What are you reading the week of January 21, 2023?

I finished Maigret's Failure which was a so-so entry in the Inspector Maigret series. It had an interesting setup. An obnoxious, rich businessman who was a childhood acquaintance of Maigret comes to him demanding protection. He claims that he has been receiving anonymous death threats in the mail. Maigret is unsympathetic due to the man's verbally abusive behavior. He's even more reluctant to become involved when the businessman's secretary tells him that she believe he has been writing the threatening letters to himself. But things become complicated when the businessman is found murdered in his home the next morning. It's a great set up, but the conclusion seemed weak.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Putin's People.

I am struggling with The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Working on Active Defense, to be followed by Turtles as Hopeful Monsters and 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies.

I'm still reading Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Just finished A Tale of Two Cities. A bit of a slog. Liked the story line but the writing not so much.
And starting Haven by Emma Donoghue

>i also struggled with the Hawthorne book but got through it - personally I did not feel it was worth the plodding along. Good luck!

I tried listening to an audiobook of The Decameron, but without some sort of text notes I have had to give up. The stories seemed incomprehensible to me because I don't have a handle on 14th humour. So I've ordered the Penguin Classics edition so I can use notes for the difficult bits.

Am still reading the Andrew Morton biography of the late Queen Elizabeth II - The Queen: Her Life. Am also reading When Breath becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

Enjoying this OverDrive audio ~

The Maze (John Corey Novel, #8)
by Nelson DeMille

Currently reading:
SF/F
The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie
Other
Trigonometry for Dummies by Mary Jane Sterling
A fugue in Time by Rumer Godden

Loving Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good – Helene Tursten
3***

From the book jacket: Maud is an irascible 88-year-old woman with no family, no friends … and no qualms about a little murder.

My reactions:
One Goodreads group had a prompt for this month for a “translated short stories” and this was the book the group selected. I hadn’t bothered to read the blurb on the book jacket. I also, apparently, didn’t pay any attention to the cover (skull and crossbones), so I was expecting a fun romp of a story, and was surprised by the murder.

The book is actually a series of short stories, all featuring Maud and her interactions with various neighbors in her apartment building. Over the course of the work, we learn about her background and how she comes to be living rent-free. We learn of her lost love, her relations with her family, her astute business sense, and her many travels around the world.

The third story in the book was actually the first one written by Tursten. One story very suddenly switches from Maud’s point of view to that of a neighbor in the building. And a subsequent story deals with the same episode but from Maud’s point of view. It’s in interesting juxtaposition, though any possible suspense is removed in the second telling.

This is the first in a series, and I would consider reading more of Tursten’s works, if they are available in English.

All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers
By Larry McMurty
3.5/5 stars
Danny Deck is going to have his first book published but his female relationships are not going as well as he planned. On top of all this turmoil he takes off, leaving Houston to hopefully get his life back on track.
Nicely written!

I finished Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson. This is an excellent and compelling biography of a woman who began life as a share cropper's daughter in Jim Crow Mississippi and eventually because one of the leading voices of the Civil Rights Movement. You'll find a more in-depth review on my CR thread.

I've now started American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild. This history about the period of American history during and just after World War I that is broadly known as the Red Scare but encompasses all sorts of other unpleasantries, including Jim Crow, violent labor movement surppression, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. This lovely ditty was a Hanukkah present from my wife. After Walk with Me and American Midnight, I'm going to need something lighter!

>6 ahef1963: I was thinking of giving up on The House of the Seven Gables. But at the time of posting my message yesterday, I was already more than 100 pages in and didn’t like the idea of giving up on it after that much time and effort. I spent the weekend focusing on it and got it finished this evening which was a relief. I didn’t completely hate it but certainly didn’t love it either.

I finished Mick Herron’s Slow Horses and loved it. Now I’m reading Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul Of Kindness.

I've "struggled" with that one a time or two. Good luck!

The World According to Bertie – Alexander McCall Smith
Book on CD performed by Robert Ian MacKenzie
3***

Book four in the 44 Scotland Street series continues the varied stories of the current (or former) residents of the apartment complex. Bertie has questions about his new baby brother, Ulysses. Angus is frantic after his beloved Cyril is “incarcerated” on a charge of biting. Bruce, Big Lou and Matthew find new love interests. And Domenica is not so sure that her friend Antonia is really a friend after the latter moves in across the hall.

What I love about the ensemble series is that each book gives us just a glimpse into their lives. We pick up where the last book left off, and end with many issues still unresolved. It’s the same way we encounter casual friends, catching up when we see them, but not knowing how things will turn out once we depart. And yet, happy to see them again and catch up once more.

