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The Cat Who Could Read Backwards – Lilian Jackson Braun – 3***
Book # 1 in a cozy mystery series featuring James Qwilleran, a newspaper reporter in an unnamed Midwestern city, and an extraordinary Siamese cat, Koko. I love cozy mysteries, and this is a great series. Qwilleran is a good amateur detective. As a reporter he is appropriately curious and has a great excuse for gathering information. No talking cats, here, still I like the way that Braun uses Koko to help Qwilleran. A totally satisfying cozy mystery read.
My full review HERE

Owl’s Outstanding Donuts by Robin Yardi
5 ★

Mattie Waters has lived with her aunt since the day her mom died. Her Aunt Molly owns a donut shop and, with the help of some friends and a friendly owl, Mattie must do all she can to help save her aunt’s donut shop.

This is one of the most delightful books I have read this year. Each chapter starts with a description of a donut from Owl’s Outstanding Donuts and each made me want one. They sound so good. I wish we had one of these donut shops where I live.
What I loved the most about this book was the setting, Big Sur in California. Mattie and her aunt live close to a campground where Mattie’s friends live and the area reminded me of where I grew up. I remember walking to the local campground myself and walking to the beach from my aunt’s house. I was the same age as Maggie during this time as well.
Alfred the owl is a great character and I enjoyed how the author had chapters from his point of view. It gave the story a whimsical feel. I also think the owl gave Mattie the courage to do all that she did in the story. She missed her mom so much, but Alfred helped her deal with that.

Tirso de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla [c. 1630] 121 pages [in Spanish]

Because I'm planning to read Handke's Don Juan as part of my Nobel prizewinner project (if I make it through the 763 pages of Die Bildverlust), I decided to do a mini-project on the most important earlier versions (the only one I had read previously was Molière's). El Burlador de Sevilla is the first work that introduced the character and story of Don Juan. The edition I read had a brief introduction taken from an article on Tirso de Molino's theater, which was basically only the few facts known about his biography with nothing about the play itself; I had to turn to Wikipedia to discover that it was first published about 1630 and may have been performed as early as 1616.

All the essential features of the story are already here, the various "tricks", the cowardly and overtalkative servant, the killing of Doña Ana's father (the Comendador) and the invitation to his statue to dinner, and so forth.

Tirso's Don Juan seems rather cruder than Molière's and the comedy is less witty (if I remember that play correctly; I'm going to re-read it next). His character is really what the title says, a "trickster", rather than the seducer of the later tradition; he disguises himself in two cases as the lover of the woman, and in one he convinces the father to arrange a marriage without consulting the woman.

The Spanish looks rather strange but isn't at all difficult, although there were one or two words I couldn't find in the dictionary, perhaps because they are now obsolete.

The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel
5 ★

Lane Roanoke ran away from her grandparents’ house 11 years ago and now returns to look for her cousin, Allegra, who has vanished. All of the old memories, secrets, and fears return with her. Her goal is to find Allegra and get out again.

This is an extremely dark story with a tough subject matter. The chapters alternate between “Then” and “Now”, so the reader gets a good feel for what is going on. Some chapters also center on the other Roanoke girls who have run away or died. It’s a very quick enthralling book that I found hard to put down. I just needed to know what was going to happen and how Lane and Allegra handled everything. I figured out the secret early on and knew what had happened to Allegra and who was involved long before it was revealed.
Lane, Allegra, Tommy and Cooper are great, yet dysfunctional, characters that capture your heart right away. You can’t help but pray for them to figure everything out in their lives and move on. The ending was expected, but it did have a disturbing twist that bothered me. Most of my questions were answered, but I was left feeling sorry for all of the Roanoke girls and their grandmother, Lillian.

Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy [2018. tr 2020] 418 pages

This book just came out in translation last month. It gives short accounts of the lives and mostly early works of three of the major figures in early twentieth-century philosophy, the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, Walter Benjamin up to the founding of the Frankfort School, and Martin Heidegger up to just after the publication of Being and Time. The only older figure is Ernst Cassirer, at the height of his career and publishing the multiple volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The book opens with a prologue in 1929, then goes back to 1919 and proceeds year by year, with the four figures alternating, then ends (apart from a brief epilogue about their later careers) with the disputation between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos which crystallized the half-century separation and virtual isolation of the Analytic and Continental traditions.

The book is a popularization, written for the general reader with an interest in modern philosophy -- I doubt whether it will find the same degree of success here that the original version seems to have had in Europe. It doesn't require any previous knowledge of the four philosophers (I have taken courses in Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but have only read one or two books each by Benjamin and Cassirer.) If it is occasionally difficult, that is because the thought of these four is often difficult.

Eilenberger begins with the situation of Germany and Austria after the First World War (all four subjects of the book were from Germany or Austria), defeated, economically in chaos, and intellectually in despair, and argues that these four thinkers are responding to the breakdown of confidence in the culture of the period with a radically individualist type of philosophy of life (less so in the case of Cassirer, who often seems to be included simply as a foil to the other three, as an established academic philosopher, and isn't dealt with as thoroughly or sympathetically as the other three -- unfortunately, because he is in some ways the most interesting of the four.) He shows how they interpret the "crisis" of philosophy and "failure" of the modern world in similar ways, and quotes from their writings and personal letters which often use the same or very similar phrases. The emphasis is on how similar they are, how they were dealing with the same questions even if the answers were different and how they interacted with each other before the split at Davos.

It is obvious that Eilenberger has his own views and judgements on the four; he devotes the most space to the views of Heidegger and seems to be most sympathetic to his philosophy of existentialism (although very unsympathetic to him as a person, for good reasons), emphasizes those aspects of Wittgenstein and Benjamin that he can fit in with Heidegger but portrays them as mentally disturbed losers, and likes Cassirer as a person but isn't really interested in his philosophy, because he is too rational and objective and doesn't talk about Angst or unmotivated "authentic" choices. In short, we are seeing them all through a certain lens, which isn't necessarily the lens I would prefer seeing them through. The book was quite interesting both for the biographical material which I didn't know much about and because it showed how these figures who are usually not brought into contact were really part of the same development.

Molière, Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre [1665] 101 pages [in French]

The second play in my reading of the Don Juan tradition; I had read this one decades ago. Molière does not base the play directly on Tirso, but on French versions of Italian versions; it seems though that he was the first to change the "trickster" of the previous plays into the "seducer" of later tradition and create the character that gave the theme its importance to later philosophers and psychologists such as Kierkegaard. The play is comic but also deals with serious themes such as hypocrisy (part of the play is obviously a comment on the banning of his earlier Tartuffe.) In fact, he implies that the divine vengeance is more for Dom Juan's hypocrisy than for his sexual adventures or his blasphemy. The play was performed fifteen times before disappearing from the repertory -- the sixteenth performance was two hundred years later -- presumably due to the same "cabale des dévots" that suppressed Tartuffe. The printed editions were subject to varying amounts of censorship; many of the suppressed passages were restored in an edition published in Amsterdam, which is used for the modern editions, but we probably don't have the play exactly as it was written.

Tariq Ali, Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays [2009] 294 pages

This book is a collection of essays on literature and politics. The title essay is one of the weakest in the book, a strange satire on Zionism which begins with a discussion of politics in fiction, turns to a discussion of Proust's novel Sodom and Gommorah, makes some absurd historical claims which I'm not sure were intended seriously and then ends up with a tongue-in-cheek argument which uses the language of the Zionists to argue that just as they claimed that anti-Semitism and ancient Biblical history justified a Jewish state in Palestine, so gays should respond to anti-gay prejudice by establishing a gay state in their ancient homeland of Sodom and Gommorah. I can understand using this as the title for the collection, for shock value, but it is unfortunate in that it suggests a false idea of what the book really is.

