MAGPIE MURDERS

Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz, Harper, 2017, 496 pp

 

 

I was looking forward to Magpie Murders, read for one of my reading groups, but while I enjoyed it I wasn't as crazy about it as it seems almost everyone else in the world was. It is a mystery within a mystery, the two are interrelated, and it just felt too long. That may have been because I started reading it a bit too close to the meeting date causing me to rush through in my best power-reading mode.

 

The mystery within a mystery is one "written" by the fictional Alan Conway, a bestselling British crime writer. His entire book, Magpie Murders, is reproduced in the novel I was reading, also called Magpie Murders. Are you confused yet? I am quite certain that Mr Horowitz intended so.

 

The actual mystery which must be solved by Alan Conway's editor Susan Ryeland, concerns the death of her author. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? Why was the manuscript he turned in just days before his death missing the last chapter? It is all too clever by half, as they say in England.

 

Bottom line: if you like Agatha Christie style mysteries with plenty of red herrings, a long list of suspects, and a sleuth who figures out who and why before you do, you will love this one. In fact, you will double-love it. I liked Alan Conway's mystery better than Anthony Horowitz's. That is just weird because Horowitz wrote them both. 

(Magpie Murders is currently available in hardcover on the mystery shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS

Behold the Dreamers, Imbolo Mbue, Random House, 2016, 382 pp

 

 

This is an excellent novel. The author, Imbolo Mbue, is an immigrant from Cameroon to the United States, as are two of her main characters. She has been a resident of the US for a decade and got her education here while her characters are basically undocumented and struggling mightily to get legal.

 

Contrasts are the theme. Jende Jonga and his wife and son live in Harlem. She has a student visa due to expire. Jende is undocumented and working with a questionable lawyer to get a green card. They live close to the poverty line, roaches and all, but are joyful and hopeful for the better life they will give their children.

Clark Edwards and his wife are part of the one percent. He works as a senior executive at Lehman Brothers and hires Jende as his driver. His wife Cindy somehow rose from poverty herself and snagged a trophy husband but she is not happy, drinks too much, and takes pills. Their grown son has refused law school and taken off for India to find a "truer" life.

When Lehman Brothers goes down, Jende loses his job and you know the rest. So, stereotypes possibly but Imolo Mbue uses her characters and the events of the time to show us American citizens with all of our relative wealth and privilege what the American Dream means to us and to them.

The book is unputdownable and made for a good, long, impassioned discussion in my reading group. All kinds of attitudes I hadn't known were harbored in the minds of my fellow readers came to light regarding said dream, immigration, and our lack of understanding about today's immigrants known to us primarily as gardeners and nannies. At one point, as our voices rose around the table where we meet at Barnes & Noble, as one member said, "They don't belong here," a young woman cruised by announcing herself as a Dreamer and said, "Yes we do!" It was a 2017 moment.

(Behold the Dreamers is currently available in paperback on the adult fiction shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MEANS OF ASCENT: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON VOL 2

Means of Ascent, The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 2, Robert A Caro, Alfred A Knopf, 1990, 412 pp

 

 

The second volume of Caro's biography of Lyndon B Johnson is the sordid tale of how he stole his election to the US Senate. That is right. He did! At the time, he was accused of doing so but not busted for it. It was 1948, he lawyered up and escaped justice in the courts. Caro did the research and uncovered facts that had been buried for decades.

 

Coming in at 412 actual reading pages (not counting notes and index) this volume is approximately half the length of Volume 1, The Path to Power. It covers just seven years. The sense of a man who would do anything and everything to reach his goal of being President of the United States with the underlying thirst for power and the determination to "be somebody" continues. This is Caro's thesis about the man.

I have been discussing POTUS 35 with various friends and acquaintances ever since I finished the first volume in August. Many of them feel he was a great and important Commander-In-Chief. I began reading the series with the negative bias I formed against the man in the late 1960s when I was an anti-war hippy. Nothing I have read so far has disabused me of that bias. I will keep going and attempt to maintain an open mind.

Was his Great Society really great? Was his Civil Rights bill actually effective? Did he know what he was doing in Vietnam? Most important for me is to discover if he ever became a true statesman and leader with the good of our country as his prime motivation, or at least part of it. I get it that being President is a hard job and they all make mistakes.

The next volume, Master of the Senate, should be another eye-opener regarding how our upper legislative body works. It will be the longest volume yet at about 1100 pages. Am I up for the challenge? You bet.

(Means of Ascent is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

RECKLESS, MY LIFE AS A PRETENDER

Reckless, My Life As A Pretender, Chrissie Hynde, Doubleday, 2015, 312 pp

 

 

I meant to read this when it first came out. Then I forgot. Earlier this year I was reminded when my blogger friend Susan at The Cue Card reviewed it.

 

Who was not a Pretenders fan in the 1980s? I was singing in a cover band at the time (back then it was known as a TOP40 band because we performed the hits of the day as long as people could dance to them.) I sang "Brass In Pocket" with all my heart, though I could never quite capture the sound of Chrissie's voice.

