Becky's Books –

This gets more sexually graphic than I’m used to in crime thrillers.  Box’s Cassie Dewell sseries gets pretty rough, but I think this is a step worse on the scale.  These are “females in jeopardy” books – aka Fem-Jep and they were very popular for awhile. Not so much now maybe – 

Blood Trail~  
by C.J.Box; 2008
Read by Dvid Chandler
Rating: A- / Western crime thriller
(#8 in Jim Pickett series)  

It’s deer hunting season in Colorado and Joe Pickett, the former game warden of the area, is now a special agent reporting directly to the governor. While out in the truck checking out the roads and terrain, Joe and his buddy Nate Romanowsky come across a human body in a hunting camp.

That would be bad enough, it’s certainly grizzly,  but the body has been strung up, gutted and flayed so it looks like it was a trophy elk.   What’s happening here? Is someone hunting the elk hunters.  Okay – well,  who would that and why?

From residentjudge.at: “It’s Six Degrees of Separation Saturday, the meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite And Best . The idea is that Kate chooses a starting book, in this case Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, then you bounce off six other titles that spring to mind.”

Sometimes I’ve read the starter book but often not.  So here we have my rendition of “Six Degrees of Separation” from the same place, 

“Kitchen Confidential,” and ending with …. (Keep reading): which I’ve never read but I know it’s about cooking and food so it automatically brings me to

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
by Samin Nosrat – 

This is a cookbook of the sensory variety, the smells, tastes, texture, sounds and sights of cooking as well as the chemistry. This book is not just recipes with stellar food photos,  but Nasrat stirs in some emotional aspects, too.  This is about way more than “following directions of the recipe,” this is about *actively* cooking good food. 

Which brings us to 

2.  Kitchens of the Great Midwest
by J. Ryan Stradal  

About the cooking and food of my own early life and that of my ancestors.  I know this food and I love it from lutefisk and lefse to walleye and bars … always bars. But why are those Northern Minnesota delights  mixed up with jalepeños for the turkey sandwiches???  I loved this book!!!!  (For the fun of it.) 

And it takes us to another book about immigrants, the crossers of borders in many ways, places, and times: 

3.  The House of Broken Angels 
by Luis Alberto Urrea 

About a 70-year old man dying of cancer and wanting to have a big “final” (70th) birthday party, but his mother, at almost 100 years old,  died.a few days prior.. So the first sentence is “Big Angel was late to his own mother’s funeral.” Because he went to his birthday party first then on to the mournful gathering. There are guests (family even up from Mexico) for one, the other, or both events.And there is so much food; “three whole paragraphs of smoke.” 

4.   The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros 

Another Mexican immigrant story, but this time in Chicago and from a child’s point of view as, over the years, the home they’ve dreamed of turns into a less than desirable place to live.  Also a wonderful coming of age story. 

5. The Dictionary of Lost Words
By Pip Wiliams 

There’s no food or immigration here (until the end), but it’s a coming of age story which is very different from those of today because WWI was a whole different era –  still Victorian in many ways.  One plot center for the book is the original publication of the  Oxford English Dictionary.   https://mybecky.blog/2023/05/02/the-dictionary-of-lost-words-by-pip-williams/

And you can read the non-fiction version of the Oxford Dictionary here:  (read prior to my blogging at Word Press) 

6.  The Professor and the Madman
by Simon Winchester

I read this prior to my blogging at WordPress but I read it as The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. which is the US title for The Surgeon of Crawthorne.  It’s nonfiction about how the Oxford Dictionary came to use the skills of a brilliant patient in a large mental hospital.

Thanks for reading my mess – it was fun (if challenging) to do.

These two books are a novella and its sequel – A Psalm for the Wild-Built is the first and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is the second. Buying them together is not expensive and you’ll have the second when you finish the first. }

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy 
by Becky Chambers 
2023 /  (152 pp)
Read by Em Grosland  4h 8m
Rating: A / science fiction 
(#2 in Monk and Robot Series)

I don’t always recommend reading series in order because I don’t follow that as a strict rule. I usually skip around until I either buy into the ideas/plots or I bow out. But with these two books from Becky Chambers going in order is necessary just to know what’s going on in the second book which is more like an actual sequel and if  you were tp just go right into book 2 first you’d have no idea what’s going on or who/what (?) these characters are.   I suppose there could be a book 3 but I’m not betting on it. For now it’s a novella and its sequel and that’s great.