The book is divided into three parts; the first part is entitled "Politics and Literature" and contains a very interesting essay on Cervantes (arguing that Don Quixote was a disguised attack on the Catholic Church from the vantage point of the Jewish conversos); an essay on Russian literature, comparing Tolstoy and Vassily Grossman; an essay on Anthony Powell, whom I have never read; an essay on Salman Rushdie, arguing that Shame is his most important novel; an essay on the roots of Indian democracy; interviews with Mario Vargas Llosa (on The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta) and Juan Goytisolo; two "notes" on Kipling and Sartre; a general article on commercialized literature and another article on Zionism and anti-Semitism. All were very interesting and I added a number of new writers to my already too long list of things I need to read (Andrei Platonov, Vassily Grossman and Juan Goytisolo at least).

The second part is called "Diaries" and uses Ali's travels as springboards to discuss the politics of various countries; they were very informative, but some were rather out of date and some assumed more knowledge than I have of the recent history of the different regimes, especially in Pakistan. The third part is made up of elegies of various persons, political figures and friends of Ali who have died in the recent past.

In his discussion of Rushdie, he defends his early novels against the charge that they are "pessimistic", arguing that they are simply realistic and have been borne out by events; Ali himself in these essays is "realistic", but not at all pessimistic, which I found refreshing.

Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon [2014] 321 pages

Lagoon is a literary combination of science fiction and magical realism, which uses (and twists) the sf cliché of an alien invasion to describe the culture and life of the city of Lagos, Nigeria. Of the other books I have read by Nigerian authors (Okorafor was born in America of Nigerian (Igbo) parents)-- and Nigeria has one of the most dynamic literatures around -- this reminded me most of certain plays by Wole Soyinka; Father Oke reminded me strongly of Brother Jero, and the mythical treatment of the horrendous carnage on the Nigerian roads was also a theme of Soyinka's writings. (It's perhaps not accidental that Okorafor has been a winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature.)

This was the first book I have read by the author, but I may ultimately read some of her other books, such as the Hugo and Nebula winning Binti trilogy.

Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
5 ★

I cannot express in words how much I enjoyed this book. Lauren Graham is extremely down to earth and a breath of fresh air. She has not let fame go to her head and she’s very candid about herself and all that she does. It was nice to read about an actress who did not start off in acting easily. She really worked her butt off to get where she is. She even auditioned her butt for a role (so funny!).
My favorite chapter was “What It Was Like, Part One”. Lauren goes through and reminisces about each season of Gilmore girls and breaks it down into sections: Times were different, Fashion and hair, What I love, and Season finale. It was great remembering some of the best parts of Gilmore Girls. Lauren’s chapter on life in show business is quite funny and I’m sure must of it is, almost, close to the truth.
If you decide to read this wonderful book, find a comfortable chair, grab a large cup of coffee and be prepared to giggle throughout it. It’s truly a delightful book.

Ismail Kadare, Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories [1984-1986, 1993; Eng tr 2006] 226 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

This book consists of the novella, Agamemnon's Daughter and two stories, "The Blinding Order" and "The Great Wall".

Written just before the fall of the Stalinist regime in Albania, the title novella was smuggled out to France and intended to be published after the author's death, and thus is far more direct and outspoken in its criticism of the regime than the more allegorical novels which preceded it. There is really no plot; the entire novel is the stream-of-consciousness of a low-level official who has just learned that his girlfriend Suzana, the daughter of a high official, has been ordered to break up with him to avoid jeopardizing her father's new position as the Successor to The Guide, Enver Hoxha. He has also, much to his and everyone else's surprise, been invited to watch the May Day Parade from the official grandstand. He feels a combination of pride and guilt, afraid that others will think he must have done something terrible to be rewarded by the regime. He compares his girlfriend's being ordered to break up with him to Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigeneia. He also recalls various events (purges) in the history of Albania. As we see his thoughts we feel that he is totally paranoid -- and then realize that that is precisely the point of the novella, that Albanian life as the dictatorship becomes more desperate is a kind of institutionalized paranoia.

