Becky's Books –

Oh my -this book has it all from hairpin plot twists and some steep foreshadowing to almost schmaltzy sentiment (but I said “almost”), and very contemporary themes this book also veers from heart-breaking to  -warming exuberance. 

Beartown 
By Fredrik Bachman 
Translated by Neil Smith 
2022 / 
Read by Marin Ireland 21h 22m 
Rating: 8.5 / 21st Century fiction 
(3rd in the Beartown series)

The series takes place in a small Swedish village named Bear Town which is situated way north of Stockholm. The thing to do in Beartown is play hockey – it’s the town’s passion.  And their arch-rival is just up the road in Hed 

Winners is the third book in the Beartown series by Fredrik Backman.  Backman is Swedish author who gained some fame, in the US anyway, for A Man Called Ove back in 2013.  Since then he’s produced 7 more novels, 6 available in the US, plus 2 novellas.  I’ve read most of them.  This series opened with Beartown which was followed by Us Against Them and now Winners.   I think it’s important to read these books in order as there’s a main plot which moves sequentially through all three which are both heart-breaking and -warming in equal measure. I think I’d almost rather call it a trilogy  

Many of the characters from the first book have stuck around in Beartown, which featured the violent rape of a lovely and promising high school junior by the hero of the hockey team but because relationships in very small towns can get complex, that gets very twisty. In the second book, Us Against Them, the towns become quite divided (and mean-spirited) while the young people have to grow up anyway- many have serious problems.  There are all kinds and it really feels like a bunch of “homies.”

In Memory of Memory: A Romance
 by Maria Stepanova
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
2019 / 2021 (Eng US) – 324 pages
Read by Inga Tudor 14h 46m
Rating:  9.5 / 21st historical fiction 
Short List for Booker International 2021 
(Both read and listened)  

This book, Stepanova’s 5th, was published in Russia and in Europe back in 2019 but it took awhile for it to get to US and English markets. It was on the 2021 Booker Prize Short List and was chosen for the October 2022 read by the Booker Prize reading group.  I bought it a few months ago when I found both audible and Kindle versions on sale.  

At first I was really disappointed. What the ???? –  but I kept going.  I rarely quit a book if I’ve bought it although I occasionally  return them.  Is this fiction or what? It feels more like a nonfiction essay.  And so it goes for quite a long time although there is a rather clever set-up.  Our protagonist is in her aunt’s apartment to clean it out after her death. There she finds piles and stacks of photos and postcards and letters and diary entries and newspaper clippings covering almost the bulk of her aunt’s life – almost 100 years, Unsorted, unorganized, un”arranged.”

She starts in to sort them, but gets interested and remembers quite lot. This is a large family of Jews living in Russia with the story beginning before WWII. They are workmen and grandmas and artists and poets and professors and doctors and so on. The times are of revolution and Nazism and pogroms and war. There is a huge cultural change with Stalin but also with new poets and novels as well as science and music.  “What is to be done?”  This is a book of social, intellectual and cultural history as lived by one family and a multitude of changes.

I suppose I was about 1/3 through when the took off on me and left me enthralled – and loving it.  This will likely make my Best of Year list in historical fiction –  this and The Books of Jacob ~ by Olga Tokarczuk. 

It’s about memory – remembering memory and how we remember.- and what and why. The subtitle is “a Romance” so it’s not all sad.

These books are basically just like the TV show from back in the 1980s-‘90s.  They’re good mysteries but there’s often a shot of humor there, too. The first “author” listed on the cover is Jessica Fletcher, the fictional author-character in the book and the actual writer is whomever is listed as the co-author, in this case Jon Land.  Land took over from Donald Bain when Bain passed away in 2017. That happened at book 48, but there have been a few other writers.  I’ve read some of Bain’s books and some of Land’s,  but only a handful in all. These don’t have to be read in chronological order to make sense of them because the overarching trajectory moves so slowly and very little changes.  Still, it would enhance the whole effect if you did. There are 53 episodes/books as of today, with at least 3 more planned. 

