Paging All Bookworms! discussion

Welcome to June!

Let us know what your reading this month! Did you like it? Was it hard to finish? Leave your thoughts and review if you feel like it.

Have a great month!

Odds Against – Dick Francis – 3.5***
I’ve read a couple of Dick Francis mysteries, but this is the first in a series, starring Sid Halley. I really liked how Francis gave us Halley’s background and set up potential continuing relationships for future books in the series. I’d classify this as more thriller than mystery. Halley (and the reader) know pretty quickly who’s behind the nefarious doings at the track, though there’s a bit of a question as to why and how. Halley is tenacious, intelligent, a quick-thinker, and a realist. I like the way he thinks.
My full review HERE

An Echo In the Bone – Diana Gabaldon – 3.5***
Book # 7 in the incredibly addictive Outlander series, continues the saga of Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser as the American Revolution gears up. I really enjoy the historical inferences in these books. I’ve been to Fort Ticonderoga, and reading those chapters were intensely vivid for me. On the other hand, I was not a great fan of Brianna’s chapters. And Gabaldon ends the book with several plot threads hanging. Pet peeve … please trust your readers to want to read the next book, don’t “force” us to do so by using cliff-hangers.” Lost half a star there.
My full review HERE

The Conference of the Birds (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #5) by Ransom Riggs
5 ★

Jacob Portman has been given an assignment by H, an associate of his grandfather Abe. Jacob needs to deliver a girl named Noor to another of Abe’s associates, V. Noor is special to the future of all Peculiars and must be protected. With help from his friends, Jacob sets out on another adventure.

I think I’ve said it before, but Ransom Riggs really knows how to tell a story. Once again he has done a marvelous job incorporating pictures into his story. These eerie pictures help the reader get a better sense of the craziness Jacob and his friends encounter. There are so many characters throughout this book and every one of them is unique and interesting.
Jacob didn’t learn much from his last adventure. He’s still spontaneous and jumps at anything that he thinks will help him learn more about what his grandfather did. This time, as usual, it gets him into trouble. The crew is now in America where there are Peculiar gangs that are at war with each other. It’s a very different environment from the one Jacob and the others are used to. The descriptions of the gangs draw a pretty clear picture of where they come from in the United States.
This book has some happy moments, sad moments and revelations that will surprise you. The ending is a bit shocking and it has me sad that I have to wait until next year for the next book. I have so many questions, but I know that the author will cover them all in the next one (and probably create more).

The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton – 4****
Any travel guide will tell us where we should travel and what we should see when we get there. Alain de Botton tries to tell us WHY we should travel. In various chapters he expounds on what it is that travel offers us. He waxes poetic on the anticipation of arriving at a new location, the marvels of modes of transportation, on “country” vs “city,” on finding beauty – in the familiar as well as the exotic. I think he has opened my eyes and I will feel more open about all experiences henceforth, whether just the comfort of my own bedroom, or the excitement of a location that is completely new to me.
My full review HERE

Tyrannosaur Canyon – Douglas Preston – 4****
This was one wild ride of a thriller! I was all set to follow independently wealth veterinarian Tom Broadbent, and then wanna-be monk and ex-CIA operative Wyman Ford steals the show. Plenty of action, more villains that you can shake a stick at, twists and turns and danger to keep the reader turning pages and trying (in vain, in my case at least) to guess where this is going. And I loved that the T-rex gets a few chapters of her own to “narrate.” Also, Preston’s female characters are really strong women!
My full review HERE

Peter Handke, Die Theaterstücke [1992] 575 pages [in German]

This collection of eleven of Handke's plays in chronological order was difficult to get through. I think it was the plays that made his reputation, but most of them are no clearer than the fiction; just the opposite.

The first play here is "Publikumbeschimpfung" (Insulting the Public, 1966), which had a huge success. It consists of actors standing on stage telling the spectators this is not a play, we are not characters, we are actors, we are speaking to the audience, we are not representing anything, there is no story, there is no fourth wall, there is no suspension of belief, you are an audience, you paid for tickets, your nose itches, you need to cough, etc. (And many of the claims contradict one another.) The play ends up with the actors "insulting" the audience: you Communists, you Social Democrats, you petty bourgeois, you Fascists, you Nazis, you Jews, you journalists, you newspaper readers, you academics, you... etc. This section was also full of topical allusions to German politics of the time, and was obviously intended to be improvised for later performances. I wasn't all that impressed reading it, but then I watched two very different performances on Youtube, one of the early German performances on a traditional (but minimalist) stage and one much later American performance (a bit toned-down, probably a school play) where the actors mixed with the public in the same space, and it is very effective as theater. It combines two of the main influences on modern theater, Beckett's theater of the absurd and Brecht's rejection of theatrical illusion, and I don't know of any playwright who takes them farther, whether or not that is a good thing.