Her memoir is a trip through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. First in her hometown of Akron, OH, where her dad worked for Bell Telephone and her mom was the embodiment of the "feminine mystique." Chrissie was a good girl in her childhood but once she got hooked on music her path was set.

The 60s was high school, getting high, and going to see any band she could get a ride to. Somehow she graduated and got accepted at Kent State. Yes, she was there in the crowd during the shooting of college students protesting the Vietnam War.

Chrissie was not born under a bad sign. She had luck protecting her throughout a wild and dangerous young adult life. She learned guitar, she loved guitar gods, she took anything available to get high, but always she was trying to form a band. It was a long time coming but finally in London, The Pretenders became reality. Her book tells the whole story.

The Pretenders also became on "overnight" success. None of us knew it had taken her over a decade to get there. The substance abuse of course went into overdrive but her luck held. Like any self respecting rocker who plans to have a long career, she eventually quit all the drugs and tours to this day.

Chrissie Hynde is not only a great songwriter. She is a great writer. Reading her book is like having her right in your head telling her incredible story. Quite simply, she rocks!!

(Reckless, My Life As A Pretender is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, W W Norton & Company, 1963, 395 pp

 

 

Getting through his iconic feminist text took work but I am so glad I read it. The work of reading it took different forms.

 

Hardest to read were the passages where she cited primary sources such as Freudian psychiatry, sociology, magazine writing, and the advertising of the times. Only when I reached the end of the book did I appreciate the meticulous way in which she built her thesis. It made for a good many pages of fairly dry reading.

I concluded that she had been influenced by both Simon de Beauvoir's The Second Sex as well as some of Vance Packard's early books such as The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, The Waste Makers, and The Pyramid Climbers, all of which I have read. She had done her homework and was proving it.

I understand why she did that though, because as a woman writing about women in the early 1960s, she knew she would take some heat and had to stand strong.

Another part of the work for me was all the emotion she evoked. I was only a sophomore/junior in high school when the book was published. I did not know of it then but I wondered if my mother had read it. One day near the end of her life, my mom told me and my sisters that when she was raising us she often felt she had lost track of who she was!

The book got me thinking about and remembering what it was like being raised in a suburban New Jersey town by a stay-at-home mom. I realized that she had channeled all her creativity as a musician into running a home, managing her husband and bringing up three daughters. I also gained plenty of insight into why I felt so smothered by her when I was a kid.

Then I pondered the choices I made as a young wife and mother. I felt chagrined to recognize how much the "feminine mystique" still had a hold on me in those years and caused such conflicted emotions and guilt as I tried to also follow my own dreams and keep a semblance of my own identity.

All in all, it was a rewarding reading experience despite how long it took to get through the book. After all, it was THE book that started second wave feminism. All the later complaints about The Feminine Mystique lacking diversity are true. The women Betty Friedan was writing for were the white, middle class citizens of America. Even so, she hit on universal truths for women: the importance of birth control, legal abortion, education, and the right for all women to be fully contributing members of society.

 

I feel this is an important book that traces why and how women were sent back home after WWII and what that did to us and our children. It was an eye-opening book to read in 2017.

(The Feminine Mystique is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOVEMBER READING GROUP UPDATE

Reading group plans are small this month. Some of my groups are on hiatus due to the holidays. I will not be attending the One Book At A Time meeting nor reading the book, but I am including it anyway.

Bookie Babes: 

One Book At A Time:

Tiny Book Club:

Do you have reading group plans this month? If so, what are you discussing? Do you have any recommendations for good discussion books? 

BOOKS READ IN OCTOBER

October in SoCal is not what it was in my earlier years. The leaves don't turn colors or fall until November. I don't have kids or grandkids around to carve pumpkins with or dress up in costumes. This year it was heat and more heat, fires near my loved ones in NoCal (one family lost a home), but thankfully lots of good reading.

Stats: 10 books read. 7 fiction. 5 written by women. 3 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 3 mystery/crime/thriller. 3 nonfiction. 2 biography. 

Favorites: Edgar & Lucy, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Reckless.

Least favorites: none, I liked them all!

Here is what I read:

How was your October reading? Favorites? Recommendations?

THE CONFESSOR

The Confessor, Daniel Silva, G P Putnam's Sons, 2003, 393 pp

Summary from Goodreads:

Munich: The writer Benjamin Stern entered his flat to see a man standing there, leafing through his research, and said, "Who the hell are you?" In response, the man shot him. As Stern lay dying, the gunman murmured a few words in Latin, then he gathered the writer's papers and left.
Venice: The art restorer Gabriel Allon applied a dab of paint carefully to the Bellini, then saw the boy approaching, a piece of paper in his hand. It would be about Stern, he knew. They would want him to leave right away. With a sigh, the Mossad agent began to put his brushes away.
The Vatican: The pope known as Paul VII - "Pope Accidental," to his detractors - paced in the garden, thinking about the things he knew and the enemies he would make. He believed he understood why God had chosen him for this job, but the road in front of him was hard and exceedingly perilous. If he succeeded, he would revolutionize the church. If not, he might very well destroy it - and himself.