The Murder of Twelve 
by Jessica Fletcher and Jon Land
 2020
Read by Laural Merlington 8h 3m
Rating: B+ (for enjoyment) / amateur sleuth 
(#51 in Murder She Wrote series)

These books are basically just like the TV show from back in the 1980s-‘90s.  They’re good mysteries but there’s often a shot of humor there, too. The first “author” listed on the cover is Jessica Fletcher, the fictional author-character in the book and the actual writer is whomever is listed as the co-author, in this case Jon Land.  Land took over from Donald Bain when Bain passed away in 2017. That happened at book 48, but there have been a few other writers.  I’ve read some of Bain’s books and some of Land’s,  but only a handful in all. These don’t have to be read in chronological order to make sense of them because the overarching trajectory moves so slowly and very little changes.  Still, it would enhance the whole effect if you did. There are 53 episodes/books as of today, with at least 3 more planned. 

Anyway,The Murder of Twelve is a kind of take-off of a popular Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot) mystery, “And Then There Were None” (1940). These are “amateur sleuth who-done-it” mysteries so they’re not usually too cozy. Yes, The Murder of Twelve is also similar to The Guest List by Lindsay Foley from just last year.  

People may be coming to Cabot Cove for a fancy wedding, but a blizzard is also en route to create havoc  And a killer is on his way, too. It’s up to Jessica, along with her long time friends Seth and Mort to figure out who is doing what to whom before another one shows up dead. 

I’ve wanted to read this probably ever since a new translation was released in 1995.  It’s the story of the ruination of the Trotta family due to unmerited military honors and elevation to the nobility. This all happens at the same time that the Hungarian-Austrian Empire, under Franz Joseph I who is killed by assassination,  collapses (between our Civil War and WWI).  

The Radetzky March
by Joseph Roth (tr Joachim Neugroschel)
2032 /-
Read by James Anderson Foster 14h 27m
Rating – 10 / classic historical fiction 

It reminds me in a way of Buddenbrooks and I see I’m not the only one to make that connection. The stories take place in the same pre-WWI era and are generally about 3 generations of a family which rose to glory and riches but then fall with the third generation (and it was called the Buddenbrooks effect for a few decades).  

In The Radetzky March, Joseph Trotta, a excellent Austrian infantryman of rural peasant background. saves the life of Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, by throwing him to the ground and getting a bullet in his own back for his efforts. Trotta recovers from his wounds which darned near killed him, but finds himself knighted and promoted to Captain. So now he’s got a new life, too.  He and his family are promoted to the nobility.  

He and his family are nobility in title only.They were not “to the manor born.”  The truth is that Trotta’s son and grandson don’t have a clue how to lives  which have been circumscribed for generations in other families of similar title. So life for grandson Carl Joseph (our protagonist) is awkward and there are funny situations as well as deadly. 

The 1st situation involves a good friend of Carl who is doctor and his wife.  He ends up moving to another base.  The 2nd situation involves a very old man oil

Franz Trotta, Joseph’s son, and Carl Joseph Trotta try their hardest but courtly duties, manners and women definitely confuse them and it all comes to nothing- maybe.

I found this novella on sale at Audible. I guess  I’m trained to buy Women’s Murder Club books as the next one emcees up.  LOL!  The last one was really gross though. Too much graphic fem-jeopardy. But apparently The Trial comes between #s 17 and 18 which is the grizzly one.  

The Trial by James Patterson and Maxine Praeto
2020
read by January LaVoy 2h 26m
rating – A / crime novella
Women’s Murder Club #17.5

Picking up on novella # 17.5 (a “, The Trial, Joe and Lindsay separated, but never filed for divorce and now they’re living separately, but I know that in #18 they’ll be together again.  (And I’ll be all set for #23 which doesn’t hit the stands until May – I started with #18 and went back to #1 then skipping to 4 for Paetro’s writing and continued. This is my last catch-up book unless I find some other unexpected novella. 

Anyway – it looks like Kingfisher, the arch-criminal who apparently got away in an earlier novel is on the loose. This means plenty of blood and mayhem.  

This was recommended during a reading group discussion, maybe I should say that I was pointed toward this book during a discussion as I don’t know if he ever read it or not.  Anyway,  I started out very excited and that stayed with me until maybe 2/3rds when my interest waned. I moved to another book (a group read for October) and came back to this one because I did want to finish. 