Because the gist is that in the far future a human named Dex and a robot named Mosscap are visiting other villages where a robot has never been seen – they’re mythical.  Mosscap, who doesn’t eat, has philosophical problems with fishing and killing anything, even for food.  The theme, again, deals with the difference between organic and inorganic people, robots, animals and/or plants and also goes into the wants and needs as well as love and fear plus some other elements of life and death (killing, too) on this or maybe any planet.  

It’s a sweet and heartwarming story,  so maybe not for everyone, but there are those (including myself) who wouldn’t change a word.  

I’ve been reading this series in order and I just don’t think Betrayal is as good as the 6 priors in the Robin Lockwood books. Parts are quite good, especially an embedded mystery and its resolution.   And the courtroom drama is good, as usual.  But, too much of it is so-so. The plot here is original though and I can say that about the whole series to date.

Betrayal 
by Philip Margolin 
2023
Read by Theresa Plummber 7h 20m
Rating – B+ / legal thriller 
(#7 in Robin Lockwood series)

Robin Lockwood gets a call from someone named Mandy Kerrigan,  a woman whom she used to fight when they were both  professional wrestlers. In fact, Robin lost her last fight to this woman before she turned to law school full time. Now Mandy is in jail, charged with murder, while Robin is an up-and-coming criminal defense attorney while Mandy is on the downside of her career.  But Robin takes the case.

The tale starts out with a local (Portland, OR) organized crime group getting the money owed to them by arranging car wrecks and collecting on the insurance from the resulting personal injuries. Then one day a women is more than injured; she’s killed and her husband is none too happy about it. And then someone else is killed – erased from the planet. And then there’s a whole suburban family of 4 – killed in their home.

Mandy is arrested basically because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.   It takes Robin and her crew to get to untangle the sticky web and get to the bottom of things.  Meanwhile, Robin has met a man she actually dates twice. That’s nice and it’s not overdone in the slightest. 

I don’t know why, but it took me awhile to get into this book. It’s not terribly long, but covers quite a lot of everything with a brilliant intensity.  The setting is the coastal area of South Korea basically from the post-Korean War era to contemporary times.  That’s about 2 generations of one family, plus an occasional bit of back story.  It felt more “foreign” than most of the translated Korean lit I’ve read to date and maybe that’s because of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez touch.

Whale
by Cheon Myeong-kwan
translator Chi-Yong Kim
2023 /
read by Cindy Kay 11h 34m
Rating – 10 / Korean lit fiction

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize of 2023, Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan is a very, VERY, compelling novel.  It’s reads like a fairy tale with some magical realism opped with an allegory of indeterminate meaning although there are “lessons” or “rules” throughout. They’re all  folded or swirled in and out and through each other via the very simple (allegory-style) writing used by Chen Myong-kwan.   
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-whale-by-cheon-myeong-kwan-translated-by-chi-young-kim

Because the author’s background includes a lot of screen-writing the the narrative emphasizes the visual. I would almost always rather read a book than see the movie version of it because my visualization is very good – it always has been.  (My dad told me invented stories at night and because there were no pictures, I had to visualize them – this was a couple years before I could read.) 

The book is said to have an overtone of “han” which is “rage, resentment, grief, regret and sorrow – a Korean concept that has no direct English translation.”  https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230618000165 and yes there is a lot of resentment and rage expressed in graphic violence – and the main characters feel quite a lot of grief, regret and sorrow.  

So to me this is a combination of One-Hundred Years of Solitude with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ magical realism, almost any of John Irving’s later novels (Avenue of Mysteries?) for the scope and zaniness, and the melancholy of Orhan Pamuk’s “Hüzün,” in the melancholy of his nonfiction Istanbul.

It takes place somewhere on the coast of South Korea where fishing is the usual economic activity. The actual tale spans maybe 40-50 years total or 2 generations, those of the mother and her daughter the main characters in the novel.   But it goes back to the last emperor of Korea for background. There is some socio-cultural history embedded in the narrative, but it’s not a political-economic history. Rather, it follows social trends from the John Wayne movies shown there and the popularity of the coffee shops in the 1970s and ’80s, to the feminism of the late 1980sand early ’90s, and finally the commercialization of the film industry. 

Fwiw, whales are very symbolic and beloved on the Korean peninsula and have been since ancient times when they were revered. They are a very large and beautiful animal and Geumbok, one of the two main characters is large and beautiful as well – so is her daughter and her husband and a couple other characters.  In fact, Geumbok is big and brash and lustful and ambitious. She was inspired by seeing the whale and she goes after more and bigger things in her entrepreneurial projects, the restaurant, the brickyard and the movie theater.  