My Review:

Daniel Silva's third novel in his Gabriel Allon series takes place mainly in Rome, where a new (fictional) Pope has plans to reveal the complicity between the Catholic Church and the Nazis during WWII as regards the Final Solution. It is a gripping and well-written thriller.

I am enjoying this series because it gives me insight into the Jewish point of view, at least as regards the Israeli secret service. Truthfully, as I have learned in the many spy thrillers I have read, the secret service of any nation at any time is about as reliable as the governments of the countries served. Dirty deeds and assassinations, carried out in the interests of power and domination, not always based on completely accurate intelligence or good foresight, make for moral ambiguity by the bucketload. 

As it turns out, a controversy has been raging for years in real life between the Catholic Church and Israel as to the role of the Vatican in forwarding the aims of Hitler's Third Reich. The official line of the Church, to this day, is a denial of any complicity in the Holocaust while certain Israeli officials work to expose it.

Naturally, Daniel Silva has told the Israeli side of the story. Given that the persecution of Jews has gone on for centuries, I am inclined to believe his version. Read it and decide for yourself if you are interested.

(The Confessor is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE TEA GIRL OF HUMMINGBIRD LANE

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See, Scribner, 2017, 364 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate—the first automobile any of them have seen—and a stranger arrives.

In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change. Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city.

After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.

My Review: 

I have read and loved and/or enjoyed all of Lisa See's books. This, her latest, is the best one yet.

Combining Chinese history and modern days in both China and California, she teaches us about tea culture, examines the impact of change in a remote village, and true to her enduring theme of mothers and daughters, excites and tears at our hearts. 

A young girl who breaks with custom and has to give up a baby is a story often lived and often covered in fiction. She makes it new and unique. The economic crash of 2008 is another much written about event but who knew that a Chinese millionaire who made his riches out of cardboard would be affected? Well, he was because shipping is done in boxes. Something I never considered.

This novel is rich with knowledge about another culture, with the ways a mother's love and the longings of two daughters can outlast time and distance, as well as with stories that twist and turn and intertwine. Of course it may be improbable that lucky coincidences can lead to such a happy ending. That was fine with me because the storytelling is so assured. 

Ever since I learned to read, I have loved tales of girls and women who got themselves free of traps due to pluck and luck. In a world filled with disasters, sorrow, loss and dashed dreams, we always need such tales. Lisa See has her own pluck and luck in good measure and thankfully does the hard work necessary to bring the tales to us.

(The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is available in hardcover on the adult fiction shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

EDGAR & LUCY

Edgar & Lucy, Victor Lodato, St Martin's Press, 2017, 526 pp

 

 

I had never heard of this author or his book until a reading group selected it. I am so glad they did! I loved every page.

 

Victor Lodato is a playwright, poet and novelist, an occasional short story and essay writer. He has won awards and gotten a ton of writing fellowships. A hardworking writer, he was born and raised in New Jersey, the state where I grew up. This is his second novel.

I loved the characters, even the "unlikable" ones of which there are many. I loved the oddness of the story which borders on the improbable but feels completely plausible while you are reading it. I loved the steady tension of the tale, though some of the reading group members felt he dragged it out too long. Personally, I feel any novelist who can keep me turning the pages in a state of high anxiety for that long deserves high praise.

Edgar Allan Fini is an eight-year-old albino, being mostly raised by his grandmother in a small New Jersey town. Lucy is his unstable, unwilling mother. Edgar's father suffered from some kind of bipolar type mental illness and died when Edgar was an infant. Lucy's father was an abusive alcoholic, so she became a tough, wild young woman, which is why she stayed on with her in-laws after her husband's death and turned the job of raising Edgar over to her mother-in-law. 

We learn most of this from Edgar's young, unreliable viewpoint. He is an Owen Meany sort of precocious kid with a touch of something akin to Asperger Syndrome. I swear this novel has elements of many other novels but is not quite like any of them.

Loss, secrets, abuse, mental illness, alcohol, predatory males, overbearing and overprotective old world grandmothering all paint a picture of blue collar life in New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen should compose the soundtrack if ever there is a movie.

When Edgar is abducted by another unstable, grief-stricken man (though thankfully never sexually abused) both Edgar and Lucy deal with it in their own ways. Will Edgar ever make it back home from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey? Will Lucy ever grow up enough to deal with her past and her present, not to mention her future? That is what creates the tension.

Perhaps Victor Lodato attempted to put too much into what is ostensibly a psychological thriller but I don't think so. I think he pulled it off. His writing is achingly beautiful and his dialogue is pitch perfect, as one would expect from a poet and playwright. His insight into people's hearts and minds rivals Shakespeare, if you ask me.

In summary, the novel is not for the faint of heart or the squeamish. If you know me as a reader, you understand that it has just about everything I look for in a good read. I loved Edgar Allan Fini!

