The History Book Club discussion

Vicki, this is your thread for 2018. I have included the link to the required format thread and an example. If you had a 2017 thread - it will be archived so when you get the opportunity move over your completed books and formats to the 2018 thread - but we will allow time for you to do that.

Please follow the standard required format below - I hope you enjoy your reading in 2018. Here is also a link for assistance with the required guidelines:

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Our Required Format:

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2018
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even goodreads. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

IMPORTANT - THE REVIEW SHOULD BE SHORT AND SWEET - THERE ARE NO LINKS OF ANY KIND IN THE BODY OF THE REVIEW ALLOWED. NONE. DO NOT REFER TO ANY OTHER BOOK IN YOUR BRIEF REVIEW. THE ONLY BOOK CITED IN YOUR REVIEW IS THE ONE YOU ARE REVIEWING - NO OTHERS. ALL LINKS TO OTHER THREADS OR REVIEWS ARE DELETED IMMEDIATELY - THERE WILL BE NO WARNING. WE CONSIDER THIS SELF PROMOTION AND IT IS NOT ALLOWED AND IS IN VIOLATION OF OUR RULES AND GUIDELINES.

JANUARY


1. by Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm and Philip Pullman
Finish date: January 1, 2018
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: A
Review: This book contains 50 of the tales the brothers Grimm collected over the years during their philological studies. Some are familiar (Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella) but many are not. They're all pretty short and many contain familiar themes. One story (Goose Girl at the Spring)) seems a precursor to King Lear, where the king's lands are given to the 2 older daughters who flatter him, but the youngest, who loves him the most, is banished. She says she loves him like salt, which is essential to life, but he feels that's an insult. Many are funny, and several are gruesome (eg. limbs cut off and cooked).

2. by Virginia Woolf
Finish date: January 7, 2018
Genre: Essay, women's studies
Rating: B
Review: This is a long essay, apparently originally two lectures at a women's college. Woolf looks over literature to find books written by women, and decides that there was not much of it in the past because women were expected to keep the house and raise the children, so they didn't have much time for anything else. She determines that women need time to themselves and some money of their own in order to create much of anything besides children. It's an interesting look at the history of women's writing.

3. by Bram Stoker
Finish date: January 9, 2018
Genre: Science fiction, fantasy
Rating: C-
Review: This book was a disappointment. The characters were not well developed, neither the bad guys nor the good guys, and the "monster" wasn't very scary.

Vicki, you are off to a great start. I will now archive the 2017 thread which will still be open but in the archive section,

4. by William Shakespeare
Finish date: January 16, 2018
Genre: Drama
Rating: B+
Review: I'm pretty sure this was my first time reading Romeo and Juliet, although I remember reading other Shakespeare in high school. Some scenes are so familiar, but many were not. It's still shocking to read that Juliet was not quite 14 years old. The edition I read was from the Oxford Shakespeare collection, and had a long and erudite introduction (which I only skimmed) and copious footnotes, which took up more room on some pages than the actual text of the play. I'm thinking of reading an edition with the original text on one side and a modern rendering on the facing page.

5. by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Finish date: January 17, 2018
Genre: Science
Rating: B+
Review: This was a very entertaining dip into astrophysics and a pretty quick read, as advertised. I didn't quite get the first few chapters, dealing with the very beginning of the universe after the Big Bang. But I liked the chapter on the periodic table and the next one on spheres. The final chapter urging people to be more responsible toward our fellow human beings was a surprise and was quite touching.

Dr. Tyson is one of my heroes. He reignited the passion for science that I had as a kid and lost around middle school. Somehow, I haven't actually read any of his books yet!

Douglass wrote: "Dr. Tyson is one of my heroes. He reignited the passion for science that I had as a kid and lost around middle school. Somehow, I haven't actually read any of his books yet!"

His humor definitely comes through.

6. by Eric H. Cline
Finish date: January 18, 2018
Genre: Science, archaeology
Rating: B+
Review: This is a very good intro to archaeology, with a chapter on just about every interesting site. The "Digging Deeper" chapters are particularly informative - "How Do You Know Where to Dig?", "How Do You Know How to Dig?", "How Old Is This and Why Is It Preserved?" and "Do You Get To Keep What You Find?".

