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VICKI'S 50 BOOKS READ IN 2019
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1.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: January 8, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A
Review: One of my favorite books, featuring the actual murder defense that made Cicero's reputation. Gordianus the Finder is a wonderful protagonist; you really get to know and like him tremendously. And Saylor makes Rome come alive, describing the streets and people quite vividly. The actual solution to the murder really surprised me, even the fourth (?) time I read it (my memory not being quite as good as it should). One of my favorite things about this series is the way Gordianus' unconventional family grows.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: January 16, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A-
Review: This is a series of short stories dealing with Gordianus' life between the end of Roman Blood and the beginning of Arms of Nemesis. Eco is still mute but can communicate well with Gordianus by gesture. Lucius Claudius, Gordianus' patrician friend who leaves him a farm in Catilina's Riddle is in many of these stories. The final one, "The House of the Vestals", includes Catilina as well as Cicero, where Gordianus has to solve a murder committed in the House of the Vestals. Another good one is "King Bee and Honey," which has a lot of Roman lore about bees (mostly erroneous).
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Steven SaylorFinish date: January 23, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A-
Review: This one isn't quite as good as the first in the series, Roman Blood, but then Crassus isn't as interesting as Cicero. You do get a good feel for life in a seaside estate, with the many, many slaves required to run it. Also, there was the quite legitimate underlying fear of slaves at this time, since many owners and their families were murdered by their slaves during the Spartacus revolt. Naturally, there's a happy ending for (almost) all but the culprit.
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Edith HamiltonFinish date: January 23, 2019
Genre: Ancient history
Rating: B-
Review: This is an interesting overview of ancient Greek authors, from poetry to philosophy to history to drama. Hamilton believes that the Greeks were able to be more or less free thinkers because they didn't have an entrenched priesthood, as the Egyptians did. I really enjoyed the parts on history and philosophy, but I was a bit lost in the drama section because I haven't read the plays she covers.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: January 24, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A-
Review: Another collection of stories about the early career of Gordianus the Finder, who solves mysteries in Republican Rome. The story about the gladiator is a good one, featuring a beautiful Nubian woman. Cicero shows up in a few of the stories, and is just slightly pompous, as usual. Saylor describes the historical background for the stories in a very interesting afterword.
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Alan BradleyFinish date: January 27, 2019
Genre: Mystery
Rating: C+
Review: 12-year-old Flavia and her family factotum Dogger have set up a detective agency, Arthur W. Dogger & Associates. Before they get their first case, a severed finger is found in her sister Ophelia's wedding cake and Flavia works on discovering where it came from. Flavia is always interesting, but this book didn't appeal to me as much as the previous ones, don't know why.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: February 17, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A-
Review: Gordianus' friend Lucius Claudius has died and left Gordianus his farm north of Rome. He thinks he can escape the intrigue and violence of Rome by becoming a farmer, but is persuaded to play host to Catilina because Cicero wants to keep tabs on him. When a couple of headless corpses show up on the farm, Gordianus realizes he can't really escape Rome - it's everywhere. Catilina comes off as a rather sympathetic character, and we don't ever really know if he was the wild revolutionary Cicero accused him of being.
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S.J.A. TurneyFinish date: February 20, 2019
Genre: Roman historical novel
Rating: B+
Review: This is the first in a series called Marius' Mules, another name for the Roman legions. I assumed it was about Marius so I was surprised to find Caesar on the first page. The book appears to be a novelization of Caesar's first year in his conquest of Gaul. But he's only a secondary character. The main characters are Caesar's legates, who command the different legions that make up Caesar's army, and other important officers in the army. There are good descriptions of various battles and obstacles the army faced in a foreign land fighting unfamiliar enemies.
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Rex StoutFinish date: February 24, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B+
Review: Wolfe has a formidable opponent in this one. His client is being followed and otherwise harassed by the FBI and Wolfe has to find a way to make them stop. He decides the best way is to prove that the FBI didn't murder a man writing an expose of them, which Inspector Cramer belives is what happened.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: March 16, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A-
Review: One of Gordianus' teachers from his days in Alexandria has come to Rome as part of an Egyptian delegation, most of whose members have been scared off. He's worried he will be killed. Gordianus can't do anything for him, and the next day, he is found dead. While trying to solve that case, Gordianus is hired by the infamous Clodia, sister of the equally infamous Publius Clodius Pulcher, to get evidence that Caelius, a former lover, has tried to poison her. This is based on an actual court case where Cicero successfully defended Caelius. The poet Catullus, who had also been Clodia's lover for a while, becomes involved. The second time I read this, I thought I had remembered who Dio's killer was, but I was wrong. My memory held up this time, though.