The second play "Weissagung" (Prophecies, 1996) would probably work best as a radio play, and is the most understandable thing Handke ever wrote; it turns proverbs and clichés into "prophecies": the wind will wander like the wind, the snow will be as white as snow, the rabbits will breed like rabbits, Gary Cooper will walk like Gary Cooper, and so forth. Some of the images were unfamiliar to me and were probably German proverbs or taken from German literature but most are universal expressions. It was quite funny.

The next two, "Selbstbezichtigung" (Selfaccusation, 1966) and "Hilferufe" (Call for help, 1966) are similar to "Publikumbeschimpfung" in that the actors speak alternating or in unison to the audience rather than to each other, as if it were a soliloquy divided between multiple actors. The first describes the development of a first person narrator from babyhood to adulthood learning to speak, walk, finally to be responsible, feel guilt and so forth; in the second the narrator tries to call for help but can't remember the correct word.

"Kaspar" (1966) is one of his best known plays, and again seeing it in English on Youtube it was far more effective (though even less understandable) than reading it. It is based loosely (very loosely) on the story of Kaspar Hauser, the boy who appeared from nowhere knowing only one sentence. In Handke's play the story is turned into a discussion of language and epistemology.

If the first four plays are essentially all dialogue (or monologue) without any action, the next play, "Das Mündel will Vormund sein" (The Ward would be the Guardian, 1969) and the last play, "Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wusten" (The Hour when we don't know about each other, 1992) are action without any words. In the first an older and a younger man try to establish dominance through various absurd actions, and in the last people in different costumes wander across the stage and carry out various actions, some everyday "normal" and some totally bizarre, without noticing or interacting with each other.

"Quodlibet" (1969), "Der Ritt über den Bodensee" (1970), and "Die Unvernünftigen sterben aus" (1973) seem on the surface more like usual plays, in that the characters actually talk to one another and say the sort of things characters in a play might say, but not in any discernable connection. "Über die Dörfer" (1981), called a "dramatisches Gedicht", despite some absurd elements makes more sense. It begins with a normal situation, siblings quarreling over an inheritance, and goes on to defenses of the working class by one brother and of the petty bourgeoisie by the sister against the seeming contempt of the wealthier and more educated brother; there is a section of abstract existential despair followed by an abstract "inspirational" ending. "Das Spiel vom Fragen oder Die Reise zum Sonoren Land" (1989) is ostensibly about asking questions and has Parzifal as one of the characters.

If this had been the only thing I had read by Handke, he certainly wouldn't be a favorite author, but I would consider him at least interesting.

Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School #1) Gail Carringer
3 ★

Sophronia Temminnick, 14 years old, has been sent to Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing School for Young Ladies of Quality. Her mom hopes it will teach her how to act like a lady. It will, but she will also learn how to politely do other things – death, diversion and espionage.

I have been looking forward to reading this series for a while now and, although I enjoyed the story, I wasn’t wowed by it. The characters are great and the setting is interesting and fascinating, but I found many of the characters names hard to pronounce and there are many old fashion words used that I had to look up. I really enjoyed the steampunk aspect of the story. The school is truly an amazing creation and the mechanimals are pretty cool as well.
Sophronia is your typical spunky and curious 14 year old that just wants to explorer and learn how things run. It’s unfortunate that this is unaccepted in her family. She’s very smart and fearless. Her new classmates are all very different and I love how they figured out how to work together. They are a group of girls who have great things coming to them and I look forward to seeing their adventures to the end.

The Mockingbird Next Door – Marja Mills – 3.5***
Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills was sent to Monroeville Alabama on an assignment to gather background information for a piece about To Kill a Mockingbird . She met Alice Lee and her younger sister, Nelle Harper Lee, and over years became friends with them. This is her memoir of her time in Monroeville and the lessons she learned from the sisters – about the South, about family, about justice.
My full review HERE

The Woman Who Walked In Sunshine – Alexander McCall Smith – 4****
Book sixteen in the immensely popular – and equally enjoyable – series starring Mma Precious Ramotswe and other residents of Gabaron, Botswana. I love this series for the gentle “mysteries of daily life” and for the wonderful way that Precious arrives at the truth and solves her cases. There are no gristly murders here, though there are mysteries of human behavior. Spending time with the characters of these novels is like enjoying an afternoon libation on a patio in the sunshine.
My full review HERE

Auntie Mame – Patrick Dennis – 4****
Oh, what an absolute delight! I love Mame … she’s outrageous, convivial, adventurous, kind, a bon vivant, prone to exaggeration, unable to resist, unabashedly lacking in marketable skills, and yet full of confidence. This novel “memoir” is funny and tender, horrifying and enthralling.
My full review HERE