Meanwhile, her daughter, Chunhui, is also of enormous size and strength, although she’s mentally very slow, even unable to talk. She is ignored by her mother, but loved by Jumbo, the elephant the family takes in. 

I gave this book a 10 although I am generally loathe to do that without having read it twice. I did read that it’s already a classic in South Korea and deservedly so, imo.

This is a good one in the Joe Pickett series, one of the best maybe, but I’ve got 17 books to go – LOL!  

Free Fire
by C.J. Box – 2007 (book) 
Read by David Chandler 11h 5m
Rating – A++ / western crime 
(# 7 in the Joe Pickett series) 

Everyone is on the scene since Joe was fired from his job as county game warden in Twelve Sheep County, Wyoming; that was In Plain Sight. And even if this is an older book, there was still a 12-week (!) wait at the library and I’d already been waiting for about 6 weeks. So I caved and got it at Audible (Premium membership).  

The main series cast: 
Joe Pickett – a middle aged game warden in Wyoming.
Marybeth – Joe’s wife 
Shannon – their oldest daughter – maybe 15
Lucy – their younger daughter – 8?
Missy – Marybeth’s mother –
Bud – Missy’s ranch-owner husband
Nate- a recluse and Joe’s friend and neighbor – trains falcons  – hates the gov’t 

But Joe the governor of Wyoming wanted him hired back to take care of a situation in which some lawyer admitted, up front, that he murdered 4 people in a certain area of the park. The twist was that the law said the jury had to come from the area. Unfortunately, because nobody lived in that little area, there was no jury and Clay McCann walked free. The nearby citizens got in an uproar and the newly freed lawyer-guy apparently enjoyed the whole thing.  So now the governor has a problem and sends the newly reemployed Joe to go investigate and figure it out.

There were a few too many added characters (for plot purposes) for me to really keep track of. who they were and what they did. And the plot was convoluted but I got the gist of it.  Good book, though, it’s fun with wise-cracking and family matters,  but as usual in C.J. Box’s books, the plot takes a turn for the deadly serious.  It’s more than a thriller, there’s who-done-it  a mystery in there – who the heck and why?   

I’d been eyeing this book for awhile.  It’s the first of a 2-book series, the first book, this one, has a sequel.  It’s basically about 2 creatures, one human, the other a robot, who live together in the wilderness set in the far-future. These kinds o books are often allegories and this is no different – it might very well be an allegory for something.

*******
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Becky Chambers 
2023 /  (151 pages)
Read by Em Grosland  4h 8m
Rating: A / science fiction 
(Monk and Robot Series –  #1 of 2)
*******

The human leaves his big city home and goes out into the wilderness where there are villages full of robots busily doing their thing.   The robot finds him there and tells him he’s there to help him. Dex, the name of the human doesn’t quite know what to make of this, but he doesn’t send the robot, “the splendid, speckled Mosscap,” away.  

Centuries ago, or so they say, the robots moved out of the city and to the countryside and were never seen again.  That’s the legend anyway; it happened thousands of years ago.

In the book’s time, Sibling Dex came to realize “they” wanted to leave the city.  So they left because there was no one and nothing to keep them back or prevent them from being a tea master when they got wherever they found themselves. But there was no one to help them either.  They wanted to go to a small village and be a tea monk, trading and selling tea between villages and to customers at their small shop.  

As I made pretty clear in the above paragraph, Dex claims no gender – S/he is a “they”. I’m really not fond of this (actually, it grates on me), because it makes it seem like there are two entities in one – a split personality? And what about verb tenses?  If “they” is only 1 entity, do you say “They is not home?” Or “They was home last night.”?  That’s treating the pronoun as if it were their name.  

But Robot is also non-gender and uses the pronoun “it.”  Chambers was consistent in this except in a couple instances (if I heard correctly) where the pronoun “she” was used for Dex.     Like …. “They stuck her hands in their pockets.”  

This happened in another book I read not long ago and it was also science fiction – I had to look it up – “The Mountain in the Sea.” by Ralph Nayler. (link to my review on this site)

Jeff Goodell had written several books on the environment before boarding a research ship for a trip with the scientists to study the effects of climate change at Thwaites Glacier on the western coast of Antarctica.  Thwaites Glacier is sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier because of its vulnerability to changes (Goodell created that nickname in a Rolling Stone article he wrote for them.) 
Jeff Goodell

****
The Big Melt:
A Journey to Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier 
Jeff Goodell 2016
Read by author 2h 58m
Rating; 9.0  (climate change)
****

And Goodell put together an audiobook about the trip which was produced by Audible. (There is no text version.). This glacier melt will affect the entire earth to one extent of another.  Water levels will rise. 