(Edgar & Lucy is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A LEGACY OF SPIES

A Legacy of Spies, John le Carre, Viking, 2017, 265 pp

 

 

Although I have read only eight of the master's books, I am a John le Carre fan. I like his particular combination of thrilling escapades accompanied by the loneliness and doubts of his spies. The title of his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold captured that truth of spy craft, possibly for the first time in literature, as well as inspiring a great Joni Mitchell song, "Come In From The Cold." 

 

So I picked up A Legacy of Spies with eager anticipation and was richly rewarded by a trip down to memories of the Cold War with all is menace of creeping communism and its moral ambiguity of the end justifies the means. 

 

George Smiley, infamous and elusive spymaster of the British Secret Service, who straddled the line between the need for secrecy and the wish to protect his agents, is only a shadow during much of the story. Peter Guillam is featured as the retired and genuinely elderly spy pulled back in to the 21st century version of MI6. The service is about to be sued by descendants of key figures from the past and Peter is expected to save them.

He is unwilling, recalcitrant as always, and it is his cynicism that protects him from demands that he reveal old secrets he would prefer to keep cloistered in his heart. After all he lost in that game, those secrets are all he has left.

Some things never change despite the modern stresses on the service. In some of his novels, le Carre has written such indecipherable conclusions, but in this one the ending is perfect.

(A Legacy of Spies is currently available in hardcover on the new book shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE FIFTH SEASON

The Fifth Season, N K Jemisin, Orbit, 2015, 465 pp

 

 

I have been amusing myself lately by reading fantasy. N K Jemisin is a woman of color with several accomplishments. She won the Hugo Award two years in a row: 2016 for The Fifth Season and 2017 for The Obelisk Gate, the first two of a trilogy. She is the first African American to win this award. Some say she has redefined the genre as was done by greats such as Ursula Le Guin and William Gibson. How could I not check it out?

 

I loved it! The Broken Earth trilogy gets its name from the major earthquakes and other disasters occurring periodically on Jemisin's created continent called The Stillness. It is Earth in the far future, practically unrecognizable except for some remnants of an earlier advanced civilization. 

The disasters have been going on for centuries and whenever one occurs it changes the civilization as the survivors live on and then rebuild. Such a period is called a Season. The story opens with a fresh disaster: earthquake, fire and massive destruction.

Essun comes home from work one day to find her son killed and her daughter kidnapped by her husband and her own life in danger. Essun is secretly an orogene, a person with a magical gift to draw power from the earth itself. 

Orogenes are one of the greatest magical creatures I have come across. They are crucial to saving and protecting humans from these disasters but they are feared and kept in a kind of slavery. In order for Essun to find her daughter she must use her powers but hide them at the same time because long ago she went rogue.

It is a complex story along the lines of the kind of games I have never learned to play. The author provides a glossary and a history of the Seasons in the back of the book. Unless you are adept as a gamer, use them! There is a whole world and system to learn. As the tale progresses, runs backward and forward, as the characters constantly morph into what you least expect, danger and daring and violence build. J K Jemisin makes you want to work harder as a reader than you might have thought you could and then rewards you with a fantastic adventure.

Living through this summer of some the worst fires, hurricanes, and earthquakes ever in my lifetime, along with wars, threats of wars, and untold numbers of displaced people roaming the world, this amazing book both put all that into perspective and had the effect of making me feel less terrified and more able to face the facts of the state we are in.

Then the book ended and I went right to the library to get the next volume, The Obelisk Gate. Thank goodness the third volume, The Stone Sky, was published in August, because I can't stop!

(The Fifth Season is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BEARTOWN

Beartown, Fredrick Backman, Atria Books, 2017, 415 pp (translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith)

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

 

 

My Review: 

 

Well. One of the ways I sometimes feel like I might be truly crazy but just don't know it, is when so many readers love a book, give it 5 stars and rave reviews, and I find it awful, deplorable, even possibly dangerous. I purely hated this book. I'll admit the story has a can't-look-away quality to it, so because I read it for my favorite reading group and because it was recommended to the group by a good friend, I got through it.

 

I will just say that over and above the facts that the characters are cliches and the author continuously tells the reader what she should think about every incident, the bottom line is this: a 14-year-old girl is raped by a 16-year-old hockey star and he totally gets away with it. The author curiously did not tell the reader what to think about that.

Mansplaining, predatory males, male sports heroes who get away with despicable actions; I know what I think about all that. In light of the recent disclosures about Harvey Weinstein, I cannot and will not recommend this book to anyone. Perhaps I read it wrong, but I don't think so.

 

THE TENANTS OF MOONBLOOM

The Tenants of Moonbloom, Edward Lewis Wallant, Harcourt, 1963, 245 pp

 

 

 I don't remember how this novel landed on my 1963 list. I must have read a review somewhere and ordered a copy. That sounds likely because the edition I have is a New York Review of Books Classics reprint. When it came along on my list I picked it up and read it.