7. by José Saramago
Finish date: January 19, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: This doesn't have much of a plot until about 5/6th of the way through. 64 year old Cipriano Algor, a potter living in a village with his daughter and son-in-law, makes earthenware plates, cups, etc. for sale at the Center, a giant mall in the nearby city, containing lots of shops, amusements, sports facilities and apartments. One day the director of purchasing informs him they will no longer be buying his stuff. He decides to make some figurines as a substitute, hoping the Center will buy them. Also he adopts a stray dog. More unusual things start to happen when the family moves to the Center. What makes Saramago's writings interesting is the way he handles conversations - no quotation marks, but lots of commas, changes in speaker marked by capitalizing the beginning of what each one has to say, and lots of philosophical musings along the way. (view spoiler)[The Cave doesn't even make an appearance until a few pages from the end. (hide spoiler)]

8. by Sheri S. Tepper
Finish date: January 30, 2018
Genre: Sci-fi, fantasy
Rating: A
Review: This was a very interesting sci-fi/fantasy book. It takes place many, many years after mankind has left Earth for the stars. The people that remain have separated into different societies. Cities are ruled by competing gangs, there are archetypal villages which contain collections of archetypes like Oracle, Hero, Bastard, or Orphan, and formerly mythical creatures like griffens, trolls and dragons are roaming the land. One of these Orphans sets off on a quest to fulfill a prophesy her Oracle told her, joined by a member of one of the gangs from a nearby city. There are many, many fascinating characters, and I couldn't wait to see what happened next.

FEBRUARY

9. by William Shakespeare
Finish date: February 4, 2018
Genre: Drama
Rating: B
Review: I had recently read a heavily annotated, scholarly version, but I thought I was missing the flow of the play. This version with original and current English gave me a better feel for the action and the characters.

10. by Phyllis T. Smith
Finish date: February 9, 2018
Genre: Historical fiction
Rating: B+
Review: This is an "autobiography" of Livia, wife of Octavian (Augustus), first emperor of Rome, and mother of Tiberius, the second emperor. It starts when she is 14 and has just been told by her father that she's to be married to Tiberius Claudius Nero. She doesn't really like it, but he is the paterfamilius and his word is law. A few years later she meets Octavian and is attracted to him but doesn't think much of it. When Julius Caesar is killed and her family is on the "liberators" side, she has to go through a lot of strife. As we all know, she ultimately marries Octavian and he becomes the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. I wish the book had gone on longer - it ends when Octavian comes back from Egypt, having defeated Antony and Cleopatra. There was so much that happened after that and it would have been interesting to see her take on events.

11. by Italo Calvino
Finish date: February 16, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: A-
Review: This is a book about reading and writing, and is the strangest book I've ever read, but in a good way. The Reader goes to a large bookstore to buy the latest novel by Italo Calvino, titled If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. He finishes the first chapter but realizes his copy has duplicate pages. He returns the book to the store, to find that all the copies there have been recalled by the publisher. The clerk says what you really were reading was a completely other book, which he has good copies of. Since you like what you read so far, you take the replacement copy. But it's totally different, and is also defective. The same sort of thing keeps happening to all the subsequent books you read, for many different reasons, for a total of 10 different books, with intervening chapters describing what's happening to you. Many of the teaser chapters are interesting and the Reader's adventures get more and more bizarre.

12. by William Shakespeare
by Denis M. Calandra (no photo)
Finish date: February 17, 2018
Genre: Drama
Rating: A-
Review: Macbeth is definitely a creepy story, with not really any likeable characters. I did like the scenes with the witches, and there are so many quotable parts. I'm glad I used the Cliff Notes along with reading the play, it really enhanced my understanding.

13. by Ernest Hemingway
Finish date: February 23, 2018
Genre: Short stories
Rating: C+
Review: I got this book in order to read the title story, and it was pretty good. Hemingway drops you into the middle of a conversation, and into the middle of a dire situation, which you discover as you get into the story, and I won't spoil it here. I subsequently read the rest of the stories, and wasn't really impressed, although the last one, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," was interesting. Don't know if I'll read any more Hemingway.

Good progrèss

14. by Margareta Magnusson
Finish date: March 9, 2018
Genre: Advice
Rating: A
Review: This is a very short and interesting book about cleaning up your stuff before you die, although we could probably all use its advice no matter where we are in life. Basically, look over stuff you no longer want and try to give it to family, friends, charities or just trash it. One unusual suggestion was to have a box where you put things you like to look at and reminisce about, perhaps, but which no one else would be interested in. Just label the box "burn this" so your legatees won't even have to go through it. I just wish I would start using the advice.

15. by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Finish date: March 14, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: C+
Review: This was my first Fitzgerald and I was really looking forward to it, but I was somewhat disappointed. I didn't really like any of the characters very much, and the multiple locations were a bit confusing, as was the timeline. Also I felt sorry for the children; they almost didn't seem to have a place in the family.