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Annie SpenceFinish date: March 21, 2019
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: A-
Review: This is a very amusing collection of letters from a librarian to books she's read. She is encountering these books as she's removing them from the library shelves, or at a friend's house, or her own book shelves. She recounts what she loved or didn't like about each one. There were more that I haven't read than those I have, and some of them were quite tempting to pick up at my own library.
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Rex StoutFinish date: March 24, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B-
Review: The murder in this book happens a couple of weeks before the opening of the book, in Montana at Lily Rowan's ranch, where Archie has been vacationing. The ranch foreman has been arrested, but most people who know him are convinced he's innocent. Archie writes Wolfe that he'll have to stay in Montana until he can spring the foreman, so Wolfe comes out (a practically unheard of occurrence) to help. I prefer the stories which take place in New York, where Wolfe can have all the suspects together in his office, but this was fairly interesting.
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Ross MacdonaldFinish date: April 9, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: A-
Review: I think that MacDonald's Zebra-Striped Hearse was the first mystery novel I ever read. I found it in the library - must have been attracted by the strange name. Once I had read it, I was hooked on the author and read all his books. This is one of the later ones. Lew Archer, the detective, is somewhat jaded, but not totally cynical, and does care about his clients, especially the younger members of the family. In this case, he's hired by an attorney to investigate the theft of a gold box and some letters. Some of the people involved in the case wind up dead, and his investigation leads back to a 15 year old murder. There are quite a few people with links to the crimes and to each other, and I sort of wish I had made a flow-chart of the connections. As in many of the later novels, this old murder had an effect on the son of the family who were robbed. I'm looking forward to rereading many of these mysteries.
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Charles DickensFinish date: April 11, 2019
Genre: Fiction
Rating: C
Review: Little Nell, an orphan girl about 13 years old, lives with her grandfather at the Old Curiosity Shop, where they buy and sell stuff. Grandfather goes out each night to some mysterious place, and returns hours later. Turns out he's been gambling and is in debt to a malevolent dwarf named Quilp, who takes over the Shop as payment. Nell and Grandfather leave surreptitiously one night to escape Quilp. They have adventures on the way and meet many interesting characters. Quilp and a "single gentleman" separately try to track them down. Neither Nell nor Grandfather were very interesting to me, but most of the secondary characters were really good, as was the description of the journey and what was happening back in London. I won't be reading this one again, but I do like Dickens a lot.
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Rex StoutFinish date: April 12, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B-
Review: Another set of three novellas, no one stands out. I keep wondering why Inspector Cramer keeps pulling Archie in for questioning, holding him overnight in many cases, when he knows full well, after having been involved with dozens and dozens of cases with Wolfe, that Wolfe is always right and anyway, Archie is not going to give him anything useful. I guess there wouldn't be any conflict without Cramer's amnesia.
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by Sam Moorhead (no photo)Finish date: April 16, 2019
Genre: Ancient history
Rating: B+
Review: This is a very readable account of the 400 or so years that Rome was involved with the island of Britain. Many emperors made their marks there, from Julius Caesar (not really an emperor) through Claudius, Hadrian, and Constantius Chlorus and his son Constantine I. For a while, Britain was the breadbasket for Europe. Eventually the Roman legions stationed in Britain were withdrawn to deal with threats in other parts of the empire and the influence of Roman culture and government style diminished.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: April 21, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: A-
Review: All the books in the Roma Sub Rosa series are based on events in Roman history. This one is about the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a popularis politician and gang leader, supposedly by his mortal enemy Titus Annius Milo, another politician and gang leader, but on the side of the optimates. Clodius' death occurred just after the two men and their entourages encountered each other on the Appian Way, about 15 miles south of Rome. Everyone assumes that Milo or one of his men did in Clodius, but Cicero, Milo's friend, hires Gordianus to prove otherwise. This is one of my favorites in the series.
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Rex StoutFinish date: April 26, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: C
Review: This is totally unlike other Nero Wolfe mysteries, in that, not only does he leave the house to solve the mystery, he leaves the country! Wolfe's childhood friend and famous restauranteur Marco Vukcic has been killed on the streets of New York, and Wolfe's adopted daughter Carla, who went to Montenegro in Yugoslavia to investigate, has been killed there. In order to bring the killer to justice, he has to go to Montenegro, assuming a false identity. Wolfe is involved in an amazing amount of action (for him). This was interesting, but I prefer the regular type of Nero Wolfe story, where all the suspects gather at his office and he reveals the truth.