Robert Ian MacKenzie does a marvelous job of narrating the audiobooks. He really brings all these characters to life. I particularly like how he voices Bertie. How I love that kid!

Trying to read Venco. I want to finish as a win from GR but the language is a bit much for me.
Also reading Birding Basics Tips, Tools & Techniques for Great Bird- Watching by Noah Strycker. Also a win from GR. A very interesting book full of information and many pictures of birds. Published by National Geographic.

Moved Escape from Earth to the head of the line.

Rubyfruit Jungle
Rita Mae Brown
3.5/5 stars
This is a coming of age story about Molly Bolt, a young woman adopted by a poor couple, living in the South who vows to go her own way and forge her own path and loves who she wants to without any regard to what her family and friends want for her. I have never read anything by this author but am looking forward to reading more of her and I feel this book though written in 1973 still holds up!

The Reading List – Sara Nisha Adams
Digital audiobook performed by Tara Divina, Sagar Arya, and Paul Panting
3.5***

Aleisha is a teen struggling with family issues and working a summer job in the library. Mukesh is an aging widower who still feels lost without his wife, despite his loving daughters and granddaughter. These two very different souls forge an unlikely alliance based on a reading list found tucked into a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

This is a very good debut for Adams. The characters are complex and have a variety of issues. On the surface one wouldn’t expect them to have anything in common or to be able to relate to one another at all. But Adams brings them together, first by happenstance, and slowly by shared experiences and their individual needs for human connection.

My heart went out to Aleisha, whose mother suffers from clinical depression and who is shouldering more than any teen should have to shoulder. Mukesh has more of a support system in place, but he is missing the connection to his wife that he cannot get over losing. The possibility of sharing a book with his book-loving granddaughter is what first takes him to the library where he and Aleisha cross paths.

There are serious issues involved here, from grief to mental illness to loneliness. But Adams gives us moments of tenderness and love and humor that nurture both her characters and the reader. The supporting cast of characters are equally rich and interesting.

I loved how this varied list of books brought all of them together. One of her characters says it best: “…the books that had found her at the right time, that had given her comfort when she needed it, had given her an escape, an opportunity to live beyond her life, an opportunity to love more powerfully, a chance to open up and let people in.“ And at the end of the book, Adams gives us a bonus list of books that entered her own life “at just the right time” to inspire, motivate and teach.

The audiobook is performed by a talented group of voice artists: Tara Divina, Sagar Arya, and Paul Panting. They really bring these characters to life.

Trigger warning: suicidal ideation

Ghostbuster’s Daughter - Life With My Dad Harold Ramis
By Violet Ramis Stiel
4/5 stars
This was a very interesting book on her family and her father Harold Ramis who was probably best known as one of the Ghostbusters but was also involved in writing and directing. She relates her unusual rearing and also talks about her children and partners along with talking about her father’s many films.

I finished American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hoshschild. This is an excellent but horrifying (again!) history about an extremely violent and repressive, but mostly (as per the title) forgotten 4-year period in American history, from 1917, when the U.S. entered WW I, to 1920. Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913 as a liberal reformer. At first he was opposed to U.S. involvement in WW I, running for reelection under the slogan, "He kept us out of war." But as the war progressed, and the allies became hard pressed, they turned to the U.S. for armaments and other supplies, going into huge debt to the U.S government and munitions companies, among others, to the extent that an Allied defeat in the war would have occasioned massive defaults and extensive losses to U.S. creditors. Well, that couldn't be allowed. That's not the only cause that Hochschild provides for the U.S. entry into the war, but it is an extremely significant one, and something I'd never realized.

Once the U.S. was involved, Wilson's Attorney General and other high-ranking figures went to town, using the war effort as an excuse for furious and violent repression. The so-called Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime punishable by long prison terms to criticize the war effort or the government, or to complain about war profiteering. A nationwide civilian vigilante organization called the American Protective League was organized and given carte blanche for violent and even often deadly activities. People got lynched for refusing to buy War Bonds. Massive, coordinated, roundups of draft-aged men took place, and woe betide anyone who couldn't show a draft card. This was all a cover for nativist, rightwing politicians who wanted to hound immigrants, the labor movement, conscientious objectors, socialists, Jews, Catholics and, it goes without saying, Blacks. You can find my longer review on the book's work page or on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

For some reason I have been, and still remain, in a U.S. history reading groove, and I'm continuing that for the present, as I'll shortly be taking up Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America a biography written by William E. Gienapp and first published in 2001.

Finished The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie. Liked it well enough. Next up is When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo.

The new thread is up over here.