The Hideaway – Lauren K Denton – 2.5**
I wasn’t expecting great literature, and I didn’t get it. The writing is simple. The plot is rather predictable. The cast of characters, typically eccentric. There are secrets to be unearthed and solved. There’s also the ubiquitous dual timeline, with present-day Sara unearthing bits and pieces of her grandmother’s story. It was a fast read and moderately entertaining. But I’ve already forgotten it.
My full review HERE

Ismail Kadare, The Concert [1988, tr. 1998] 443 pages [Open Library]

The Concert is the first novel I've read by Kadare that I didn't completely like. The novel is set about 1978, when relations between Albania and China were essentially broken off. The novel alternates between Albania and China. The scenes set in Albania were as excellent as in his other books, but the scenes set in China, and especially the sections in which we see Mao's own private thoughts, were totally bizarre. The novel is satiric rather than strictly realistic, but the Albanian parts merely exaggerate actual tendencies, and cast real light on the situation and the attitudes and economic consequences of the cooling of relations, while the Chinese sections are too lacking in connection to reality to be credible. I realized part of the way through what he was doing; he is essentially transposing the fantasy Ottoman Empire of The Palace of Dreams into the Chinese regime, but where this works with an unidentified Sultan in a vague timeframe, Mao's politics, as "byzantine" as they were, are too well known for this to work. By not satirizing the real fauits of the Maoist regime, he misses his target. To be fair, some sections taken in isolation are very good, such as the rewriting of MacBeth to comment on the fate of Lin Biao, and these make the book worth reading despite its problems.

Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories – Jennifer Morales – 4****
An urban neighborhood must find ways to bridge divisions between black and white, gay and straight, old and young. I love short stories and was expecting that format. But this is really a novel told from nine different viewpoints. It’s an engaging and interesting look at an urban struggle that is all too familiar. I look forward to my F2F book club discussion about this very timely novel.
My full review HERE

The Women In the Castle – Jessica Shattuck – 3***
Three German widows are brought together shortly after World War II ends. I liked the idea of this novel’s story more than I liked the actual book. There are some interesting and thought-provoking themes presented, but I’m probably just overloaded on WWII. On the whole, I found the novel forgettable.
My full review HERE

Love Me to Death (Lucy Kincaid #1) by Allison Brennan
4 ★

Lucy Kincaid works for a victim’s right group by going undercover on the internet to catch sex offenders. When her account gets hacked and the offenders she has lured into meeting her turn up dead, Lucy teams up with Seth Rogan and finds the murders are linked to a vigilante group.

This book was a good start to the Lucy Kincaid series. Since I have already read the previous books by this author I knew who most of the characters were and Lucy’s back story. I highly recommend reading those trilogies first. There is a lot of information in them,
I’m glad that Lucy is doing well and has applied to the FBI, but I felt like she still has quite a few issues since her attack. She’d very jumpy and still has trust issues. I hope she is able to figure things out so that she can join the FBI.
It was great having many of the original characters back and involved in the case. I had a slight issue with Lucy’s job at WCF. I felt that it was entrapment to some degree. I guess her letting the sex offender set up the meeting may have covered that issue.
As is typical with Allison Brennan’s books, the bad guy is so far in the background that he wasn’t even on my radar. Lucy gets in trouble again and I hope this doesn’t become a pattern. What she and the other girl endure is horrific. It has a good ending with no cliffhangers and good news for Lucy.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek – Kim Michelle Richardson – 4****
I love reading historical fiction, particularly when it focuses on an element of history about which I know little. This covers two such elements: the Pack-Horse Librarians and the “blue people” of Kentucky. Cussy Mary Carter is a marvelous lead characters – kind, compassionate, determined and tenacious. The author’s use of vernacular dialect helped transport me to a different time and place.
My full review HERE

JTariq Ali, Shadows of the Pomegrante Tree [1992] 242 pages

The first book of the Islam Quintet, Shadows of the Pomegrante Tree is a historical novel about the destruction of Grenada/Andalusia after the Christian Reconquest. It begins in December of 1499 with the Christians publicly burning hundreds of thousands of Arabic manuscripts confiscated from the 195 libraries of the city of Gharnata at the order of Archbishop Ximenes de Cisneros, Queen Isabella's confessor and the symbol here for the ignorance and intolerance of the Spanish Christians. Despite the assurances of Ferdinand and Isabella that the Moslems would not be persecuted, the Archbishop is determined to destroy a culture which in its arts and scholarship is far above that of the Christians. Before long, he would progress from burning books to burning Moslems and Jews in the autos-da-fe.