How Minds Change:
The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion
by David McRaney
Read by author – 9h 33m
Rating – 6 / careers (?) 
(both read and listened)

Well that explains it – Audible has this categorized as a “career success” book and when I got to the end of it I realized that’s exactly what it was.  That said, the book starts out great with topics like are street canvassing and Westboro and arguing, sometimes theoretical other times getting source material like a journalist. – right to the end though, there are parts which are quite good.

In a way, I think the title itself is misleading because by the end McRaney is talking about working with clients and a couple of therapists who organized what he, McRaney, was thinking into a “technique” to use with clients and wrote a paper about it – (Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch)

So the book is actually for psychologists to use in getting their clients to think the “right” way.  Nope – I don’t like this. Clients are vulnerable and need to be treated with respect. Clients pay psychologists to direct their thinking.  I’m not going to be “directing the discussion towards …” with my friends! The rating got lowered.  

The Introduction here talks so much about abundance and Wilczek says “The the world is large. There’s plenty of room for humans to thrive in and plenty left over for us to admire from a distance” I thought it was going to have a religious bend to it. Wrong – but that’s the mood throughout the book -the universe is a source of wonder,  beauty and mystery to him and he writes like he’s in perpetual in awe. But although the text sometimes veers into religious or spiritual sounding prose – he’s not a believer except maybe pantheism, “a doctrine which identifies God with the universe, or regards the universe as a manifestation of God.” (Google) 

Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality 
by Frank Wilczek 
2021
Read by Sean Patrick Hopkins 7h 31m
Rating – 8.5 / science – physics

The book is about physics from basic mechanical physics to quantum physics.  Wilczek calls it material reality and says he measures it, observes what it does, thinks about it.  The author is a theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate – one of America’s finest scientists.  

“A gorgeous and inviting overview of the fundamental facts of physical reality.” —Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now

I started out really not liking this book much at all, but after about half of it I started picking up on what he was talking about and the way he was talking – iow, I got it and got into it. Starting with the introduction Wilcek talks about being “born again” but all he means is being struck by the wonder and awe of the universe as he was.

The style is a bit literary and he can digress some and get chatty. Again, after I got used to it that was okay.

The Chapters:

Part I. What There Is

• Chapter 1. There’s Plenty of Space
• Chapter 2. There’s Plenty of Time
• Chapter 3. There Are Very Few Ingredients
• Chapter 4. There Are Very Few Laws
• Chapter 5. There’s Plenty of Matter and Energy

Part II. Beginnings and Ends

• Chapter 6. Cosmic History is an Open Book
• Chapter 7. Complexity Emerges
• Chapter 8. There’s Plenty More to See
• Chapter 9. Mysteries Remain
• Chapter 10. Complementary Is Mind-Expanding

Wikipedia calls The Fortune Men a “non-fiction novel,” and the author did a pretty good job of combining the verified research of nonfiction with the imagination of fiction. I didn’t quite love it, but almost. Nadifa Mohamed’s 4th novel is a Booker Prize Short Lister for 2022.

The Fortune Men
By Nadifa Mohamed
2021 /
Read by Hugh Quarshie 10h 31m
Rating 8.5 / historical fiction (true crime)

Somalia was once a colony of Great Britain and many Somalians traveled to Britain as seamen settling in the Somaliland section of Cardiff, Wales. Locals called it Tiger Bay. By WWI settlers from more than 50 countries made their homes there, working the docks and related seaport jobs. The influence of Somalis, Yemenis and Greeks is still felt today.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butetown

One night in 1952 Mahmood Hussein Mattan, a very bright but illiterate Somali immigrant, was arrested for the murder of a local Jewish woman. He was later convicted and hung as capital punishment. That conviction stood until 1998 when it was found to be in gross error. (I think it doesn’t spoil the story to know that – for me it enhanced the tale.) I believe Mattan was the last person to be receive the penalty of “death by hanging” at that prison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmood_Hussein_Mattan

I enjoyed the first 50 pages or so and then the whole thing got rather stale for awhile. I don’t know when it picked up, but somehow something very human entered the story and I just stayed with it becoming more and more involved.

