and it arroused my curiosity about other major U.S. earthquakes such as New Madrid, Alaska, and Charleston. Perhaps he will write those books?

64karenmarie
Jul 20, 2019, 10:13 am

Hi Benita!

First time visitor – I thought you’d be in the 75ers but finally found you here in ROOTville. I’m in both groups. *smile*

I love the variety of books you read and what you say about them.

>29 benitastrnad: I think I liked The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher better than you did, but not by much. I didn't keep my copy.

>30 benitastrnad: I have this book on my shelves, and just found a copy of the first one, Ice Princess on BookMooch and mooched it, so will have to see if my mooch request is accepted.

>33 benitastrnad: I have The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu on my shelves and will still read it but with a better understanding of what it’s really about. I, too, get distressed when the ‘heroes’ of books aren’t.

>48 benitastrnad: Pachinko is on my shelves, would love to read it this year.

>63 benitastrnad: I adore all the books I’ve read by Simon Winchester so far, 4 of the 9 that are on my shelves.

65benitastrnad
Jul 20, 2019, 9:50 pm

>64 karenmarie:
I read a wide variety thanks to the Non-fiction challenge that Suzanne (Chatterbox) hosts. It is in the 75’ers group. Each month she has a different topic. This month is memoirs and biographies. I try to read, or listen to, one book a month for that group. Suzanne comes up with such unique topics that it makes finding something to fit the category lots of fun.

I have been participating in the ROOT’ers group since it was born. I use this thread as a list to keep track of the ROOT’s I have read. This makes it easy to report at the end of the month. I don’t do the tickers, but I do the reading. When I get time I write reviews. Then at the end of the year I print it out and put it in my book diary.

66Jackie_K
Jul 21, 2019, 5:35 am

>65 benitastrnad: I wish I'd kept a book diary. I have started adding my reviews each month to my blog, for some sort of posterity, but I only started doing that this year.

67connie53
Jul 27, 2019, 12:12 pm

>51 benitastrnad: read this one too. In fact I've finished every book by her that is translated into Dutch. 10 books and a novella about Patrick and Erica. And the newest one that is a standalone, Gouden Kooi. I liked them all. Some are better than others but over all they scored between 3,5 en 4,5 stars.

68benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 30, 2019, 11:26 am

I read Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray by Adam Federman for the July Nonfiction Challenge hosted by Suzanne. The category for July was Biographies. I had never heard of Patience Gray. I wanted to read this book because I had read a review of it several years ago and the reviews said it was an excellent example of a biography. I like to read about food and foodies and was astonished that I had never heard of Patience Gray. Who was this visionary writer? I had no clue. Clearly, the best thing to do was read the book and find out.

Patience Gray was a leader in the slow food movement, the back-to-nature club, or the organic food movement. Whatever you want to call it, Patience and her partner, the sculptor and painter Norman Mommens, were living the organic and back-to-the-land life style starting in the 1960’s. Along the way Patience wrote about food and published cookbooks about how to live seasonally and within the planetary means. She eschewed the consumer lifestyle that she thought permeated western culture. She and her partner lived in an isolated part of Italy, grew their own food, and preserved it, and then consumed it throughout the year. It reminded me of the way I grew up - summers dominated by the need to preserve whatever garden crop was in season at the moment.

Patience and Norman were also leaders in the environmental movement. They protested the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and monoculture agriculture. They were far ahead of the curve in this regard and became looked to leaders of this movement in Italy. They also encouraged young people to stay in the region where they were born and start businesses there’ making them leaders in the small community movements of Europe.

The reviews were correct. This was a excellent biography and I enjoyed reading it. It was well written and made the reader envious of this full but frugal lifestyle and the subjects ability to live that way for 50 years.

When I went to enter this book into my book diary (paper book diary) I noticed that it was published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This is a small environmentally certified green publishing company based in Vermont. The book was printed on recycled paper and all materials used in the book are certified sustainable. This is in total keeping with what Patience and Norman would have wanted and it is a wonderful tribute to them and their principles.

69benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 30, 2019, 11:26 am

This message has been deleted by its author.

70benitastrnad
Edited: Jul 30, 2019, 11:31 am

Bloodwitch by Susan Dennard. I have been reading through this series for a couple of years and with this book I am caught up with the author. I found this entry in the series to engrossing that I went to the public library and got the recorded version of the book so that I could listen to it in the car as well as read it when I got home. I spent most of my Saturday reading this book instead of cleaning my bathroom. (image that - reading vs. cleaning and which was the winner?) The threads of this story (that is a pun that involves the books) are getting more numerous as well as more tangled and that makes it harder to write and to follow. The author has solved this problem by bringing in characters and then leaving them out for large sections of time. It is clear that there will be more books that will take up those stories, but for now there are dangling threads for some characters. The opposite is true of other characters. They were the subjects in previous books and then disappeared for a time, only to come roaring back in this book. This is definitely a series that I will continue to read, but as with other YA series it will get harder and harder to remember threads as time goes on. This will necessitate rereads - something that I have a hard time tolerating.

71benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 13, 2019, 10:40 pm

Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce. This World War II novel is set in London during the Blitz. The heroine, Emmaline, works at a women.s magazine as a typist. The editor is the Mrs. Bird of the title.

I found this novel to be a realistic picture of life in wartime London with all the trials of living through bombing and trying to have a life. Instead of the usual heroes of men in military uniform this novel pays tribute to the thousands of firemen, policemen, and other first responders who did heroic deeds and got little notice at the time.

This was not exactly chic lit. It was a nice piece of historical fiction.

I listened to this novel and the narrator and the recorded version were well done.

72benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 20, 2019, 9:52 pm

Stranger by Camilla Lackberg. This is a mystery novel that I read for the Lackberg/Leon challenge. This murder mystery is set in the same Swedish towns as the previous novels but the author adds a little more family drama that helps to bring the main characters in the novels to life. In this novel a reality TV show comes to town and with it a murder. From there some very strange connections to a recent murder in the town come to the fore and the murder mystery is off and running.

This translation seems smoother than the previous ones in the series so perhaps the author and translator have found their stride.

73benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 21, 2019, 2:15 pm

Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge by Antony Beevor

I finished reading Ardennes 1944 and really enjoyed the take that Antony Beevor has on the Battle of the Bulge. For one thing he is much more objective about the American leadership and the American soldier than are American historians. The last chapter of the book is devoted to dealing with civilian causalities and disruptions. For instance, he notes that 30,000 civilians were causalities in some way as a result of this battle. There were at least 5,000 dead civilians. They were without homes, without resources, and without finances. The long term effects of not being able to harvest their forests for twenty years left this area of France poverty stricken. This is something that a reader of military history never stops to think about.

Beevor also lets the reader know that the American's were just as guilty of disposing of prisoners-of-war by murdering them as were the Germans. In fact, he lays the blame at the door of General Bradley. Bradley is quoted as giving orders to take no prisoners. His soldiers followed that order to the letter. The difference between this order and the one given to the German soldiers is - which side won? Beevor says it reflects badly on the leadership. Bradley did not come off well in this book. He made mistakes and spent much to much time worrying about who had command of the largest army on the front, rather than on what was actually going on. He says simply that Bradley was out-of-touch and too concerned about what the glory hungry Montgomery to his north, and the equally egotistical Patton on his south, were doing, to worry about what was on his front doorstep.

Very interesting take on this battle, that American's think was a great victory.

74benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 8, 2019, 12:32 pm

Proof (Caroline Auden) by C. E. Tobisman

This is another first rate legal mystery/thriller from this author. Tobisman takes the reader inside the legal system and makes the nuts and bolts of filing evidence, filing cases, etc. - the stuff that usually isn't exciting - exciting for readers. That is a rare gift. In this novel the author takes a simple humble story and from it builds a novel that keeps the reader on the edge of their seats. And all with the simple stuff of routine legal work - until it isn't.

This novel won the Harper Lee Legal Fiction Award in 2018. This award is given by The University of Alabama Law School for the best legal fiction of the year. It deserves this award.

The author's first novel was just as good, so if you like mysteries or thriller - read or listen to both of them.

I listened to this novel, and the narrator of the recorded version does a really good job of bringing this novel to sound. This was a great commute listen.

75benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 10, 2019, 11:29 am

Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor This book had very good reviews when it came out and that caught my eye. From time-to-time I like a good thriller. This book took a bit of time for me to come to like. At first it seemed full of tropes, but then the author started twisting them and the novel really took off. In the end there was a real twist that I didn't see coming that made me wonder about the whole resolution of the novel. This was a debut novel and it really worked! It remains to be seen if the author can reproduce it or not.

This novel is set in England and I thought there was a real chalk man in England. There isn't. It is a chalk horse and there are chalk designs - but no chalk man. The figure I thought I remembered was really Penokee Man. This is a human figure outlined in Dakota Limestone that is found on the steep side of bluff that overlooks the South Fork of the Solomon River. Penokee is located in Graham County, Kansas in the war western part of North Central Kansas, or the eastern part of Northwest Kansas. I was the school librarian at Moreland, Kansas, and I would go horseback riding with Alice Born who lived at Penokee. One day, back in 1986, we rode over to see Penokee Man. It was impressive. It has been dated to be at least 1,000 years old and the reason it was made is unknown. Today, the area is off limits to tourists because the rocks started disappearing. It is on private land and the owners are trying to protect it as much as possible. They, and the state historical society have removed its location from web sites when possible in order to keep what is there intact.

76benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 19, 2019, 4:35 pm

I finished Oranges by John McPhee. I suspect that this book was originally a long essay that McPhee wrote for some magazine because it is about 175 pages in length. However, the short length packs a punch, with lots of information about the citrus industry, the fruit - oranges, and the geography of Florida into this slim volume. This book was first written in 1967 so some things are a bit dated. For instance, there is no mention of organic fruit or farming practices. There might not be any such thing as organic oranges, according to McPhee the industry is pretty much about forcing oranges to be beautiful orange orbs on a schedule.