So in this work Jeff Goodell takes the listener right inside a specially outfitted vessel on a voyage to a seriously remote location, “the foot of the staggeringly important Thwaites Glacier.” There are chapters regarding where they are, what’s going on, why it’s important, the daily manics of a research trip like this which took several months. There’s also fascinating information about the other passengers (scientists) and how they survive.  I was left feeling quite satisfied, like I knew quite a lot more having experienced the book than I did prior and I’m interested in finding out where else this subject goes.  (So I Googled a few things.)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thwaites_Glacier

This is as of 10/2023, ABC news: and NBC news:  

Also on the audio are recordings made by Carolyn Beeler’s public radio program The World, which provide listeners with an incredible sense of what Antarctica sounds like. 

“The Big Melt” phenomenon has shattering, real consequences for all of us. This Audible Original is produced with Rolling Stone in conjunction with Columbia Journalism Review’s Covering Climate Change initiative.

I only finished because I wanted to get that child saved.  I won’t read any more of or about Joe Dillard; they’re too grizzly.

Last Resor
By Scott Pratt
Read by Tim Campbell 8h 20m
Rating: C / crime thriller 
(#10 in the Joe Dillard series)

  The violence to kids in Last Resort is not “in your face graphic,” but it’s a bit too close for my tastes, and not done very well, either. It’s not porn, but it’s about chasing traffickers who have a kidnaped a child. And then, to add insult, there’s some occult stuff thrown in. 

It might have been different had I read the books in order because Louise Penny gets into something like this in her later books but by the time I got to themt I was used to the characters and their relations that they were all just fine – nice people. With the Dillard books I never let that part of the story arc get developed and I have a suspicion it’s there.

This is from a gifted  writer I’d never heard of before. He’s got 7, now 8, books to his name and I think they’re all collections essays. touches him emotionally and that contributes to his brilliance with the written word. I think Sharlet could probably write the bark off a tree.  He gets a couple points just for that. 

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
By Jeff Sharlet 
2023/ 337 pp
Read by Jeff Scarlet – 11h 45m
Rating: 9.5 / history & morals/politics of US
(Both read and listened)

It’s one heck of a book to read following American Midnight – I think. I’m definitely leaning toward the left lane of middle-of-the-road politics – or at least aware and against the right wing “conservative” branches. And maybe these Sharlet is reporting on are fringe – we can hope so but the polls don’t seem to say that.  

It was on sale and the blurbs made it sound pretty interesting, emphasizing Trump’s supporters. That’s true as far as it goes.  The book is divided into 3 Sections each with a few essays. There’s Day-Oh- On Hope,”  “Dream On: On Vanity,” and Goodnight, Irene: On Survival.”  

Some of the essays in the collection are truly excellent, like the first one, “Voice and Hammer,” which is abut Harry Belafonte, his life and talent but focuses on his activism which I’d never even heard about.  This was originally published in 2013 or so and may be the best of the lot. It’s here at the Virginia Quarterly Review as a separate piece:   https://www.vqronline.org/articles/voice-and-hammer

That may be one of the finest essays I’ve ever read and this, my first collection from him, only served as an introduction. Sharlet has been compared to others, but he reminds me most of John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley.  (But I’m not alone in that – I googled and see that Timothy Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till, is quoted as having said “Sharlet is his generation’s Steinbeck” https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-brilliant-darkness-a-book-of-strangers-jeff-sharlet/6952627

 Other Sections of The Undertow are varied in length and topic and they were written more recently. In the same Section as  “Day-O – On Hope,” there is a second  essay, “On the Other Side of Possibility,” which mostly looks at the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon and its notorious “library.”  Men’s Rights are covered and conspiracy theorists of many stripes.

Then I got to the second Section, “Dream On: On Vanity.”  This one got a bit weird and I almost gave up at “Whole Bottle of Red Pills,” the 5th essay, but perseverance won out. (Yay!!! – it was so worth it.)  