For years I’ve read a lot of nonfiction history and true crime. This is both of those plus the very literary fiction of it. It’s not a mystery or a thriller but there is a lot of courtroom drama which I believe was taken from the records.

I doubt it will win the Booker Prize but it is worthy.

FWIW: “The shortlist includes the shortest book and oldest author ever to be nominated, three second novels, authors from five countries and four continents, three independent publishers and several titles inspired by real events. The winner will be announced at the Roundhouse in London on October 17.“
From https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2022

I read this a few days ago but didn’t get a post put up about it. I’m only 1 book shy of being caught up on the Women’s Murder Club series. Then it will be one book a year as long as it holds out.

17th Suspect
By James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
2018 / 
Read by January LaVoy 
Rating: A- / procedural thriller  

I’m charging through a couple of these Women’s Murder Club books and I’ll be all caught up.  The 17th Suspect is very similar in structure to the priors in the series.  There are two plot lines going almost from the start.  The first one is a young man accusing and suing his young and beautiful supervisor for rape.  She says they were role playing and it was all his idea in the first place. Yuki is the prosecuting attorney.  

In the second plot thread Lindsay Boxer has been told by a woman who lives on or near the streets that there have been shootings in the homeless community.  

The action alternates between the plots with occasional scenes for tension relief.  I really do enjoy the crime plots more than the romance which to me is an adequate tension reliever and I’ve grown fond of the characters.

I’d promised myself I’d go back and pick this one up and I forgot but then I found the book again and read it anyway. And I found that note to self even later.  

Unlucky 13
by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro   
2016 / 
Read by January LaVoy
Rating: A- / crime procedural 

There’s some gory crime in it but it’s exciting. 1. This time we have a female serial killer – she’s certifiably nuts. 2. in the second plot people are exploding from because they eat something from a certain chain fast food place. 3. A cruise ship up by Alaska has been taken over by pirates and lots of people die. 4. Finally, a woman who is not nuts but is pretending she is, has killed her husband in front of their kids.  Stuff happens fast.  

The crime plots here are great but there’s too much romance. 

Ahhh…. This is a legal thriller but almost as much a courtroom drama.  It starts out as a thriller but pretty quickly changes into legal matters.  A large science museum is bombed and after he confesses, a suspect is arrested at the scene.  Yuki Castellano is asked to return to the DA’s office to prosecute this case.  Meanwhile, Lindsay Boxer who happened to be at the scene arrested the suspect while her husband was very badly injured.  

16th Seduction 
by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro 
2017 / 
Read by January Levoy 7h 1m
Rating – A+ /  legal and police thriller  

Meanwhile there have been a series of of strange apparently random killings in which the victim appears to simply drop dead without cause. A needle mark on the victim’s buttocks appears to be the only sign so it looks like there was some disappearing drug injected to create a heart attack. Murder seems to have been the intent.  

The plot threads intertwine to an extent and there are the ever-present personal relationships to deal with.  Lots of deaths.  All the women are involved – Lindsay, Claire, Yuki and Cindy.  

How in the world did a nice girl like me get involved with James Patterson?  I loathed his books (having read 1 one time) but The Women’s Murder Club drew my attention for some reason.  I tried a holiday themed book, 19th Christmas, at holiday time a few years ago. That was pretty good so I tried some others and ended up going back to #1 and not liking the books until Paetro was authoring them with Patterson, 4th of July.  

15th Affair 
by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro 
2016 / 
Read by January Levoy 7h 22m
Rating – A+ / thriller procedural 

Meanwhile I’ve been reading the new ones as they come out.  Somehow I’ve been able to keep track of what’s happening in the story arc of the series that is with the private lives of Lindsay, Yuki and the others.  (If you followed that paragraph you can tell I’ve only got 3 books left and I’ll. Be all caught up. Those last books are #s 16, 17 and 18. I may get in a hurry like I did with the Slough House books and indulge in some binge reading.