At first and for quite a while actually, it was one of those unprepossessing stories about a sad sack guy named Norman Moonbloom who had drifted mostly downward in life. He works as a rent collector for his brother Irwin, a slumlord in late 1950s Manhattan.

Everything is dark and gloomy and falling apart, both the apartments in subdivided brownstones and their inhabitants. You go through a couple days with Norman as he makes his rounds and meet all the tenants. It all felt very much like an early Saul Bellow or Bernard Malumud novel with eccentric, socially maladjusted characters. The maladjusted tenants all complain to the maladjusted Norman about whatever is broken down in their apartments, from stoves to toilets to cracked flooring, stuck windows and buckling walls. Poverty being barely tolerable, exaggerated by high rents and shoddy management. Ho hum.

Suddenly it turns into the story of a young man, Norman, who has never connected much with life or the people around him, but for no known reason bursts into a guy who cares. A guy who defies his penny pinching brother and goes on a crusade to fix everything in those crumbling buildings. A guy who think he can fix those crumbling people or at least bring some light and comfort into their lives.

At that point I had to go on reading, all the while knowing Norman could not fix anyone, probably not even himself, but fascinated and even laughing at the slapstick of Norman's and his handyman Gaylord's do-it-yourself attempts to fix stuff.

Slow start, sudden change, and a tremendous build to the end. I only cared about Norman Moonbloom but it was him learning to care about his tenants that held my attention. In the end the novel was a feat of storytelling in a setting that would normally only induce despair but instead created a sense of hope for humanity.

I took a chance on a book and it paid off.

(The Tenants of Moonbloom is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LATE SHOW

The Late Show, Michael Connelly, Little Brown and Company, 2017, 405 pp

 

 

I completed my trio of mystery novels with my first Michael Connelly book. His work might be more accurately called crime thriller but since a police investigation is also a "who done it" the genres overlap.

 

Connelly has been writing for years, publishing 30 books about crime and police in Los Angeles. The Bosch TV series is based on the detective featured in most of his novels. My husband has read almost all of them. For the first time, with The Late Show, his detective is a woman and a brand new character. Renee Ballard lost both parents at a young age but lives part of the time with her grandmother in the suburbs, except when she stays on the beach where she surfs for relaxation and in honor of her dad.

 

She has been assigned to the night shift, called The Late Show, after having accused her former superior officer of sexual harassment.  That is the punishment she gets from the good old boy network of the department. Her partner is an older cop just waiting for retirement so doesn't like to go too deeply into the cases they come across in the deep of night. Renee is understandably unhappy but mostly she is bored.

Her former partner is one the guys who threw her under the bus. Because they had been a great team and, she thought, also friends, she felt doubly betrayed. One night she and her current partner are sent out to get the initial facts on a triple murder in a local club. When her former partner is assigned to the case the next morning and then murdered himself within a couple days, she cannot resist making her own investigation. Along with another case she finds herself deep in the Los Angeles underground of pornography and dirty cops.

The Late Show is a fast paced and exciting read. Connelly does a fine job portraying his female character, tying in her personal life and her purpose for becoming a cop. It was interesting to me how many parallels existed to Tana French's latest, The Trespasser. Best of all, it is always fun to read a book set in the city where I live. I was so impressed that one of these days I am going to go back and read Connelly's earlier books.

(The Late Show is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A SUPERIOR DEATH

A Superior Death, Nevada Barr, G P Putnam's Sons, 1994, 303 pp

 

 

As noted in my Books Read in September post, I turned to mysteries as a way to ease my overworked brain. A good thing about mysteries is the bad guy or gal gets caught and also gets what is coming to him or her, unlike our current morally ambiguous society. 

 

After reading A Mind to Murder by P D James, I picked up Nevada Barr's second novel, A Superior Death. Early this year when our current President seemed to be overriding the sanctity of the U S National Parks, I vowed to read one a month of Nevada Barr's mysteries, each set in a different National Park. As with other vows I have taken in my life, I have been faithless. In nine months I have only read one.

Anna Pigeon is a park ranger who also fights crime. In A Superior Death she has been transferred from the dry heat of the Texas high desert (Track of the Cat) to the chilly dampness of Lake Superior at Isle Royale National Park. She is moping a bit and shivering a lot, getting chomped on by mosquitoes and meeting a wide range of eccentric characters, when a grotesque underwater murder surfaces.

A current resident of Isle Royale is found dead in the wreck of an old cargo ship. The few clues available do not add up. The man had seemingly no enemies and was a partner in a concession that provided boat tours to summer visitors at the park. The discovery of his body 260 feet below the chilly surface of the lake coincided with the disappearance of another park ranger's wife, a woman with whom he was rumored to be romantically entangled. Had he made an enemy after all?

As I learned in Track of the Cat, Anna Pigeon is a fearless and determined woman. In this book she is required to learn how to dive deep in the freezing waters. An annoying FBI agent sent in to assist in the investigation is convinced that the crime stems from drug smuggling. A kooky couple, new-age types, believes that the missing wife was eaten, cannibal style, by her husband. If that were not enough, a teenage girl seems to be the victim of an adult sexual predator.