I am glad that I finally got to this title.

77benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 20, 2019, 9:55 pm

Willful Behavior by Donna Leon is another entry in the Guido Brunetti series. This one delves into the sordid recent past of Italy as a Fascist country and allie of Germany in WWII. More of the history of Guido’s father-in-law and his father is told in this novel. Of course there is art - and Venetian corruption.

This novel is one that stands out in this series as being relevant and interesting to me. Really liked this one.

78benitastrnad
Edited: Aug 25, 2019, 9:55 pm

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen I am not going to say this memoir was a total waste of time but the most interesting part was the epilouge where the author gives some of the history of the Mennonites. I found it much to trite and totally irreverent. As a result it was not nearly as thoughtful or respectful of the ways of expressing faith that others have. It was not as good of a memoir about leaving an orthodoxy and a way of life as was Book of Separation by Tova Mirvis.

I see there is a sequel to this memoir. I won’t be reading that one.

79benitastrnad
Sep 3, 2019, 10:06 am

I finished reading Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel over the weekend. This is one of the first books I entered into LT back in 2008. I read it for Suzanne's Nonfiction Challenge. The category was Raw Materials: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.

This book almost makes me stop buying bananas. There is little good about the production of the fruit and lots that is good about the fruit itself. It is the production that causes the problems. The pursuit of profits around the fruit has had repercussions around the world. There is a reason why many Central and South American countries have acquired the moniker of "Banana Republics" and none of those reasons are good.

Politics aside the fruit is fascinating. It is also endangered. Endangered by man. There are few varieties of bananas. The bananas that we eat in the stores are all clones and therefore susceptible to genetic calamity. That kind of calamity befell the banana industry once and the banana that was previously eaten by most American's was destroyed by a fungus that is now threatening the one variety that proved immune to that fungus. The banana hasn't mutated. The fungus has - and there is no replacement for the fruit. What is really a problem that in many places in Africa and Asia, the bananas home territory the fruit supplies 70% of the caloric intake for millions of people. With that food source now gone or depleted and no replacement in sight, a true food calamity is knocking on the door of many of the world's poorest countries.

This was an amazing story and I encourage people to read it.

80benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 3, 2019, 10:12 am

On the way over to the Decatur Book Festival I listened to Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. This book would make an excellent book to use in the classroom and I have a terrible time selling it to students. I decided that I needed to read it so that I can be a better salesman.

I have some quibbles with the format. I think that Middle School students would have trouble with the switches in the point-of-view, so listening to it would make those switches easier to handle. The recorded version was well done but I would expect nothing less from the people at Listening Library.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gaustloff remains the worlds worst maritime disaster but it is unknown in the U. S. (as is the sinking of the Eastland). What this book does well is humanize all of the people involved in this tragedy. I think that the evil "Sailor" is a useless trope, but in the context of writing for 12 - 15 year old's, it works.

This is a good one for school teachers. Something for which there is always a need.

81connie53
Sep 5, 2019, 10:09 am

Hi Benita, just popping in to say Hi.

Congrats on reaching your goal of 55 ROOTS!

82benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 10, 2019, 11:37 am

Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdieh This YA novel has a really good premise, and has so much potential to be a great exciting adventure thriller. It is set in a mythical country that is obviously medieval Japan complete with a Shogun and an Emperor. It has just the right amount of swords and magic to make it into a real swords and sorcerers epic, but it just doesn't quite make it. It is full of YA fantasy tropes, and just tropes in general. There is the mysterious thieves who are not what they seem - al a Scaramouche, there is the girl masquerading as a boy, and there is the evil queen. All of these elements could come together to make this a really great adventure thriller, but somehow they just don't. The novel has no hard edges, and never grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. It was easy listening elevator music, when it should have been Bob Seeger or Bruce Springsteen grab you by the guts and don't let go type of novel. Instead it is soft pedal. I noticed this tendency with Ahdieh's previous work - the tendency to have a great plot and not be able to provide the writing to match. I let it go because they were based on Middle Eastern mythology and I thought I just didn't know enough about that mythology to be critical. Japanese mythology is a different matter. Ahdieh is clearly writing outside of her realm of knowledge and just can't quite make the story into something unforgettable. This novel was a best seller and it should be because there is a dearth of books about Asian myths in general, but for hard hitting better historical fiction without the magical element there are authors who do this much better. Katherine Paterson for one. I question whether this was the right author for this project. I just don't think she has the writing chops to make this into a really good novel that would be anything more than a flash in the pan.

83benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 11, 2019, 12:40 pm

Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman I finished Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman and have to say I was disappointed in this book. Actually, I was quite startled when I first started reading the book due to the really out-of-the-box style of writing. Ackerman is the author of several best selling natural science books so I expected a more straightforward and fairly standard nonfiction writing style. Instead the text was full of, what seemed to me, speculation and unsupported supposition. I later came to realize that the author was quoting from the subjects memoir, but that was not made clear at the beginning. I believe that this book was written in a form of narrative non-fiction, but the subject matter was so interesting and made for compelling reading that it could have actually benefited from more structure and traditional nonfiction methods. I enjoyed this book, but I was disappointed in its rambling style and, often, unsubstantiated conclusions. There are end notes in the book, but they weren't extensive. I appreciated the authors telling of this story, but found its style to be disconcerting. I would recommend it and think that many readers would appreciate it more than I did.

84benitastrnad
Sep 10, 2019, 11:18 am

>81 connie53:
Good to see you. I thought I would have trouble reaching 55 but I got to it - and more besides. I have been spending more time reading. And I am reading quite a few YA novels that I have had on the back burner for sometime. They are easy reading so they go fast.

85Jackie_K
Sep 10, 2019, 1:21 pm

>83 benitastrnad: This book is on my TBR - what did you think of it?

86benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 20, 2019, 6:23 pm

I finished reading Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski and I loved this book! It is a long essay about reading Herodotus. It is a travelogue. It is a meditation on providing information. It is a discussion of what history is - and isn't. It was darn good reading - in my opinion. I don't know who it was on this thread (but it was a couple of years ago) talked about this book, but I took a book bullet and I am so glad that I did. I think this is going to be one of my top books of the year.

Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist and photographer. He worked primarily for Polish Press Agency and was the reporter that they sent all over the world to very out-of-the-way and not glamorous places. He was thrown into India as his first assignment and he writes about how he had no clue what he was to do, but he wrote and filed stories anyway. He stumbles across a Polish translation of the works of Herodotus and this becomes his traveling companion. In the book, he write of the parallel past and present that he sees. Using the past as written by Herodotus he makes connections to the places and people that he is covering in the present. He does it beautifully. I especially enjoyed the chapters on his first visit to China during the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign. The writing took me there with him.

Eventually Kapuscinski was fired from his job in Poland because of his support for the Solidarity Movement. When he died he was cited by Der Spiegal as being one of the most credible journalists that the world has ever seen. The Wikipedia entry about Kapuscinski says that he was considered for a Noble Prize. He died in 2007 but he would have been so much better of a choice than Bob Dylan.

The book I read was a translation from the Polish and I am thankful for the translator who made the words and ideas come alive in English. That is a talent as fundamental as is the original writing.

87benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 28, 2019, 9:20 pm

Red Rising by Pierce Brown. I got this book as an ARC from the Chicago ALA conference back in 2013 when I heard the author speak at an Author’s breakfast. He was compelling as a speaker and I figured that this book would be a good one. However, I did not serious about reading it until I got a book bullet from Joe Walsh. Then I moved it up in the pile. (I also noticed that the library copy has had good circulation so I figured I should get to it soon.)

This book was the September selection for the local Barnes & Noble Book Club, so I decided to read it. I read it in a little less than a week. This is one exciting dystopian war games novel. You can bet that I will be reading the rest of the books in the series and hope that they live up to the standards set by this one.

The novel is set on Mars where the society is modeled on a quasi-Roman system. There are the Aristocracy, the Knights, and the Plebians. There is a Spartacus style uprising being planned and the hero in this book is the lynchpin in the plans.

Very well done debut novel that leaves me with high hopes for the series.

88benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 28, 2019, 9:34 pm

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. This novel was a book bullet from Joe Walsh and from Ginger Hewitt. I had the recorded book and Ginger gave me the ARC that she picked up in Atlanta back in January 2017.

This was a really good book. It is classed as women’s fiction but I think that probably does it more harm than good. I think that this is a novel that will appeal to many people, but that genre tag on it is going to limit its playing field more than help it. It is really fiction about a woman who has a mental breakdown and it is no wonder with all that she has been through in her lifetime. The author does not reveal what that event was until the very end of the book, and so the reader is forced to go along with Eleanor as she gathers the various threads of her life and tries to put it goether and make sense of how she got to where she is now. The book was a emotional ride. It made me laugh and cry, and by laugh I mean that I laughed out loud. I think that any author who can write laugh-out-loud scenes is doing a darn good job and more people should read the book.

The recorded version had a very good narrator who played the part of Eleanor quite well. I found myself anticipating my drives with pleasure while I had this book playing and there were driveway moments with this one.

Good book!

89connie53
Sep 23, 2019, 1:33 pm

>88 benitastrnad: I'm reading that book too. What did you think, Benita?

90benitastrnad
Sep 23, 2019, 6:01 pm

>89 connie53: I really liked it. It had its laugh-out-loud moments along with the sad. I think that any author who can write a scene so that the reader laughs is doing a darn good job.