Then comes Section 2, which gets to some of the individual narcissism of the bunch who attacked the Capital on 1/6/2021. Sharlet wasn’t at the event, but he found people who had been and did what he does – interviewed, got them to talk about it and their thoughts.  There are some very strange photographs included.- very curious and interesting. 

Section 3 is called “Goodnight Irene” and is mostly about Jan 6, 2021 with “The Undertow” being 123 pages long – it has its own parts though.  I think this might be what some call a “long read.”  (In fiction it would be a novella.) 

The book was on sale and although I’d never heard anything about it or the author, it sounded interesting.  I came to find out later that Sharlet has written 7 other books along spiritual/moral lines, but dealing with the realities of contemporary US  society including the political divide with its religious themes. In

this one the topics go from Harry Belafonte and the Freedom Marches, to Occupy Wall Street, then Trump, Ashli Babbitt and more Trump, the ministry today and back to the music scene with folk sinter Lee Hayes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hays  (not too far removed from Woody Guthrie).   It’s had super-good reception in the media.  

I found that Sharlet usually writes about religious issues and produces politically left-of-center essays separately and in collections. He’s regularly reviewed by NY Times, WaPo and in many (!) other places. He teaches at Dartmouth and does other things  His most freequently mentioned has been

I haven’t read a John Lescroart novel for a year and a half!  I used to love his legal thrillers and get the new onse in a series as they came out. But then after a half dozen books the reader changed but changed back and the books kept coming  David Colacci had such a distinctive voice and when different voices were tried it was too much to bear (lol). I just couldn’t put anyone else in there for a long time and then I tried one of the new guy but …  So I tried the non-Dismas Hardy and they worked okay but … and time passed until now I finally decided it was time for one of the few I hadn’t got to yet. 

The Fall
 by John Lescroart
Read by David Colacci 11h 11m 
2015 – 
Rating:  A- / legal thriller 
(Book # 16 in the Dismas Hardy series
and #1 in the Rebecca Hardy series)

 A 17-year old Black girl falls or is pushed off a roof. The cops are being pressured to find the killer so they find a White boy who looks suspicious and they can put the finger on. Dismas Hardy gets the call to defend but his daughter, Rebecca, is on the case this time. . 

Rebecca Hardy, Dismas’ eldest daughter, just 2 years out of law school and working out of Dismas’ office, gets the case; her first murder case.  On these pages we also run into Abe Glitsky who has his own associated series. He’s with the police department and is Dismas’ very good friend.  Then comes Wyatt Hunt, from yet another series written by Lescroart and connected to the Dismas Hardy books, turns up here. He and Devin Juhle, his partner, are police homicide investigators.  
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lescroart#Bibliography

It’s a fine legal thriller with a good amount of courtroom drama, some twists and turns etc. There are some hilarious moments in the dialogue. I really enjoyed it but it was nothing special.

Thi is a very good book BUT I have a couple of things I’d like to mention.  First – Hochschild is not a historian – not an academic one at any rate. He’s a journalist and teaches narrative writing for grad students at UC Berkeley – nothing to be sneezed at. Second – as a lifelong leftist (not an extremist), he definitely has his biases and they show. – Okay I said it..

American Midnight
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
2023 / 422 p Kindle
Read by Jonathan Todd Ross 15h 6m
Rating: 9 / US history
(both read e-book and listened)

I may be the target reader because I have a BA in history (MA in something else) and have been a non-scholarly history buff ever since. Although I’ve read and loved some academic history, I have no preference as to that.

It’s possible if this book had been written by an academic historian that the footnotes would be easier to follow (this may be a problem with ebooks and cost factor). Also, the wording of the narrative would be more equivocating.  (“I would like to suggest …” “It would seem …”  “Perhaps …” etc.) The organization would have been tighter.   Other than that, the only difference I might see is that Hochschild seems at least somewhat light-handed about criticizing the media (newspapers from the New York Times to KKK rags).  But there are plenty of academic historians who share Hochschild’s views – would they do this? – hard telling. Zinn was actually worse but corrected his breath-taking (for the times) book A People’s History of the United States (1980).

Trump is unlikely to wind up in an orange jumpsuit, at least not on this indictment, and probably not before November 2024. Yet if that happened, he would not be the first candidate to run for the White House from a prison cell. In the Presidential Election of 1920, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, polled nearly a million votes without ever hitting the campaign trail. I’d totally forgot that but I think I did know it at one time.

On that day when the majority of the states elected Harding as POTUS, Debs was locked behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, serving a 10-year sentence for sedition (yes). It was a not a “trumped up” up charge (sorry). Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed unjust – see the Sedition Act of 1918.