Barr juggles a large list of characters (I wish I had made a list) and is forever moving Pigeon around the island into various coves as well as back and forth between different settlements. I found a great map online allowing me to track her movements. I also learned from my husband, who grew up in Michigan, that he had gone to Boy Scout camp on the island. He is reading the book now.

As the deep dives take their toll, as the chilly fogs move in and out, a bewildering list of possible suspects grows and danger mounts. This was an exciting read full of extreme adventure but also occasional humor. I have renewed my vow!

(A Superior Death is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

OCTOBER READING GROUP UPDATE

Oh my, the way disturbing events can interrupt my blog schedule. My reading group line-up is huge this month and I have a feeling these books are going to save me. It could be that reading groups are my support group. I have already read A Legacy of Spies and it was great. I am well into Edgar and Lucy, also great. I love it when I want to read every book that was picked for the month.

Laura's Group:

 

 

Tina's Group:

 

 

One Book At A Time:

 

 

Bookie Babes:

 

 

Molly's Group:

 

 

 

Are you in a reading group yet? If yes, what are you reading in October? If not, what book are you dying to discuss with at least another person?

BOOKS READ IN SEPTEMBER

What with one thing after another (fires, personal upsets, heat waves) I did not make my reading goals in September. I did read 8 novels and only one was less than successful for me. It is probably a well known fact to many readers, but I discovered that when times are tough, mystery/crime novels are the perfect panacea! Fantasy worked for me this month as well.

Stats: 8 books read. 8 fiction. 5 written by women. 2 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 1 historical fiction. 3 mystery/crime. 2 fantasy. 1 translated.

Favorites: The Plague Diaries, A Superior Death, The Fifth Season

Least favorite: Beartown

How did your reading go in September? What were your favorites?

A MIND TO MURDER

A Mind to Murder, P D James, Random House, 1963, 256 pp

 

 

P D James's second Adam Dalgliesh mystery was published in 1963 and so is on the 1963 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. Only three weeks earlier I had read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, making it a bit of a shock (pun intended) to open A Mind to Murder and find it set in a London psychiatric clinic. In between the electric shock and LSD treatments as well as psychiatric "talk therapy" sessions, the administrator of the clinic is murdered in the basement amid a confusion of scattered patient files.

 

This reader's personal tastes were confirmed: P D James is hands down a superior mystery writer to Agatha Christie. (I know there are many readers who would not agree with me, but it is what it is.) Right out of the gate she sets up the rivalries and tension between the various therapists, the nurses and secretaries, and the victim. Miss Bolam had been nearly universally disliked by all the staff, giving Inspector Dalgliesh a knotty problem as he tried to single out the suspects. Every doctor had an alibi while the rest had some issue with their boss.

As the investigation proceeds, Ms James also writes scenes with the various characters interacting while not in the Inspector's presence. Quite soon the reader comes to know all these people and what is going on in their personal lives. I felt like I was doing my own work to figure out who done it and that made the reading even more enjoyable. 

In the end however, it was Inspector Dalgliesh who found the correct line of criminal activity to follow and solved the crime in an intense series of time sensitive incidents. My only complaint was that I could not figure out what led him to follow up that particular line of inquiry and suddenly felt left out of the story where previously I had thought I was part of it. 

A breach of patient confidentiality was the initial cause of events leading to the murder. That issue as well as the conflicts of opinion among the doctors about various approaches to treating mental illness, made the story resonate with current times even though it was written over 60 years ago.

The first P D James novel I read was Children of Men and I was struck by her intelligence, her insight into her characters, and her sense of social consciousness. Now that I have gone back to read her earlier books I am hooked and look forward to more of them.

(A Mind To Murder is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE PLAGUE DIARIES

The Plague Diaries, Ronlyn Domingue, Atria Books, 2017, 417 pp

 

 

Sometimes a book, or in this case a trilogy of books, is so personally relevant to me that I am almost overwhelmed with wonder. Then it becomes difficult to write about it in a way that I feel alright about sharing with others. I will do my best here.

 

The Plague Diaries is the last in Ronlyn Domingue's Keeper of Tales Trilogy, in which she ties together all the aspects found in the first two books and takes her tale to a conclusion so satisfying, so appropriate to what has gone before. I think she must possess many of the gifts she injects into her characters.

 

The three books can only be categorized as fantasy but they contain an awareness that goes beyond fantasy, that borders on an enlightened spirituality and especially an understanding of womanhood not often found in many of the books I read.

 

In the first volume, The Mapmaker's War, Domingue builds her worlds around Aoife, the first and only female mapmaker in the Kingdom. While journeying to chart the entire domain she slips through a thin place to find an almost mythical people who have created a way to live in peace. Her discovery unleashes a terrible outcome and she is exiled.

 

The Chronicle of Secret Riven, second book in the series, takes place 1000 years later and introduces Secret Riven, born of a strange and emotionally distant mother, mute until the age of seven, and possessed of her own gifts. The story follows Secret through her first 18 years as she learns to deal with the joys and horrors of her gifts.