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Mary NorrisFinish date: May 2, 2019
Genre: Travel, language
Rating: A
Review: This is a really interesting book about the author's immersion in the Greek language and in Greece itself. She goes over the alphabet and its origins and talks a lot about her teachers and friends who helped her along the way. She likes traveling alone and has many adventures because of that. I look forward to reading her previous book.
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Phyllis T. SmithFinish date: May 9, 2019
Genre: Roman fiction
Rating: B+
Review: This is the story of the part of Augustus' Principate from the time he returned to Rome after defeating Antony and Cleopatra until he banished his daughter Julia, as told by three important women in his life - his wife Livia, his daughter Julia and Antony and Cleopatra's daughter Cleopatra Selene. Selene was quite young when he brought her and her brother back to Rome. It's interesting getting into the heads of Livia and Julia. Livia's reputation as a scheming and possibly murderous woman is quite different from how she's portrayed here. And Julia isn't as promiscuous as she is in other writings. Selene is also interesting as sort of an outsider and possibly not quite trusted, given who her parents were. I enjoyed reading about the politics of the time from women's viewpoints.
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by Emma Lathen (no photo)Finish date: May 13, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: What I like about Lathen's mysteries is that you're always learning something new about different businesses - in this case a hospital. When a wealthy man dies in hospital four days after being operated on for a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Thatcher becomes involved because the insurance company won't pay if he died by suicide, but will pay if the death was the hospital's fault, and Thatcher's bank is the trustee for the beneficiary. Things become really interesting when the surgeon who operated on the deceased is himself murdered.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: April 21, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: B+
Review: A relative of Pompey's is killed in Gordianus' garden when he comes to consult him. Naturally Pompey is upset and charges Gordianus with finding out who did it, and takes Gordianus' son-in-law Davus as a sort of hostage while on his way out of Italy to regroup in Greece and fight against Caesar, who has just crossed the Rubicon in defiance of Rome's laws. Not one of my favorites, but the solution is unusual and all of the books in the series are very interesting.
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Agatha ChristieFinish date: May 17, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: Poirot and Hastings are on vacation at the seaside, Poirot having "retired." They encounter a young woman who has had several near-death experiences. In fact, when they inspect the hat she's left behind, they see a bullet hole and find the bullet nearby. Naturally Poirot offers his services. I think this is the first Christie mystery I've read where I knew whodunit, having watched the TV movie. It was interesting to see how the plot was constructed.
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Ross MacdonaldFinish date: May 21, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B
Review: This is the last Lew Archer mystery. Having recently read an early one, it's clear that Lew has matured and doesn't get into fights as much. He does still wind up in cases where something bad happened years ago that has poisoned lives, mostly of young people not involved in the original events. A painting by a famous local artist who disappeared many years ago has gone missing and Archer is hired to find it. This leads him to people who sell paintings down by the beach at Santa Teresa, and to Arizona, where many of the characters, including the missing artist, came from years ago. When I read one of these books, I'm tempted to make a flowchart to keep track of the links between the characters, the connections are so many and so intricate.
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Charles Dickens and
Wilkie CollinsFinish date: May 23, 2019
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B
Review: Two writers "apprenticed" to Lady Literature decide to take a trip to the north of England. This is apparently the fictionalization of a trip Dickens and Collins actually took, where Collins injured his foot during a trip up a mountain. Dickens was famous for his love of long walks, and his counterpart in the story has the same enthusiasm. It's pretty funny.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: May 31, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: B+
Review: Gordianus has come to Massilia looking for his younger son Meto. He's received word that Meto is dead, having betrayed Julius Caesar, his general. Gordianus is sure this isn't true, and is determined to find out what happened. He is invited to stay with Hieronymous, the scapegoat, who will be sacrificed soon to expiate the city's sins. Lots of strange goings-on, naturally, with a satisfying ending. This is one of my favorites of the series. I especially like that Verres and Milo, real Romans who were exiled to Massilia, were included as characters.