 All that said, this is is such a fine book. -I’m giving it a 9 because although there may be some flaws in there and I think that’ really depends on what the reader is looking for. I don’t necessarily want an unbiased look at that era. For too long students of US history have been given an “abridged” version of our history with the emphasis being “nation building” and overlooked some unfortunate events and trends. We also blurred the problems we had underneath that. Hochschild nails a bunch of them during a brief time when we were facing some serious problems. 

I was always interested in the Red Scare and Palmer and the immigrants of the times and although it was touched on in many of my history classes, it was just a bare brush with the truth of it. Kind of like a history of Stalinist Russia without mentioning the gulags or the Stasi. (My grandfather came from Finland in 1899. He wasn’t “Red,” but he was understandably suspected by Czar Nicholas II.)

In many ways the things the US is going through since 9/11 with the Right Wing Nativists and the rage of Donald Trump and his supporters is quite similar to what we experienced then. We just haven’t actually gone to war yet. Even our Covid-19 and the earlier Spanish Flu mirrors the days. But we made it through those times, so Hochschild’s is message is not a thoroughly negative one; “We made it through worse times than these.“

This is a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR according to the New York Times,Washington Post, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post, Fast Company and more. 

A new book in the Mickey Haller series by Michael Connelly is released every two or three years and I’ve looked forward to this one ever since it was announced. I don’t pre-order anything because personally, I want to start reading right away when I get a book. So it’s only after I finish my current read and maybe a “next-up” book, that I buy, download, and jump into that newly published by a favorite author book. But it’s on my wish list until then. That said, there are a few I know I’ll be reading so I sometimes pre-order those – very rare – not even #1 Ladies Deceives Agency.  

*******
Resurrection Walk 
by Michael Connelly  
Oct, 2023
Read by Peter Giles, Titus Welliver, Christine Lakin
Rated: A+++ (wow) / legal thriller
(Lincoln Lawyer Series # 7)
*******

 The phrase Resurrection Walk Mickey explains (but it’s obvious) refers to those times the judicial system via a lawyer gets a client declared innocent after having been found guilty and serving a chunk of his time. This is beyond appeal.  It’s a risky move because the standards of proof are higher –  the “petitioner’ has to be actually found “innocent.” When that happens this person’s record is wiped clean of this offense.  And he gets to make a “resurrection walk.” as opposed to a “perp walk” when he’s been charged and is walked into the courtroom or jail.  

Now, Haller has hired his half-brother, retired detective Harry Bosch (who has his own excellent series) to join him in trying to exonerate Lucinda Sands, convicted of killing her husband 5 years prior.  The whole thing smells of police corruption. The two of them study the case files, investigate on their own, go out to see witnesses, collect the information of experts, and finally end up before a judge – no jury for these types of cases.  

So the whole gang is here – Mickey,  Harry, Cisco (Mickey’s investi-gator), and Harry’s adult daughter – even Maggie McPherson, Mickey’s ex-wife.   Shamiram Arslanian is a forensics expert who does work for Haller from time to time. She’s been in a couple prior books.  https://www.michaelconnelly.com/characters/shamiram-arslanian/

However, Harry is very ill and getting experimental cancer treatments. As Mickey says, “He’s old!” But Harrye has invaluable experience and conducts himself well on the stand. He juste doesn’t know much about the developing technologies.

So many of my favorites detectives are getting old – Dave Robicheaux, Harry Bosch, there are others like Inspector Gamache. One thing I really enjoy about the Haller series is the emphasis on legal procedures. And there’s a fair amount of new technology added. Yes, there is some thriller stuff, too,like chases and shootouts, but that’s true of most “mysteries” these days, from police procedurals to amateur sleuthing.  But I do enjoy a good courtroom drama – I’m going to have to try Perry Mason.  

For decades I read real dead tree and ink books and loved them dearly – I’d say I did that for 68 years or so. And I was usually a voracious reader. But some time within the past 20 years or so I became quite nearsighted. and although I used to wear my glasses on top of my head when I read, I started needing them when I read! (Woe!). And I was prescribed bifocals and then trifocals. Now my distance vision is almost good enough to drive without glasses at all – but I can’t read a menu to save my life.