"The Blinding Order" is an allegory of a similar kind, although less realistic in style, set in the unreal "Ottoman Empire" of The Palace of Dreams. "The Great Wall" is about a rebuilding of the Great Wall of China in the time of Timurlane, and also serves as an allegory of the Albanian regime and the so-called "iron curtain". All three are well-written and reminiscent of Kafka.

Ismail Kadare, The Successor [2003, tr. 2005] 206 pages [Kindle]

The Successor is a sequel to Agamemnon's Daughter, written more than a decade later after the collapse of the regime, which is foreshadowed in the novel. Suzana's father, the "Sucessor", is found dead of a gunshot wound. Initially described as a suicide, it is later suggested it may have been murder -- perhaps at the highest level of government. The novel is again a Kafkaesque mixture of bizarre investigations and rumors which never seem to add up to any conclusion, as the Successor is variously rehabilitated and denounced. The enigma is similar to that of the death of Lin Biao, the "Successor" to Mao, as Kadare presented it in The Concert. I was unsure reading it how much of this was based on history and how much was made up, but one review I read says it was based on the suicide or murder of Mehmet Shehu in 1981.

Melissa wrote: "
Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
5 ★

I cannot express in words how much I enj..."

Would a person enjoy it as much if they haven't watched Gilmore Girls very often?

Terris wrote: "Melissa wrote: "
Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
5 ★

I cannot express in word..."

I think so cause it covers more than just Gilmore Girls.

Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) by Jim Butcher
5 ★

Harry is tasked with taking down a The Last Titan and saving Chicago and all who live there.

This book starts off right where the last one ended and the action never stops. It is a non-stop adrenaline rush page after page. Harry’s sarcastic sense of humor is present throughout, even during the scenes when you would think humor was inappropriate. Through every bump, bruise and dislocated shoulder, Harry tries to keep his friends sane and unharmed. This book brings together all of the creatures Harry has fought over the years and we get to see them all work together for the first time. It’s a very uplifting scenario.
The book isn’t all peaches and cream though. There are some devastating deaths and some surprise revelations. So many emotions went through me as I read and I don’t know where I stand on the ending. I look forward to the next book to see how it all pans out. I know Jim Butcher will please all his readers one way or another. He always does.

Melissa wrote: "Terris wrote: "Melissa wrote: "
Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
5 ★

I cannot ..."

Good! Thanks for the info. I'll look into this book :)

Vacation Interrupted (Lucy Kincaid #4.5) by Allison Brennan
3 ★

Lucy and Sean try to take a short vacation and end up stopping a murder attempt. It was a quick and easy situation for the two of them, but I was not overly impressed with the story. It really doesn’t do anything for the series and was just a way to fit in a vacation for Lucy and Sean. The story does have an interesting storyline and was entertaining though.

Heather Ewing, The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian [2007] 432 pages

There have been other books written about the founder of the Smithsonian, mostly combined with a history of the institution itself, but Ewing's book is based on new original research by the author and seems far more complete, to the extent anything can be known. Smithson left a great deal of material -- journals, unpublished manuscripts, and so forth -- but it was nearly all destroyed in the fire at the Smithsonian in 1865. The author has searched for letters to other scientists, documents in various government and private archives, and the annotations in the books he left (which were in the library wing of Smithsonian which was not damaged by the fire) in order to reconstruct as much of his life and work as is now possible.

Although he is not known for any great discoveries, Smithson was a significant figure in the early history of chemical mineralogy, and had a high reputation among his contemporaries, which I had not realized. He was on the governing board of the Royal Society, a founder of the Royal Institute, and a member of several other important scientific societies. The book is interesting for its descriptions of the European scientific community of the time (Smithson spent much of his later life on the continent, including three years as a prisoner of war in Denmark, and had contact with nearly all the major scientists).


Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said [2006] 128 pages

Although Tariq Ali is listed as the author, apart from a memorial preface (reprinted in the collection of essays I read last week), the text is primarily the words of Edward Said, who was interviewed by Ali for a filmed documentary in 1994. Said was from a relatively wealthy Palestinian Christian family which left Jerusalem for Cairo in 1947 (most of his other relatives were driven into exile the next year); he was sent to a boarding school in the United States and later attended Princeton and Harvard before becoming a professor of comparative literature at Columbia. As an academic, he is best known for his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. He was also quite knowledgeable about music; the only books I had previously read by him were about music, Music at the Limits and his dialogue with Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes, both published posthumously. To most people, however, he is best known for his role as an activist for the Palestinian cause.

The conversation here touches on all these facets: his early life, his involvement in politics, his books, and even his ideas on music. His criticisms of the Palestinian leadership, and Yasser Arafat in particular, are quite interesting, as is his view that the Palestinians needed to win over and make alliances with sectors of the Israeli Jewish population, something the Palestinian official leadership never attempted (and couldn't, given their commitment to a military strategy long after it was hopeless.) I was reminded of the debates within the Irish movement. The book ends with a criticism of liberal and "left" academics for their lack of real involvement in political movements.

Fair And Tender Ladies –Lee Smith – 5*****
Ivy Rowe tells her story from her parents’ meeting to her old age through letters she writes to her friends and family through the years. Ivy is curious and adventurous, intelligent if lacking education, forthright, determined, and self-reliant. She makes mistakes and deals with them. She observes the workings of the world as it changes around her but remains true to her tiny corner and her mountain ways. Her letters are full of every emotion of life – hope, despair, joy, sorrow and love.
My full review HERE

Stalked (Lucy Kincaid #5) by Allison Brennan
5 ★

Lucy Kincaid has finally made it the FBI Academy in Quantico and although her training is going well, there is one instructor who has it out for her. Things get even more hairy for her when a reporter who is writing a book about the last case Lucy was unofficially involved in gets killed. More victims start piling up and there may be a killer at Quantico.

The twists and turns in the story made it a great mystery. I was truly surprised by the ending. Sean Rogan is back helping Lucy, which I like because he’s a great character, but I would really like to see Lucy do things for herself. She is more than capable and needs to stop doubting herself.
Lucy’s classmates at Quantico are a diverse group and I really hope we see them in future books. It was nice seeing Lucy interact with someone another than Sean, her family and other law enforcement at crime scenes.
Lucy learns some upsetting news and does not handle it well. Hans Vigo is back and he tries to explain to Lucy the why behind the information she received. If Lucy had just taken a minute to process what Hans told her, I don’t think would have acted as she did. She takes things very personally and shuts people out.
My favorite part of the book, why I gave it 5 stars, was the way Lucy handled her issue with the instructor that was watching her and making her doubt herself. She did her research, with Sean and Noah’s help, and confronted him with confidence and respect. It was a great scene that showed how well Lucy is going to do in the FBI.

Two finished on the last day of October, one (too) long and one short.

Lord Byron, Don Juan [1821] 720 pages

Lord Byron is considered a major English poet, and according to Wikipedia Don Juan is his Magnum opus. It's certainly one of the longest poems I've ever read, and it's unfinished -- actually Don Juan has barely gotten started, with fewer amorous conquests than Byron himself. But to be honest, I found it rather boring. The first two cantos, in mock epic style, are quite funny in places -- he follows a stanza and a half of deliberately bad verse with a parenthesis "and this last simile is trite and boring", and there are also some wonderful digressions in the first few cantos on monarchy and war, but once the hero arrives in England, he is almost lost sight of in long degressions satirizing the British aristocracy and marriage practices. Perhaps if anyone other than historians remembered who many of the people he is aiming at were, it would be as funny as the first parts, but I just kept thinking, when is Don Juan going to do something besides eat dinner?

Chimamanda Adichie, Zikora [2020] 35 pages

Adichie packs an awful lot of emotion and good observation into a story that can be read in under an hour, and the time of the narrative itself is not much longer. Zikora, a Washington lawyer and immigrant from Nigeria, is having a baby, and she reflects on her boyfriend, her mother and father, and her sister and brother-in-law, juxtaposing different forms of relationship. This was an Amazon original short story, free on Kindle Unlimited.