91connie53
Sep 24, 2019, 2:47 am

>90 benitastrnad: Good to hear, I kind of lost sight of this book while I was reading Bernard Minier series about Martin Servaz (all 5 books). Now I want to pick it up again. Thanks.

92benitastrnad
Edited: Sep 28, 2019, 9:39 pm

Hidden Child by Camilla Lackberg

I finished Hidden Child today and thought it was the best one that Lackberg has written in this series - so far. However, it could have used some serious editing. My copy was 528 pages and I think that was about 75 pages to long. There were large chunks of this book that could have been left out - unless they are pieces to the next novel. In that case, they should be in the next novel not in this one.

This novel reminded me a great deal of the first Jo Nesbo novel to be translated and published in the U.S. Redbreast. Both novels cover much of the same events. The Nesbo novel is about the Norwegians who volunteered to join the German Army and formed an entire division that fought on the Eastern Front. That novel pointed out the fact that the Norwegians voted Quiesling into office and so there was great support for the Nazi party in Norway. Historians tell us that there was support for the Nazi’s in Sweden as well. That is the premise for this novel.

That brings me to one part of this novel that did not make sense to me. Franz. Franz, was a Neo-Nazi. He should have loved the Germans as he shared their beliefs. Therefore, he should not have participated in the crime, or have been the one person to figure out a way to hide the body. It is possible that his jealousy overrode his belief system, but I find that hard to believe given his actions throughout his life.

For the most part this was a well done murder mystery - but I could have done with less of the domestic stuff.

93benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 1, 2019, 5:43 pm

I finished my first book for this month (October). I read Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan. This book was written in 1990 and at the time Egan was the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times. Now he is a well known author of nonfiction books with a National Book Award winner to his credits. This book is in many ways a companion to Egan's later (1998) book Lasso the Wind.

The book starts with a chapter on Egan taking his grandfather's ashes to the headwaters of a river in the Northwest. It then morphs as Egan becomes interested in what has happened to the land that he grew up on and that his grandfather helped to settle. As Egan does the research he comes across one of the best books about the early Northwest that was written and Egan begins to follow the trail of Theodore Winthrop as Winthrop travels by foot, canoe, and horseback in 1853 from Vancouver, B.C. to Astoria, Oregon. Each chapter of Egan's book is about a different section of the trail as followed by Winthrop and Egan contrasts the past and the present as he makes his journey following the same trail. The two journeys turn out to be very different. Egan manages to maintain a fair hand in dealing with all the changes, but there are times when his own prejudices show. He laments the loss of estuaries, free flowing rivers, and most of all the old growth forests. At the end of the book he says, "The most economically distressed counties in the Northwest are those that depend on logging for their livelihood. The most prosperous are those that have unchained themselves from their mills." (p. 253) But at the end of his last chapter he says, "Standing above the Columbia today, the river that carries water from all parts of the Pacific Northwest to the ocean, uniting deserts and glaciers, forest and farmland, cities and sage country, I'm trouble by this paradox. Winthrop thought the land here would change a man, not the other way around; still, at the ebb of the twentieth century, we have yet to prove him entirely wrong." (p. 250)

There were times as I was reading this book, that I wondered if the statistics that he quoted would still be true because it is 30 years after the publication of the book, but in general I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book was still relevant and generally true. The biggest question I have is about the explosion of population that the Northwest has seen in the last thirty years and its effect on the environment. I would think that it has got to be the biggest problem for the area at this point in time.

I read Lasso the Wind last year and loved it and I had the same reaction to this one.

94benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 29, 2019, 4:53 pm

Planetfall by Emma Newman

This work of science fiction is also about psychological breakdown. It is about manipulation and fear that is instilled in people when they are part of a conspiracy. The reviews for this book were good, but I found the book rather boring. I listened to the book instead of reading it, and I think that affected my view of the book. It was narrated by the author and I did not think she was a good choice for narrator. It did pick up towards the end of the novel, but that did not make the beginning any more interesting. I never did figure out what the object of the space expedition was or what or where it was that this group of pioneers was trying to find. There are three more books in this series and I am not sure I will ever read them.

95benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 14, 2019, 1:59 pm

Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

I read this book for my real life book discussion group. Stylistically it was a bit odd - there were no quotation marks, and lots of dashes instead of commas. However, the ending was awful. If it hadn't been for that one thing I would have put it as one of my top fiction reads of the year. The historical detail in this book was amazing and the unique style did not put me off as it did some readers. I got accustomed to it fairly fast. I did not like the ending. It was odd and confusing. I would have liked it better if the author had ended it with the news about the sisters and not given the odd alternative endings. That was a ploy that didn't work.

96benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 29, 2019, 4:55 pm

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde is book Four in the Thursday Next series. It was fun and easy to listen to. As usual, this book was full of literary puns and nonsense. For those with a literary senses of humor this was a fun read. Pure mind candy starring the heroine of the book world, Thursday Next - or her written counterpart.

97benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 22, 2019, 6:36 pm

Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family by Jennifer Lin

I finished Shanghai Faithful today at lunch and I really liked this book. It is really well done and very readable. It is basically a history/memoir of one Chinese Christian family from Shanghai who managed to survive the Cultural Revolution. The book starts with the conversion of the family patriarch in the 1880's. This man was a peasant with no education. He hitched his star to that of the English Episcopalian missionaries from Ireland and Wales who came to China in the late 1880's. He wanted his children to get a good education and so he left his farm and went to work for these missionaries. All of his children got educations, as did his grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Most of them were educated in Western Church schools in China and then in the U. S. By the 1940's everybody in the family was a college graduate. The major character in this family, Lin Pu Chi was educated at St. Johns University in Philadelphia and was an ordained Episcopalian priest. The chain of well educated children was broken in the Cultural Revolution when the family was declared to be enemies of the state and many of the family members, including teenagers, were sent, or volunteered for, reeducation placements. These teenagers were unable to go to college so their educations were retarded for 10 years. Eventually, they did go to universities and many of them went to western universities in Australia and the U. S.

It is a remarkable story and one that was very interesting to read. The author was a reporter who worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and was based in China for 5 years. She and her father began tracking her family and she spent years searching in archives for letters, magazine articles, and other ephemera having to do with the history of her family. It was a remarkable story. I hope that others will find a copy of this book and read it.

I gave it 5 stars! and put it on my Best of 2019 list.

98benitastrnad
Edited: Nov 25, 2019, 11:56 am

Ghost Moth by Michele Forbes. This book was reviewed well and was recommended as an adult novel for young adults. It was about growing up in Belfast just before The Troubles started. It involves a young woman who is Catholic who marries a Protestant and by the time the novel starts has 4 young children. It is a sad book and once I got into it, there were some twists and turns that made it interesting. I don't think it will appeal to many YA's, but for readers interested in Ireland and The Troubles it will be of interest.

99benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 30, 2019, 10:53 pm

Uniform Justice by Donna Leon. This is book 12 in the Guido Brunetti series and I read it for the Lackberg/Leon mystery challenge I am hosting here on LT. This is another entry in the long sad take of Italian corruption in high places. This one starts with an apparet suicide in the Venetian military academy. In this book Guido’s long slide into despair and discouragement with the Italian government gets worse. The heart of the story is the accusation, or perhaps indictment of Guido by the father of the murder victim. “Further, you represent a state I perceive as both criminal and negligent, and that is enough to exclude you, absolutely, from my trust.” This wounds Guido terribly and this wounding is very evident by the end of the novel. What will happen next to Guido? Fortunately, there is another book in this series that might answer that question.

100benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 30, 2019, 10:47 pm

Wildcard by Marie Lu This novel is the sequel to Lu’s book Warcross that I listened to last year. This novel is less about the concept of virtual reality gaming and more about computer hacking. At heart it is a good old conspiracy theory thriller. This one is not about team sports and friendship and more about the lone wolf operator on a mission to save mankind. Emika relies less on her friends in this novel but it is still a tense ride from beginning to end with only a few sidesteps into cliche land. Even so it works. No doubt that it works so well because the narrator is very good and it is a quality production.

101benitastrnad
Edited: Oct 30, 2019, 10:41 pm

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima The reviews of this book were very good, but the reality for me was that this was a total bore. I skimmed over the last twenty pages because I just couldn't take any more of the weird Japanese ideas about sex, motherhood, and female independence. The early parts of this novel reminded me of Murakami because they seemed so much like magical realism, but then those half fantasy parts disappeared and the book just got to be the chronicle of a confused wife and mother. I find that kind of literature boring and this novel was no exception.

Given that the book was published in 1979 in Japan and the author is now deceased, I belatedly realized that the elements of magical realism actually predate Murakami and foreshadow his later work. Not the other way around.

102benitastrnad
Nov 11, 2019, 10:32 am

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? by Gregory Alan Thornbury. This biography was about the rise of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and about one of the founding godfathers of that genre, Larry Norman. Larry Norman was a rising rock star who looked and acted the part - at first. He was a virtuoso guitar player and poet. He counted among his friends Bono and Cliff Richard. His work was admired by Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. (All of these were his contemporaries as well as musical voyagers of the same era.) He grew up a Christian and his early work, while secular, was heavily influenced by his faith, but also by Elvis Presely and the Beatles. He was determined to make it as a Rock Star. He had the rugged good looks needed for the part, and a striking mane of long white blond hair - naturally that color. He looked like the quintessential California surfer boy rock star. He was a consummate showman. His concerts were events and contributed to his growing mystic and eventually his legend. A conversion experience in his early years as a Rock Star led him to a life as the founder of a new kind of music - Christian rock. The title for the book comes from one of his Christian rock anthems for which he became famous. He was also the person who trademarked the "One Way" sign of the single finger pointing upwards that became associated with the Jesus movement.