Fen, Bog and Swamp: 
A Short History of Peatland Destruction
and its Role in the Climate Crisis
by Annie Proulx 2022
Read by Gabra Jackman 5h 6m 
Rating:  9 / non-fiction-science 

My solution has been available ver since I discovered that the Kindle books had a magnifier. That worked for awhile but now I can’t even see the largest font without the bifocals – with them I can read all but the smallest size and I’m comfortable at about 1/3 of the largest. (This is all on Mac stuff so my fonts tend to be larger anyway.).

It took me awhile but I got used to the Audio versions of the books and now I’ve been happily listening since 2005 – that’s well over 1000 books from Audible and fewer but growing from the library. I rarely read something in Kindle only and virtually never via ink and paper although I could with my glasses.

The best way for me to read a book which is complex in any way (fiction or non) is to do both – I get so immersed. That’s why these book reviews have “X2 in their titles. It means this is the second reading for me. Sometimes I take notes then because I’m older now and can’t necessarily remember the names of the characters. This is where the Kindle comes in handy because I can do a search and find that guy on the 4th page and not mentioned again until now, by his last name only and no other info, at page 87

So that’s what I did with Fen, Bog and Swamp. I both listened and read it back in August, and then I did that now again in November when it came up in my reading group (All-nonfiction) – I liked it well enough in November, giving it a 9 which is very, very good, but not quite excellent. This second reading put all the bits together and it’s a 9.25. (I can’t quite give it a 10 due to a couple of “flaws.”

Proulx has written quite a lot of non-fiction, but this may be her first full length book – (?) She says she sent it in as an essay and the publishers wanted more. So she wrote another few chapters and they published it as a “slim volume” about “Fens, Bogs and Swamps” in their historic as well as their scientific and aesthetic senses or significance and I don’t know which aspect gets more coverage.

‘m not sure who the book is aimed at – is it for high school students or general public adults with some background in the subject? The footnotes are inadequate if the reader is supposed to be an historical or scientist – they’re fine for a business major. There are no graphics and that would be a huge improvement because this is visual stuff! (So check the internet for some good pictures.)

On the plus side I feel like I learned a lot about the wetlands of the world and how they’re needed for proper balance of nature, homes to so many species, carbon storage for our excess. They are NOT wasteland to be viewed only for their developmental capabilities.

I was somewhat disappointed in my first reading because it really didn’t seem like a very good science or history book. Okay – so it’s not a science or a history book as I had thought. This time I realized it’s not supposed to be that from the outset and tried to appreciate it for what it is.

Mitch McDeere, John Grisham’s protagonist for the 1991 legal thriller, The Firm (1991), is back in Memphis to check on a possible pro-bono death penalty case. This novel, The Exchange, is # 2 in the series, and takes place in 2005 with Mitch employed by an upscale law firm in New York and living a good life there with his small family. The pro bono case fell though and his past seems behind him so he goes to see an old friend who was also involved and is living nearby. The reader gets a bit of a refresher. 

The Exchange 
By John Grisham 
11/2023  
Read by Edoardo Ballerini; 9h 1m
Rating: B+  / International thriller  

Now, in 2005 (book’s time frame), Muammar Gaddafi is the military dictator of Libya with more than one group of terrorists doing his bidding whether it’s a beheading or a kidnapping or robbery – and yes, he and the country need money. Gaddafi likes the fame and wants to be seen in the newspapers. His people kidnap the adult daughter of a prominent partner in Mitch’s firm and hold her for ransom.  Things get tense when the demand is for a LOT of money and Mitch’s wife has to help bring the matter to a close.

This book was okay, but I loved the legal thrillers Grisham used to write. Now he seems different  This might have been written by a much lesser author.

This book was so compelling I just wanted to lose myself in it and just skip the jigsaw puzzle or whatever in front of me  (like crocheting while listening to the radio – not a biggie).

What the Dead Know:
Learning About Life as a New York City
Death Investigator 
by Barbara Butcher; 2023 (288 p)
Read by author- 9h 47m = 
Rating: 9.5: true crime – memoir 

I found it available at the library, it looked promising, and the narrator wasn’t too bad; so I grabbed it. A True Crime memoir?  Okay.

I had some doubts until in Chapter 3, my enjoyment picked up dramatically due to the humor.  And the pace and tension stayed right up there. This is NOT a mystery.  It’s the story of a woman’s life from being a drunk to AA to finding herself employed in the medical examiner’s office in New York City.  Person-ally, I’m usually allergic to detailed descriptions of body parts and this woman was a medical examiner so that usually comes with the job. 