The scene then shifts to the Banu Hudayl, the estate of the noble Hudayl family, who are the central characters of the novel: the parents Umar and Zubayda, and their children Zuhayr, Khultum, Hind, and Yazid, as well as various other relatives and servants. Throughout the book, the more far-sighted characters realize that there are only three real choices for the Moslems: to accept the forced conversions to Christianity, which may or may not protect their lives and property from the greed and fanaticism of the Church and Inquisition, to engage in an ultimately hopeless resistance, or to abandon their lands and flee to the Maghreb (Northern Africa). All three choices are illustrated in the novel, but most of the population chooses the suicidal course of pretending to themselves that the Christians will behave in a civilized manner and leave them alone if they do nothing to provoke them.

Tariq Ali, raised in a secular leftist family in Pakistan, does not idealize the Islamic rulers or the religion; some of the subplots show the rigidity of the feudal code of honor, many of the positive characters are religious skeptics, and it's generally accepted by all the characters that the Sultans brought the disaster on themselves by their corruption and divisions, fighting amongst themselves rather than uniting to defend their lands and people against the Christians.

The novel ends with the situation still in flux, but it leaves no doubt about the ultimate outcome, which we know from history: the Christians triumph and Spain, which was a major center of learning and civilization in the Middle Ages, becomes what it has been for the last half-millennium, one of the most backward and reactionary countries in Western Europe and one of the poorest despite its empire in the New World.

O Pioneers! – Willa Cather – 4****
Cather’s first novel follows one family over decades as they settle the great plains of Nebraska. The heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who takes charge of the family farm after her father dies, and ensures the family’s prosperity despite setbacks. This is a strong woman! Her love of the land is evident, but she is no romantic. The story encompasses tragedy as well as triumph.
My full review HERE

Peach Pies And Alibis – Ellery Adams – 3***
Book two in the Charmed Pie Shoppe series, starring Ella Mae LeFaye, who discovered her magical powers in book one of the series. This installment in the series did serve to better explain the premise and Ella Mae’s family’s magical history. It’s far from literature, and pretty predictable, but I did find it entertaining.
My full review HERE

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – 4****
A proper English butler, known only by his last name: Stevens, reflects on his life’s work. I love the way that Ishiguro reveals Stevens’ character through his musings. As he recalls the glory days of house parties that welcomed influential people to Darlington Hall, Stevens reveals how he allowed his sense of duty and devotion to being butler in a great house to blind himself to what was really happening – both in the world at large and on a more personal level. This slow realization is what makes this book so poignant and thought-provoking.
My full review HERE

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
3 ★

A plane crashes on a remote island and the only survivors are a group of boys. This concept confused me a bit because none of them seem to be hurt very badly. Also, the plane and crash site are never mentioned. The boys all seem to come from the same school, but none of them know each other. Why? This was just a few of my questions after reading this book. I did enjoy the story and the idea of young men having to figure things out on their own. There is quite a bit of bullying and violence in the story that some readers may not like. The boys get pretty savage, but it wasn’t a surprise to me. If this story had been written about a group of girls it would have been boring. I liked how all the boys were so very different, but in the end some of them came together and worked together. There is always at least 1 dominating male in a group of men and Jack is that male. Ralph tries, but he lacks the commanding presence and self-confidence that Jack has. I feel like this story accurately portrays what can happen when a group of kids is left to rule themselves.

Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us [1935] 408 pages

Ordinarily at this time of year I would be re-reading those of Shakespeare's plays which I would be going to see at the Utah Shakespeare Festival on my vacation; but this year the Festival has been cancelled due to COVID-19. Perhaps there is a certain fitness or irony in a Shakespeare Festival being shut down, as the Elizabethan theaters so often were, by a plague. (And am I the only one who finds it telling that everyone has implicitly agreed to use the neologism "pandemic" instead of the exactly synonomous English word "plague"? See Newspeak.) As a substitute, I am reading a few secondary works on Shakespeare.

Caroline Spurgeon's book was as far as I know the first to attempt a statistical analysis of the images in Shakespeare's plays (and a few of his contemporaries, for comparison). It is interesting, although perhaps more for its method than its conclusions.

Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare [1939] 302 pages

At the opposite pole from the previous book, Van Doren's Shakespeare seems like a reversion to the nineteenth century school of impressionistic criticism. It consists of short chapters, which seem almost like reviews, on the poems and each of the plays. Each chapter concentrates on one or two aspects of the play and tells us whether it is one of Shakespeare's successes or failures in the opinion of the author. He seems to miss the point of some of the plays entirely. I'm not sure why this book is listed in so many bibliographies of important works on Shakespeare; while there were some insights it was basically not all that useful to anyone who has read or seen the plays, and to anyone who hasn't it would make no sense at all.