16. by Oscar Wilde
Finish date: March 22, 2018
Genre: Drama
Rating: B+
Review: I really enjoyed the title play. Wilde likes to make fun of the upper class, showing them as rather silly. I especially liked the two butlers. Algernon's man Lane had the perfect response for everything, coming to his master's rescue more than once. I think he might have been the smartest character in the play.

I didn't like the other plays as much. I had a hard time distinguishing Lady A, Duchess B, Mrs. C and Colonel D in some of them. It probably works better to see the plays performed rather than to read them so the characters are more distinct.

17. by Daisy Dunn (no photo)
Finish date: March 22, 2018
Genre: Ancient history
Rating: B
Review: The author reconstructs Catullus' life from his poems and contemporaneous historical accounts. Besides his poetry, Catullus is most famous for his affair with Clodia, the sister of the demagogue Publius Clodius Pulcher and the wife of former consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer. Many of his poems are quite scatological, and others are outright attacks on people, including Caesar. It's a very interesting look at Rome during the last years of the Republic.

APRIL

18. by Jane Austen
Finish date: April 2, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B
Review: I like Austen a lot, but this isn't one of my favorites. Poor Anne Elliot has few friends and her father and sisters are hard to live with (IMHO). Her best friend, Lady Russell, dissuaded her 8 years ago from marrying the man she was in love with because he didn't seem to have good prospects, and since Anne's father was a baronet, she should have an alliance with someone higher up in society. Now the Elliot's have leased out their manor to the brother-in-law of the spurned lover, and he's a captain in the Navy with lots of money. Of course they finally reunite, but there are tricky situations in the meantime. The writing is wonderful, but I did feel sorry for Anne.

19. by Kate Quinn (and 6 others)
Finish date: April 10, 2018
Genre: Historical fiction
Rating: A
Review: Seven writers tell different parts of the story of the Trojan War, starting with the wedding in Sparta of Odysseus and Penelope. Paris abducts Helen, and disaster ensues. Each story is told from the POV of important characters in the story, like Agememnon, Achilles, Odysseus and finishing with Aeneas. I personally liked Odysseus' story the best, but each story was great in its own way.

20. by Amanda Grange
Finish date: April 16, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: This is the story of Jane Austen's Persuasion, told from the viewpoint of Anne Elliot's spurned lover Captain Wentworth. The most interesting part is the story of how they met and fell in love, then separated, i.e. the part that happened eight years before the beginning of Persuasion. I was hoping for some episodes of the captain's adventures at sea, but the second part of the book takes up when they meet again. It's very much the flavor of Austen's book and I liked seeing events from another viewpoint.

by Jane Austen

Good progress

21. by Marie Kondō
Finish date: April 20, 2018
Genre: Advice
Rating: B+
Review: An interesting illustrated guide to getting rid of clutter, with some good ideas and cute pictures.

22. by Agatha Christie
Finish date: April 22, 2018
Genre: Mystery
Rating: B+
Review: This may be Christie's most famous book, with at least 3 filmed versions. A man is murdered on a sleeping car on the Orient Express, traveling from Istanbul to Paris. The car is packed with a wide variety of people, from an aged Russian princess to a fussy American housewife. He couldn't have been killed by someone from the outside as the train is stuck in the snow and there are no footprints. Poirot interviews all the passengers and exercises the little grey cells, thus solving the murder. It's interesting to re-read this when you know whodunit.

23. by P.J. O'Rourke
Finish date: April 25, 2018
Genre: Advice, humor
Rating: B+
Review: P.J. is pretty funny in this book, giving very bad etiquette advice, but I prefer his political writing, even though I don't often agree with him.

MAY


24. by Adrian Goldsworthy
Finish date: May 19, 2018
Genre: Ancient history
Rating: B+
Review: A very interesting book on the life and times of Julius Caesar. There's a lot about his wars in Gaul and the civil war against the Pompeians. You really get a flavor of what life was like for an upper class Roman in those times.

25. by William Makepeace Thackeray
Finish date: May 27, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: I guess this could count as a comedy of manners set in mid-19th century England, chronicling the lives of two girls - Becky, a poor orphan with ambition and smarts, and Amelia, a sweet girl from an upper-middle class family, whose father looses his fortune part-way into the book. This is a very long book with tons of characters and lots of biting wit. I don't think Thackeray liked any of his characters, except many Dobbin, a rather dull friend of Amelia's fiance George. I enjoyed it, but I needed the Cliffs Notes companion to sort out the characters.