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Rex StoutFinish date: June 4, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B-
Review: This appears to be the last Rex Stout book published, although the three novellas contained in it aren't new ones, but new versions of already published works. The first one, Bitter End, originally had another detective, Tecumseh Fox, as the main character, who had to soldier on without his own Archie Goodwin. The second one, Frame-Up for Murder, was originally Murder Is No Joke, which appeared in And Four to Go. The last one, Assault on a Brownstone, was originally Counterfeit for Murder, and appeared in Homicide Trinity. I much preferred the original story for this last one. There's an interesting introduction by John J. McAleer, who was Stout's authorized biographer.
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by Harry Eyres (no photo)Finish date: June 10, 2019
Genre: Poetry, ancient history
Rating: B-
Review: This is an interesting introduction to the poetry of Horace by a poet and wine critic who studied Horace in school but didn't really appreciate him at the time. Rereading them later in life, he finds many connections to what Horace was saying, and his translations are quite good.
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Jane SmileyFinish date: June 14, 2019
Genre: Biography
Rating: B
Review: This is a very good and thorough biography of Dickens, considering that it's fairly short. I was hoping to read more about his childhood, but that part was pretty limited. He had quite an interesting life. The author has many good comments on his various works. I was a bit surprised that there was no index.
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José SaramagoFinish date: June 23, 2019
Genre: Dystopian novel
Rating: B-
Review: A man sitting in his car at a stop light suddenly goes blind. A passerby drives him home, then steals his car and also goes blind. The first man's wife takes him to an eye doctor, and later all the people in the office go blind. The government decides to quarantine the blind people in an abandoned mental hospital. When they come to take the eye doctor away, his wife claims to be blind in order to go with him, even though she's OK. The hospital fills up and a group of thugs take over the distribution of food provided by the government and hold it for ransom, either for valuables or women. The doctor's wife keeps on not being blind and tries to take care of people in her group. This is a pretty grim book, with none of Saramago's wry humor. It was interesting but it's my least favorite of his novels.
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José SaramagoFinish date: July 1, 2019
Genre: Dystopian novel
Rating: B+
Review: This takes place in the country where, 4 years ago, everyone (except for one woman) became blind for several days. Things have been fine since then, but during the current election, 83% of the ballots in the capital city were blank. Since voting is mandatory here, this is a blatant disrespect of the government, and the various heads of government are sure it's the prelude to outright revolution. This novel has a lot of Saramago's humor, which was mostly missing from Blindness. While it's not absolutely necessary to read that prequel, it does help to have some context for the final third of the novel.
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by Eli Maor (no photo)Finish date: July 5, 2019
Genre: Math
Rating: B+
Review: This book has about 50 short descriptions of math problems/theorems, each with an accompanying painting. Most of the entries about about geometry, and there are proofs of some of the theorems in the appendix. The illustrations are really interesting.
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Robert HarrisFinish date: July 6, 2019
Genre: Roman fiction
Rating: A-
Review: Marcus Attilius Primus, a young engineer, has gone to Misenum to oversee the Aqua Augusta aqueduct. He meets with Pliny the Elder (and his nephew Pliny the Younger) to discuss the recent problems with the water supply around the Bay of Naples, where many rich Romans have homes in Neapolis, Herculaneum, Baiae and Pompeii. We learn a lot about how the aqueducts were built and how they operate. Naturally there's a love interest, Corelia, the daughter of one of the richest men in Pompeii (and one of the most corrupt). Vesuvius doesn't erupt until quite a ways into the story, and there are very vivid descriptions of the effects.