 

The Plague Diaries opens as Secret comes of age. She has lost her tormented mother but inherited an ancient manuscript written by the mapmaker Aoife. In fact, her mother's attempts to translate it led to her death. Though Secret has suppressed the burdens of her gifts and tries to become a somewhat normal young woman, she is thrown into that other world discovered by Aoife. Along with another young person of indeterminate gender, a person even more gifted than herself, Secret becomes party to a transformation taking place in the Kingdom. The medium of change is the predicted Plague of Silences alluded to in the earlier books.

 

If you are someone who has pondered the possibilities of peace in the world, of an end to war and violence and greed, the transformation brought about by that plague will be right in your wheelhouse, as they say these days. Very much key to the entire three-part story is the role of women.

I do not read much fantasy. I have never read any of the George R R Martin books for example. The fantasy I have read and enjoyed are books by Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Philip Pullman, China Mieville, etc. What these authors have in common falls into a genre called Slip Stream, where different worlds run along side by side and where the seemingly unsolvable dilemmas of human existence are viewed with an eye toward solving them. Ronlyn Domingue fits into that domain.

A reader could pick up The Plague Diaries without having read the earlier two volumes of the trilogy and find a full and understandable story. To completely experience the richness and underlying wisdom I recommend reading each one in order. If this is your type of story, you will be rewarded beyond anything you could imagine.

(The Plague Diaries as well as the two earlier books are available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE CONFESSIONS OF YOUNG NERO

The Confessions of Young Nero, Margaret George, Berkley, 2017, 506 pp

It has been a while since I read Margaret George. I have read three of her earlier historical novels and found them a highly palatable way of learning old, old history. (Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, and The Autobiography of Henry VIII.) She likes to dig deep and correct historical misperceptions about these larger-than-life characters who left indelible effects on history.

She attempts to do the same for Nero, a later emperor of the Roman Empire, best known for fiddling while Rome burned. This volume will have a sequel as it covers only the first half of Nero's life, ending with the fire that left Rome a heap of cinders.

Nero was descended from Julius Caesar due to a circuitous family tree that owed much to famous murders and remarriages in the tumultuous ways of empire and power. It opens with an instance of Caligula trying to drown Nero when he was only six and follows his childhood as his ambitious and lethal mother employs a renowned poisoner to do away with anyone who stands in the way of her son becoming Emperor.

She succeeds in placing him as such when he is only sixteen. Nero continues in her tradition, eventually having his own mother murdered! It is a bloody tale in which Margaret George tries to show how a young man who loves chariot racing and the arts embraces the role of power while trying to bring culture to a decadent Rome.

She is a smooth writer, foregoing long sentences and using only enough description to bring the times and locales to life. However, this time I felt a bit disappointed in an almost too simplistic rendering of a complex man. She certainly makes Nero a sympathetic character, as she did with Mary, Cleopatra, and Henry, but in those earlier books she somehow did a better job (at least in my recollection) of bringing the full personality of those rulers to life. I cried when Mary, Queen of Scots died. I wished I could have met Cleopatra. I almost forgave Henry VIII for killing so many wives.

Perhaps part of the problem was that Nero's worst deeds are still ahead of him and I will feel more satisfied when I read the sequel. I read this for a reading group and all the other members loved it. I don't argue that she makes history easy to assimilate and does her research with competence. It could be that Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy (still waiting for that third volume coming out next year) spoiled me for this kind of historical writing.

(The Confessions of Young Nero is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy, Alfred A Knopf, 2017, 444 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent - from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war.

It is an aching love story and a decisive remonstration, a story told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Each of its characters is indelibly, tenderly rendered. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love - and by hope.

The tale begins with Anjum - who used to be Aftab - unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her - including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover; their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be. We meet Tilo's landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul. And then we meet the two Miss Jebeens: the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs' Graveyard; the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi.

As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids these lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts.

 

 

My Review:

I was so eager to read this novel and the waiting list at the library was so long. In a fit of splurging on books I bought the hardcover.

 

Arundhati Roy is not an American writer and her two novels are nothing like American mainstream fiction. Nothing like them except for the exceptional power of her storytelling.

 

I am not going to talk about the plot or the characters. Read the summary if you want that. You still won't have any clue about why her new novel is so wonderful or even what it is really about.

 

My impression is it is about people whose lives and hearts get broken by the various upheavals that seem to go on forever in India. Here we sit in America moaning and groaning about our President, the state of our politics and our divided nation, but really we have no idea how lucky we are.

 

Much of the story takes place in a graveyard. The rest takes place in Kashmir where war is a continuous fact of life. Actually you could say that the Indian government and the Kashmiri rebels and the feuding Hindus and Muslims are all doing their best to turn Kashmir into a graveyard.