26. by E.M. Forster
Finish date: May 30, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: Lucy visits Florence with her older cousin Charlotte and is fascinated by the city and by George and his unconventional father, who trade rooms with the ladies so they can have rooms with a view of the city. Her fleeting attraction to him is put aside when she returns to England and gets engaged to stuffy Cecil. It's very interesting to see how Lucy comes out of her shell and becomes her own woman.

JUNE

27. by E.M. Forster
Finish date: June 2, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B
Review: A young English widow with a child goes for a visit to Italy and meets and marries a handsome young Italian, to the shock of her family. They try to understand how it happened and have to deal with the aftermath of her death in childbirth a year later. I got this from the library after reading A Room with a View and seeing that it also took place in Italy. It's a very interesting story that goes in unexpected directions.

28. by Ross Macdonald
Finish date: June 11, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B+
Review: Sleuth Lew Archer is trying to help out a young woman and her son track down her husband who's gone off to his mother's estate in the southern California foothills, which estate is unfortunately in the path of a forest fire. The husband is found dead and buried but the little boy is missing, last seen in the company of a woman the husband is involved with. More bodies turn up over the course of a complicated investigation. I love the Lew Archer series and this is one of my favorites.

29. by George Eliot
Finish date: June 14, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B-
Review: This is an interesting look at life in the English countryside in the mid-19th century, concentrating on the ups and downs of one family. We meet Maggie as a 9-year-old rather headstrong and passionate girl who gets into trouble but is never mean. She dotes on her older brother Tom, who becomes the support for the family a few years into the story when the father loses his mill because of a lawsuit. The extended family of aunts, uncles, nieces, etc. are quite a bunch of characters. The book gives you a good picture of how easy it was to become destitute and how you can work your way out of it.

30. by Rex Stout
Finish date: June 18, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: A man comes to Archie asking to be checked out if he's being followed, gives him the starting and ending addresses and a start time. Only he never shows up. Turns out he gave a false name and the real person with that name was found dead near the ending address hours before the imposter contacted Archie. The initial client is the head of the corporation where the victim worked who wants to quelch any scandal. And other potential clients follow. It takes a while to discover who the imposter was.

31. by Rex Stout
Finish date: June 23, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: While solving the murders in this book, Wolfe crosses paths with a master criminal, who figures in the next two books as well as this one.

32. by Rex Stout
Finish date: June 30, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: A rich woman whose husband has been kidnapped comes to Wolfe, not to find her husband, but to make sure he's returned safely. Wolfe has a notice put in the paper addressed to the kidnapper to make sure of this outcome, which does happen. But then the husband turns up dead the day after he returns. Was it murder or an accident? The son of the woman next hires Wolfe to find the ransom, which his mother has told him he can keep if he finds it, with Wolfe getting one-fifth as a fee. How he finds the money and deduces the murderer is quite interesting.

JULY

33. by Robert Graves
Finish date: July 3, 2018
Genre: Historical fiction
Rating: A-
Review: This is the story of the first few Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome, as told by the fourth one, Claudius. As a child, he was sickly and had a slight deformity, so no one looked on him as a possible heir to the throne, thus he wasn't a threat to anyone. He had few friends, in particular his brother Germanicus, and even his mother Antonia and grandmother Livia basically despised him. He was quite intelligent and a good observer, so we get to see all the goings-on in the household of Augustus, and later of Tiberius (the second emperor) and Caligula (the third). When Caligula was murdered, the Praetorian Guard picked him as emperor. That's where this book ends; the story is picked up in the second volume, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina.

Graves makes Livia, Augustus' wife, a pretty evil person, having anyone killed who might stand in the way of her son Tiberius being Augustus' heir. Claudius himself is pretty sympathetic - you really feel for him and the humiliations he had to endure.

34. by Samuel Beckett
Finish date: July 9, 2018
Genre: Play
Rating: B
Review: Two characters, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting by the side of the road for Godot, who has told them many times he's coming but hasn't yet. There's a lot of talk about pretty much nothing, but it's sort of interesting. I had a hard time reading the play until I watched a YouTube version, then it was easier, visualizing the dialog. For many, many years I had been assuming Godot was pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable, but in the performance they pronounce it GOD-ot. It took a while getting used to that.