In his early days it was very hard to get a contract to produce Christian rock and the established Christian recording companies didn't know what to do with rock. For that reason he started his own recording company. He also started his own booking agency and became not only the first star of the Christian rock scene, but also one of its founding executives. This sounds like a success story. It wasn't. Norman had a difficult personality and two difficult marriages that devolved into scandal. There were sex scandals, drug scandals, and business scandals that followed him throughout his career. He spent large chunks of his life in Britain and found a following in Europe, particularly in Britain and the Scandinavian countries and he felt like it was a case of a prophet in his own country syndrome. He died in the early 2000's from congestive heart failure in his early 60's. Bono and Paul McCartney sent flowers to his funeral.

The book covered and area of the music industry that tends to not be taken seriously even though sales are now through the roof and CCM is a big, and still growing, part of the music industry. That meant that the subject was of interest. However, there were times, when the writing just wasn't that scintillating. The author is a reporter who covers the CCM part of music, and he admitted in the first pages of the book that he was a Larry Norman fan. Even so, there were parts of the book that were mundane when the life of Larry Norman was very exciting and cutting edge. In short, this book could have been more, but it was still a good 250 page introduction with endnotes and references.

103benitastrnad
Nov 15, 2019, 12:12 pm

I finished reading Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose. I read this book for the Nonfiction challenge for October. The topic was Other Worlds/Alternate Worlds. I have a bit of history with this title as it is one that I remember urging our collections person to order for the library back when it was published. We are an education library and this book is about American University education. She purchased it, and I, expecting a screed, was surprised by the quality of the writing and the viewpoint that the author took.

The book was written during the spring semester of 2007 when Roose left Brown University to spend a semester "abroad." Instead of abroad, as in a semester in Europe, he opted to spend a semester embedded at Liberty University in Lynchberg, Virginia. Liberty is a conservative Christian university founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell. The school now enrolls 15,000 people on its campus, and claims to have upwards of 100,000 enrolled world wide in its digital university courses.

Roose was inspired to attend Liberty University by his mentor and former employer, A. J. Jacobs, (he of the Year of Living Biblically, and other shock reality books fame.) Roose thought that living and going to school among fundamentalist Christians would be as much foreign territory as would living in Europe for a semester. He convinced the Brown University administration to go along with this experiment and so enrolled in Liberty and had it count as his Semester Abroad at Brown. Roose, was not a fundamentalist Christian. He was raised in the Quaker faith, and his family was somewhat diligent in attending Quaker Meeting, so the concept of having a faith and religious forms was not unknown to him. However, the idea of a more charismatic fundamentalist style of faith was very much outside of his norm and to him, the equivalent of living in a foreign country.

The book kept my interest throughout and in the end Roose, and I, as a reader, came to the conclusion that college students are the same all over the country. The strict rules of Liberty do add limits and tend to curtail the "Animal House" type of activities that happen at secular universities. Roose maintained an objective and balanced tone throughout the book, even when that caused him to confront his personal ethics and morals. This was a very interesting look at this aspect of fundamentalist christianity as it manifests in modern American life.

I highly recommend this book.

104benitastrnad
Edited: Nov 25, 2019, 11:53 am

Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde - this is the last book in the Thursday Next series and it is a bit of a return to form for the author. I found this one more interesting than the previous book One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. This one was more fun and while confusing with all the "day players" involved, once I caught onto what was going on, it was fun to read. Of course, Thursday conquerors her nemesis - Jacques Schitt. It was a great way to close out the series.

105Jackie_K
Nov 17, 2019, 4:05 am

>103 benitastrnad: I've added that to my wishlist - great review!

106connie53
Nov 22, 2019, 2:21 am

Wow lots of books read, Benita! And some great reviews.

107benitastrnad
Nov 25, 2019, 11:50 am

The Drowning by Camilla Lackberg - This is book number 6 in the Patrik Hedstrom/Erica Falck series by this author. This author does great plots and has wonderful mysteries at the heart of her books, but the darn things are just too long and take too long to get going. This book clocked in at 471 pages and it should have been about a 100 pages shorter. To much character development and not tight enough to keep my interest. This will be my last novel in this series by this author. They simply aren't interesting enough to make me want to continue reading them.

108benitastrnad
Edited: Nov 27, 2019, 2:55 pm

Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya by Jamaica Kincaid is one of the last books I have left to read in this National Geographic Directions series. It is the 19th book in the series that I have read. I have two more to read and I will be done with the series.

This was one of the better books in the series. The author lives in Vermont and is a gardener. She went on a hiking trip with a couple of other seed collectors in order to get seeds for plants that she could grow in her garden in Vermont. Vermont is a harsh climate and so she needed to find plants from higher elevations that were hardy and yet pretty. She spent months hiking and training in order to be in shape for the strenuous hiking that she would have to do on the trip. Even so, she was plagued by altitude sickness and bacterial infections that kept her somewhat incapacitated. She was honest about the limits of her trip due to these problems. Sometimes more so than I needed to hear. I get it - you were sick a good deal of the time. Overall, the writing was strong and she kept me interested in her reasons for being in the Himalaya's and in a politically unsettled area.