Also, I’m not a big fan of authors reading their own books, but with this one, except for the sample, I didn’t even take much note except that she was obviously not a professional reader/actor. Then, at about  20%, I realized she was the perfect narrator for her memoir; her voice made it even more real.

Barbara Butcher was in her early 30s when she sobered up and went through rehab including some employment counseling. She was fairly well educated so she landed a job in the New York City Medical Examiner’s office and loved it from day 1. She wanted to succeed and worked hard and over the next twenty-two years learned how to do every part of the job.  

And it’s fascinating – forensics has always interested me because of the tie-in to the whole legal system from cop-shop and 1st responders to death row and examining the trajectory of blood splatters, the DNA of hair samples, and the arrangement of body parts. It’s often very much like a puzzle to be solved.  And Butcher deals with everything from natural deaths due to old age or heart attack to vicious double serial killers and what all they do.

It’s intense from page 1 on.   

Ahhh….True Crime – a book to relax with – (maybe?) – but I might fall asleep – 

“The causes of their deaths was either calamity or overwhelming force.”  So said the original Russian government report of 1959 about the violent and bloody deaths of 9 young hikers in the Urals . 

Don’t Go There: 
A Solution to the Dyatlov Pass Mystery,
by Svetlana Oss: 2015
Read by Chloe Cannon: 5h 47m
Rating: 7.5 / True Crime (historical) 

But actually, the truth and reality of the deaths might never be known.  Avalanche? … on such a low angled slope? That wasn’t even discussed as a possibility at the time.  Now it’s more like a possible snow slab which slides rather than rolls? Or maybe some conspiracy of a duplicitous group like the KGB is correct?  Or maybe local natives with sacred lands got murderously enraged?  And there’s always the fire accidentally caused by the hikers themselves?  Who knows?  

This all happened in 1959, but was never resolved until Moscow concluded a new investigation in 2020.  It was called for because the Russian people were so curious – like our JFK murders. 

What exactly happened? Nine highly qualified and experienced Russian trekkers associated with a skiing and hiking club from a local polytechnic university decided to walk across the Urals.  This would earn them their level 3 proficiency rating – (the highest).  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Their trek would involve about 200 miles of snow and ice and it would take about 2 weeks or so.  The leader, 23-year old Ivan Dyatlov (deceased with the others), for whom the expedition was named as were several memorials since then. The group started out with 8 other hiker/skiers, but one went home due to illness, so there were only 7 others, 5 males and 2 females plus Ivan. They were all killed “either calamity or overwhelming force,” according to official sources at the time. 

Over the years … er … decades, many theories have been advanced, from avalanches and aliens to Indigenous peoples of the Urals, to a disastrous but accidental fire to … the most recent theory I know of is concerns the movie “Frozen (2015). Between that, a few scientists, and other experts, it’s possible the mystery is now solved – ??? (Only 60 years here …) 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/jan/03/revisited-how-a-disney-movie-helped-solve-a-decades-old-adventure-mystery-podcast

So here’s a little starter-pack of web-sites to get you on your way catching up with the internet: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/jan/03/revisited-how-a-disney-movie-helped-solve-a-decades-old-adventure-mystery-podcast

Years ago I heard about this incident and found it quite an interesting puzzle actually and the incident felt familiar even now, 20 years later, when I read the blurbs for this 2015 book. I probably remember it from a longer newspaper or magazine article which didn’t have a solid conclusion, but did point toward a preferred resolution. 

 I used the “category” of “True Crime/ historical” because this event occurred in 1959 and that makes it out of the actual memory of most writers today – 50 years is usually used these days.

This is an excellent site explaining a couple theories and has a very helpful YouTube video which clarifies things a LOT! This book has quite a lot of detailed information to fill in the basics of which I had a vague memory. And there’s more and more and more online.

The indigenous people of the Ural area, the Mansi and Oss are suspected by one group of amateur armchair sleuths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansi_people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident
Pretty extensive 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/jan/03/revisited-how-a-disney-movie-helped-solve-a-decades-old-adventure-mystery-podcast
Yup – even the Guardian.

https://dyatlovpass.com/theories
A LOT of material and some good photos

https://kit10phish.wordpress.com/2023/07/
Don’t forget the fireballs –

https://www.norwegianamerican.com/dyatlov/

And here’s an excerpt from the book:

“Solving the Dyatlov Pass Mystery” in the Moscow Times: 
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2015/03/29/russian-souvenirs-make-up-to-500-profit-online-despite-political-faceoff-a45248

(The link looks weird but I copied it from