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Ross MacdonaldFinish date: July 9, 2019
Genre: Detective fiction
Rating: B-
Review: This is an early Lew Archer novel and it was interesting to read it so soon after finishing a late one. The case starts when a woman wants Archer to find out who sent her husband a letter accusing her of "amorous activities." She intercepted this one, but doesn't want any more to come. Early in his investigation, the woman's mother-in-law is found floating in the family pool, dead. As is usual with this series, there are psychologically damaged young people and years-old secrets. Archer is more of a wise guy, and gets beat up more, in this book than in later ones, and the plot is a little less convoluted. But still pretty intricate.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: July 14, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: B-
Review: This is my least favorite Gordianus book because (view spoiler). The story starts with Gordianus performing a funeral for Cassandra, a young woman from who-knows-where, who was believed to be a seeress, giving prophesies after having fits, and doing this for several of the most important women in Rome. Namely Clodia (Clodius' sister), Terentia (Cicero's wife), Antonia (Antony's wife), Cytheris (Antony's mistress), Fulvia (Clodius' and Curio's widow), Fausta (Milo's wife) and Calpurnia (Caesar's wife). The story goes back and forth between the "present", where Gordianus talks to the various women to figure out why Cassandra was poisoned, and what was going on in Rome during the seven months she was there, and his encounters with her. Each of these women is quite different and portrayed really well. Most fiction about Rome doesn't deal with women in such a concentrated manner.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: July 21, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: B
Review: Gordianus and Bethesda are sailing to Egypt so she can bathe in the Nile to cure her lingering illness. They're blown off course and wind up in the midst of Pompey's fleet; he has gone to Egypt after his loss to Caesar at Pharsalus. Gordianus witnesses Pompey's killing by Egyptian soldiers. He and Bethesda keep looking for the right spot for her to enter the Nile and finally find a small shrine to Osiris which looks perfect. She enters the river but Gordianus loses track of her and can't find her anywhere. Suddenly he's captured by king Ptolemy's forces and taken to Alexandria. Ptolemy is interested in him because of information they have on him that says he has a connection to Caesar, who has just entered Alexandria. The story continues with encounters with Caesar, Meto, and Cleopatra. At one point Meto is accused of trying to poison Cleopatra and Gordianus has to get him out of jeopardy.
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Burkard PolsterFinish date: July 25, 2019
Genre: Math
Rating: B
Review: This is a very thin book with one-page descriptions of various mathematical objects and theorems, with illustrations on the facing pages. The discussion of Pythagoras' Theorem is very good as is the page on the Sieve of Eratosthenes.
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Steven SaylorFinish date: July 27, 2019
Genre: Roman mystery
Rating: B-
Review: In 46 BC, Caesar has returned to Rome after concluding the civil wars and is about to celebrate four triumphs. His wife, Calpurnia, has been consulting a haruspex who predicts that Caesar is in great danger. She tasks Gordianus the Finder to uncover the plot and protect Caesar. She had previously used Gordianus' friend Hieronymus (from the book Last Seen in Massilia) for this, but he was killed. Gordianus looks through Hieronymus' notes and interviews all the people he had been checking out, a sort of Who's Who in Rome. He talks to Antony, Cicero, Fulvia, Cleopatra, and even the prisoners Vercingetorix and Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe. Naturally he finally figures out who killed his friend, and along the way we get a description of the triumphs, which were quite elaborate. While I always like going along with Gordianus and his family, the last book in the series that I really liked was Last Seen in Massilia. This one was kind of like reading a list of famous people, and you don't really get to know them well.
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Agatha ChristieFinish date: July 29, 2019
Genre: Mystery
Rating: B-
Review: While this is nominally a Poirot mystery, most of the "sleuthing" is done by his friend Ariadne Oliver, a mystery author. She is approached by an unpleasant woman at a literary luncheon who is worried that her son's intended fiance, Ariadne's goddaughter Celia, isn't suitable to join her family because her parents were were found shot to death when Celia was very young. Did the husband shoot the wife, then himself, or vice versa? Ariadne and Poirot talk to several people who might know something about what happened those many years ago (the "elephants" in the title). Naturally they work out what happened and there's a happy ending.
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Agatha ChristieFinish date: August 3, 2019
Genre: Mystery
Rating: B-
Review: This is another story involving a mystery from the past which impinges on the happiness of a young woman. Carla's mother was executed years ago for murdering her husband, but wrote a letter to her daughter saying she was innocent. Poirot talks to five people (the "little pigs") involved in the mystery and has each of them write his or her memories of the event. An interesting but unusual source of info.
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Agatha ChristieFinish date: August 4, 2019
Genre: Mystery
Rating: B-
Review: A retired policeman friend of Poirot thinks that the young man convicted of Mrs. McGinty's murder is innocent, and he wants Poirot to look into the case. Ariadne Oliver just happens to be in the same town and they work together to interview relevant people and find the real killer.
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Agatha ChristieFinish date: August 9, 2019
Genre: Mystery
Rating: B-
Review: A teenage girl announces at a Hallowe'en party that she saw a murder some years ago, but just realized that it was murder. No one believes her, because she's always been a liar. Later, her body is discovered, drowned in the tub where the kids bobbed for apples. Ariadne Oliver attended the party and enlists Poirot to help solve the mystery. There are always many interesting plausible suspects in Poirot mysteries.
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The History Book Club
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Agatha Christie (other topics)Charles Dickens (other topics)
John Maddox Roberts (other topics)
Albert A. Bell Jr. (other topics)
Agatha Christie (other topics)
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