35. by Rex Stout
Finish date: July 13, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: A perfume company is running a contest and the five finalists have been flown to New York for the final puzzles. But the person in charge of the questions and answers has been murdered and the list of answers he had is missing. Wolfe is hired, not to solve the murder, but to find out who took the answer sheet. Of course, he does solve the murder, but not until someone dies in his study, during an all-suspect meeting. I like the conversation Wolfe has with one of the contestants, a professor - very entertaining.

36. by Rex Stout
Finish date: July 17, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: A
Review: An acquaintance of Archie's asks him to fill in for him at a dinner given by the man's rich aunt for some unmarried mothers. One of them dies from poison and Archie is the only one who insists it was murder and not suicide, even though the young woman had often talked about killing herself and she was killed by the same kind of poison she carried around in her purse. As usual, I had no idea who the culprit was. On rereading this, I had to go from 4 stars to 5 - the denoument was so amazing.

37. by Annelise Freisenbruch
Finish date: July 24, 2018
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: B-
Review: This seems to be the start of a new Roman mystery series. The sleuth is Hortensia (a real person), the daughter of the famous orator Hortensius Hortalus. She's just been married to Caepio (another historical person) and should be settling down to being a Roman matron, but gets sucked into a mystery involving forged wills kept by the Vestal Virgins, one of whom has been killed. The underlying mystery involves a plot to kill consul Pompey. It's an interesting plot, but it's a bit of a stretch imagining a young woman raised in a wealthy home and newly married running around Rome looking for clues. I will read the next one, though.

38. by Charles Dickens
Finish date: July 25, 2018
Genre: Fiction
Rating: A-
Review: I thought I had already read this, but that must have been because I've seen a couple movie versions. It starts off with young Pip, who lives with his older sister and her kindly blacksmith husband, being accosted by an escaped convict in the local graveyard. Pip has to help him with food and a file or the (imaginary) vicious young man who's with the convict will kill him. The convict is recaptured and sent off to Australia. Not long after, Pip is invited to visit the reclusive Miss Havisham, a rich older woman who's shut herself away after being jilted by her fiance years ago. There Pip meets, and falls in love with, young Estella, who is being trained to break men's hearts by Miss Havisham. Some years later Pip is told by a lawyer that an anonymous benefactor has given him a lot of money. He goes to London and starts a new life. It's a pretty long book, but very interesting. I kept visualizing the characters from the 1946 movie version.

39. by Harold Bloom
Finish date: July 30, 2018
Genre: Drama
Rating: C+
Review: This is a pretty short book with an interesting analysis of Shakespeare's play. Some of it was way too scholarly for me.

AUGUST

40. by Rex Stout
Finish date: August 7, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: Wolfe is approached by a committee of authors and publishers to find out who is behind the string of spurious claims of plagiarism. It gets serious fast when some of the people who claimed to have been plagiarized turn up murdered. Of course, by the end the murderer has been uncovered. This book contains one of the rare instances when Wolfe leaves the house on business.

41. by Alan Bradley
Finish date: August 13, 2018
Genre: Mystery
Rating: B
Review: Flavia is on a river trip with her older sisters and the family factotum Dogger. While trailing her hand in the water, she encounters the dead body of the son of the local canon who was executed 2 years ago for poisoning 3 gossipy ladies of the parish. But was he really guilty? Flavia and Dogger uncover the actual facts of the murders. I love the Flavia books, but slightly prefer the ones that take place at the family manse of Buckshaw.

42. by Vicki León
Finish date: August 17, 2018
Genre: Ancient history
Rating: B-
Review: This is a fun read about people usually ignored, i.e. women in ancient times. It covers Egypt, Greece, Rome and Near and Middle East. The entries are short and humorous, but maybe a bit too snarky with the humor. She's written several other collections about women in different time periods.

43. by Rex Stout
Finish date: August 20, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B+
Review: Archie has to go undercover at a rich man's house as his secretary in order to find out if the man's daughter-in-law is plotting against him. After a gun is stolen from the house, a couple of people turn up murdered and the police think Archie knows more than he's telling. It's interesting how all these mysteries are different and yet still very similar, at least in structure.

44. by Joseph Hansen
Finish date: August 22, 2018
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B+
Review: Dave Brandstetter is an insurance investigator in the LA area. He's investigating the possible death of one of his company's clients, whose car was found a week ago after crashing off a bridge, but his body is still missing. There's a possibility he staged the accident to disappear and Dave is tracking down the facts. Dave is an openly gay man, unusual for a book written in 1970. His longtime partner died a while ago and he's having a hard time adjusting, but he has lots of friends, straight and gay, to help out. One always thinks of the death of a gay man as being caused by AIDS, but this was written years before the epidemic. The start of a really good series.