 

A graveyard is an appropriate image for our times as the human race does its utmost to render our entire planet into one. But what beats through this somewhat challenging novel is love in just about every configuration possible. I think that is Arundhati Roy's particular strength. Whether she is writing novels or political essays, it is the passions of individual humans that she delineates. Isn't it true, she seems to say, that our politics is another version of the passions that drive existence? 

 

 

(The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

THE PATH TO POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON #1

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1, Robert A Caro, Alfred A Knopf, 1982, 768 pp

 

 

So far in my quest to read a biography of each President who held office during my lifetime, I have covered Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. I have been mostly content with the biographers I chose but Robert A Caro tops them all. He even managed to keep me interested for at least 80% of the time.

 

Reading presidential biographies feels a lot like being in school, except that most of the American history I studied in school was deeply slanted towards the sentiments that all of our Presidents were awesome dudes and America is the most democratic country in the world. Reading these carefully researched books has given me the education about my country I need to be a confident and wise citizen and voter.

The Path to Power only covers Johnson's first 36 years from his birth to his election to the House of Representatives to his first failed campaign for the Senate. He was born in the Texas Hill Country, an impoverished farming area. His father had been a well-loved member of the Texas House of Representatives but later fell into debt and alcoholism. It was at his father's side as a child that Lyndon became fired up about politics, but where his father wanted to serve his constituents, Lyndon was in it purely for the power, the attention, and therefore the votes.

Caro portrays him as a fairly disreputable character with a genius for the political game. No morals, no deep love of country, no mission to make America great, though quite a few of his actions did improve the lives of many. What drove him was a burning desire to be somebody and a great capacity for working the game for his personal gain. 

He was not a good student, he was not admired or even liked in his childhood by anyone but his mother and one cousin, and later Lady Bird. But once he set his sights on a goal of his own choosing he was tireless. His goal was to be President of the United States. This volume covers the years when he began to build the connections that would take him to that goal. Because he would do anything to win, he often did and thus eventually gathered around him several slavish and devoted admirers who would do anything for him.

I have always viewed politics as a dirty game with the occasional bright star I could respect. The book did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Johnson learned all the tricks and invented some of his own. In a time when due to the Depression, campaign spending was fairly low, Johnson managed to work his way into the confidence and gratitude of men with money and spent more than any candidate for public office had, at least in Texas. He was not above stealing votes, stuffing the ballot box and later buying votes.

I could go on and on but if you want to learn about the state of the union from 1920 to 1944, just buckle down and read the book. It is an eye-opener.

Because I started my project with Truman, I didn't know much about Franklin D Roosevelt, President from 1933 to 1945. I know more now. I also got a pretty good history of Texas from the years before LBJ's birth up to WWII. If I didn't know better from reading those other biographies, I would have finished the book thinking that Texas single-handedly invented dirty politics.

 

Ahead of me are three more volumes to read about this man (and possibly four since Caro is writing the final volume as I write this review.) This kind of reading takes longer to get through than reading novels. I read this one for over two months, averaging 20 pages a day while reading 24 novels in between.

 

It has enlightened me a great deal as to how the world of government and politics works. I am less upset about our current administration than I had been before I read it. My country has had truly awful Presidents before; dishonest, ignorant, unstable human beings who nevertheless were elected into office. Somehow our system of government survives and the country powers on. Plato was right however. A republic cannot stand when the populace is uneducated, when the franchise is not universal, and when money/business/finance is the main engine behind the government.

 

The least I can do is get educated and vote. 

THE BELL JAR

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, Harper & Row, 1963, 275 pp

 

 

I admit that I had reservations about reading this novel which is based on the author's own experience with mental illness. I put off reading it for years. Odd, because I have read other novels and memoirs featuring people who descend into madness and actually liked them. I think because we all know that Sylvia Plath committed suicide just one month after The Bell Jar was published, I was concerned about what I would find.

 

What I found was some of the more wonderful writing I have read. Poetic imagery, wry humor and pithy observations enough to make me wish I had known her. I did find mental anguish but not a victim mentality or even narcissism, just a sense of bewilderment about what had happened to Esther Greenwood, the autobiographical stand-in for Sylvia. Most telling though was her fear of the future once she was released from the asylum.

"I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead--after all, I had been 'analyzed.' Instead, all I could see were question marks."

 

Because the timescape is mid 1950s, one is given a patients-eye-view of the barbaric treatments of those times (shock treatment, insulin shock, and the sexism from male practitioners.) Now we have all these designer drugs for every mood and diagnosis. The fact that these drugs are also attempts to alter the mind and personality does not fill me with much more confidence however. I am not up-to-date on the current statistics as far as saving lives goes with the drugs, but I am up-to-date on some of their failures.

 

The final section of the edition I read is A Biographical Note by Lois Ames (at one time contracted by the family to be the official biographer.) That was the saddest part by far. It depicts a gifted and determined woman who struggled to overcome her demons but in the end succumbed within eight years of having been pronounced "cured."

 

Well, I have read it now. I am no longer afraid of the book but I am just as certain as I have always been that there is much more understanding of the human mind needed to help those who are afflicted with mental illness. 

(The Bell Jar is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)