The author writes in a style that was a bit odd. At times it was full of extended paragraphs that went on for several pages. Then there would be a stretch that was in normal length paragraphs.

109benitastrnad
Edited: Dec 5, 2019, 9:57 pm

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. It may be possible that the dust jacket is the coolest part of this book. It glows in the dark. (At least the 2012 hardback edition has a phosphorescent dust jacket.). The dust jacket was noted on many web sites having to do with book design.

The novel itself wasn’t as interesting as was the dust jacket. I found it somewhat predictable. I did like the way the author mixed old media and new media was good. Google not always being the bad guy was good. I also liked the way the hero used many of the available databases to track and find stuff to solve the puzzle. It was also cool the way he brought in the lost and stolen stuff from museums.

110Jackie_K
Dec 5, 2019, 4:55 pm

>109 benitastrnad: I read that earlier this year too. I saw your review - I missed the dust jacket as my copy is an ebook. I think I gave it 3 stars too.

111benitastrnad
Dec 5, 2019, 9:57 pm

>110 Jackie_K:
The phosphorescent cover might only be on the hardback copy.

112haydninvienna
Dec 6, 2019, 12:40 am

>111 benitastrnad: at least some paperback editions have it. I have one such.

113benitastrnad
Edited: Dec 11, 2019, 3:51 pm

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones Somehow I thought that this was going to be a work of chick lit. It seemed that way when I heard the author talk about the book back in January of 2017 in Atlanta. However, even though this book was full of every trope and stereotype found in the American Black marriage and family experience, I found this book was very deep, and I enjoyed reading it.

Our book discussion group read the book for our December selection and it received mixed reviews from the group. One of our group really liked the book. I really liked it, but there were others who found it mediocre in quality. Stylistically, it was odd. It started out as an epistolary novel and then about a third of the way into the book, it changed into a viewpoint novel with the story told through the differing viewpoints of the three main characters. This could be challenging for readers as well as authors. However, the author was clever enough to make it work.

The book is about marriage in America and it has layers of race and class embedded in the plot. There is the issue of class within the Black American community as well as outside of it. There is discussion about hair and skin color so there is racism within race. There is also sexism. I thought the book was full of sexism, and examples of how that manifested itself in the interactions of the characters. This was a good book and very good for book discussions.

114benitastrnad
Edited: Nov 11, 2020, 10:23 am

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling Not much to say about this book. Others have written about it at length. But at least I have started this series. I am going to reserve listening to them for the drives to and from Kansas in the coming years.

115benitastrnad
Edited: Dec 19, 2019, 5:44 am

Sourdough by Robin Sloan. I read Sloan’s previous book and thought it was good, so since the public library had the sound recording of this novel I decided to listen to it on the drive back to Kansas.

This book started out strong, but the ending was a flop. It was so implausible as to be impossible and it ruined what was a good novel of self-discovery that involved the new food movement. Oh well - an author wins some and loses some. This one was a loss.

116benitastrnad
Edited: Dec 19, 2019, 6:02 am

Edge of Maine by Geoffry Wolff. This is book 21 out of 22 in the National Geographic Directions series that I have read. One more to go and I am done with the series. I loved this book.

This was a fine entry in this series and it made me want to go vacation in Maine. It is filled full of stories about sailing, fishing, and the class and social stratification of those who live on the prime real estate of coastal Maine. The author even talked about taxes and how the struggle over taxes leads to splitting many communities and neighbors on these issues.

117benitastrnad
Edited: Nov 11, 2020, 10:25 am

Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon. Another of the good detectives satisfying police procedural mysteries read for the Lackberg Leon comparative read-a-long.

118benitastrnad
Edited: Dec 19, 2019, 6:08 am

This message has been deleted by its author.

119connie53
Dec 21, 2019, 5:01 am

Way past your goal, Benita!

120benitastrnad
Edited: Apr 4, 2020, 12:03 pm

Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany by Michael Gorra. I picked up this book because it is hard to find travel books about Germany. The author of the book found the same thing to be true. I found this book for sale at the local Friends of the Library Used Book Store and grabbed it because of the paucity of material on this subject. This is probably not the best book on this subject but it is one of the only ones on the subject.

The other reason I got the book was because I recognized the dust jacket photgraph. It is of the bells in the Mariankirk in Lubbock, Germany. I have seen them. I know of their stunning effect on the psyche of the viewer. The book had some very interesting things to say about the northern part of Germany, which was where he lived for a little over a year - Hamburg - and where his daughter was born.

This is a good book to read about travel in Germany and all of the attendant things that travel books do. It may not be the best as there are long stretches of language and linguistics professor talk in it. These are boring, but the travel sections are good and insightful.

Benita's Big Bad Book Pile 2019

Talk2019 ROOT (READ OUR OWN TOMES)

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