These are procedural thrillers which means the action follows law enforcement, in this case the San Francisco police department, as they track down suspects and pursue them. Because the stories include the medical and legal teams those aspects are sometimes included and there is also a crime reporter who is a regular member of a regular group of women who call themselves the “women’s murder club.”  

It’s probably a good idea to read the books in order starting with book 1, but the first 3 were too unrelentingly gritty for me.  When Paetro joined Patterson they seemed to lighten up. Also, I got annoyed with the romance in the first 10 or so books, but I knew that there was better stuff to come because I’d started with #19.  Sure enough, after these ladies get their love lives settled down the focus turns to more thriller/procedural matters and that’s why I read them, but I really enjoy the characters.

And about this book, 15th Affair. True to form, it’s almost immediate and unrelenting but expertly crafted tension and bloody violence. There are breaks where “the club” gets together to eat or drink or just chat, support each other, etc. I’m not sure I like this aspect either – “the girls” should not be discussing Lindsay’s current cases even if she does set some limits.  

Lindsay’s personality is very similar to the male cops who don’t take directions well.  Harry Bosch (Michael Connelly), Dave Robicheaux (James Lee Burke),  Joe Pickett (CJ Box) – made even Cormoran Strike – they do “what needs to be done, ” by golly – heh.  

15th Affair is one of the better books so far.  The cases are interesting – a plane bombing and a murder in a hotel room, Joe (Lindsay’s husband) goes missing. Enjoy a few hours of pure escape.  

I wish I had better things to say about this book.  I’m glad I read it because I really do enjoy true crime and historical true crime can be great. Richard White really did his homework, the book bristles with research.  And it is interesting but it’s also so detailed it gets a bit tedious.  

Who Killed Jane Stanford? 
By Richard White 
2022 / 
Read by Christopher P. Brown 11h 28m
Rating: 7.5  / historical true crime 

In 1905 Jane Stanford lived with a couple of her household servants in a San Francisco mansion and a Palo Alto estate. Since 1893 she had been the widow of Leland Stanford a millionaire industrialist and California politician and she was also the grieving mother of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr. who died of typhoid fever at the age of 15.

Where Jane and Leland had spent their lives mourning and immortalizing to Leland Jr. She was now left alone to take care of things and Stanford University came first. She had her own way of doing things which included a lot of religion and other high minded activities of which spiritualism was one. She was devoted to the continued existence (to her anyway) of both husband and son.  She rule Stanford in all matters and her affairs were kept in order by lawyers.

Then she was poisoned. It failed. She was poisoned again, this time while she and her company were in Hawaii. This time it worked. But who did it? Because it was hushed up so well the truth has never been certain but White takes us through the possibilities, their opportunities and motives which lead us right to the killer.

I’m a total fan of the No 1 Ladies Detective agency books!   I’ve been reading them as they came out in the US since 2002 or something.  This is one of the few authors I tend to buy no matter what I’m in the middle of – even a Cormoran Strike book – which is what happened.  

A Song of Comfortable Chairs: 
No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency  
by Alexander McCall Smith 
Read by Lisett Lecat 9h 52m
Rating –  10 / for love and enjoyment 

These books are so good for my spirits and sometimes I laugh out loud and that happened more than a few times in c

The series is about gentle people in Botswana doing and concerned with other mostly very good people but often flawed.  They’re concerned with things like manners, propriety and Botswanan traditions coming up against the themes of the 21st century like many women’s issues, city life, Christian ethics, marriage, going on into corruption, smuggling, etc. These are NOT murder mysteries in the conventional sense of the genre.  

Precious Ramatswe is the protagonist while a woman named Grace Makutsi is her kind of side-kick – her assistant at the detective agency which Precious started in the first book.  The series is more about how those two get on resolving personal issues in life than it is about any crimes although that’s what binds the stories.  

The setting is Gabarone, the capital of Botswana, which has its own contemporary problems of rime, disease, immigration, corruption, etc.  

 And I came to love Lisett Lecat as the reader/narrator. She was the voice of Mmes Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi etc.  She was replaced for #s 21 and 22 but she’s back for #23!   Yay!   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No._1_Ladies%27_Detective_Agency

Loved this book!  It’s the best of the lot in the Cormoran Strike series so far (imo).  This is understanding that yes, at over 1200 pages it is too long. I think it could have been cut to 950 or so, but only if they leave the parts I particularly like alone. LOL!   

The Ink Black Heart 
by Robert Galbraith
2022 / 1274 pages
Read by Robert Glenister 32h 42m
Rating – A++/8 literary crime
# 6 in Cormoran Strike series
(Both read and listened)

Also there are so many characters I had to use the cast listing from the Wikipedia entry. But the main plot threads were as full and twisty as ever and the ongoing saga of Strike and Robin continues through all the upheavals.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ink_Black_Heart

I both listened to the audio recording and read the Kindle version. The Audio was fine (Glenister is a master reader),  but I also really enjoyed checking what I’d read with the Kindle.  

The Kindle version has problems with the fonts which get wonky in the chat-room scenes where the text uses some kind of photo for the pages. So the text itself can’t be enlarged but the page itself can be. Also in those chat-room scenes, the text itself is broken into two or three columns and frequently goes for 5 pages or more. What you have to do to make sense of this is to read one column all the way through the pages to the end of the scene, then go to the second column and read down that one all the way through.  If you don’t do this the second column on a page won’t make any sense. The third column only appears on the pages as necessary.  It took me awhile to figure this out and then with a bit of practice, I was happy. But during those pages it was really nice to have the Audible.  

The next thing is that there are a LOT of characters.  The Wikipedia link above has a list of them. So does the fan-site:   

http://strikefans.com/the-ink-black-heart-characters/

Enjoy!  

Sad to say I skipped The Women’s Mystery Club #13 – I’ll have to catch it later.  I only discovered this after I was half-way through 14th Deadly Sin and I really didn’t want to go backwards.  

Fortunately #14 doesn’t have as much romance in it and Lindsay has now been a mommy for long enough to be able to get on with her job which is why I read the books.  

14th Deadly Sin
James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
2015
Read by January LeVoy
Rating: A / procedural -legal thriller

The Women’s Murder Club is simply a group of women friends who all have ties to the criminal justice system in San Francisco.  There’s Lindsay Boxer, the protagonist, the star of the novels who is employed as a San Francisco Detective of some rank.  Yuki is the young Japanese-Hispanic-American lawyer of the Club, and is prosecuting the city for the wrongful arrest and jail-house death of a mentally slow but very good young man.  Cindy is a crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and has just had a book published. They each have boyfriends or husbands. Claire is black woman, large and very competent. 

The 14th Deadly Sin gets quite gritty and violent but it’s a good tangled plot. The writing is plain so the reader can keep his mind on the plot and the character development which are very good. This is really a women’s murder mystery series intended for women readers the personal lives of the main characters are typical of many romance novels. (And I read the books for the crime procedural and legal parts – not the romance. (I tend to be allergic to romance but I tolerate some.) 

First off, 12th of Never starts slow and has a lot of tension breaks to delve into the side plots or interests (?). Second, there is just too much “women’s interest” &. romance in it for my tastes. The tension breakers go along with the overarching personal home lives of the protagonists. There’s too much new mommy-hood here.  I love the Women’s Murder Club for the plots, the general characters on their own, and the blow-out thriller parts.  I don’t tolerate romance well unless it’s kept to a minimum and either absolutely peripheral to the story or central. An example which is great is the Dave Robicheau series by James Lee Burke. Mostly so far the Women’s Murder Club has been fine, but in 12th of Never it’s over-the-top when the personal lives took over. The minus sign in my rating is because of that.  

12th of Never 
by James Patterson and Maxine Praeto 
2012
Read by January Lavoy; 7h 6m
Rating: A- / crime-thriller 

But I thoroughly enjoyed the crimes and procedurals and twisty plot development involved. As usual there are several  plot lines which twist around each other but never really even touch each other. In the 12th of Never there’s a trial going on which involves a murder and a kidnapping. There are a series of murders which are predicted by a man who says he is clairvoyant.  There’s a guy in jail who is scheming after Lindsay I believe he’s a carry-over from the 11th book.  

Overall this book kept me hooked and listening carefully.