Becky's Books –

I was a bit put off by this book at first.  I had a rather dramatic and terrifying experience a few years ago when it took a longer time for me to come out of general anesthesia than is common. It took me 2+ weeks before I was mentally stable and 5 before I was actually released by the hospital and convalescent home.  The experience was scary and it scared me to even think much about. My doctors and various places on the internet said it was not uncommon – okay fine, But it was still scary and Being You turned out to be quite helpful and hopeful.  

Being You:
A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
2021 / 342 pages
read by author
Rating: 10 / biology-psychology

The way Seth introduces his subject in the Prologue put me back in that awful place so I decided to skip this book on my reading group’s list. But I didn’t like just skipping a book, so I picked it a few weeks later, when discussion time actually came and to my surprise the Prologue wasn’t as bad as I’d felt the first time. And Chapter 1 was better and the book never became scary again, in fact, it was comforting in several ways. The whole thing was very interesting, perhaps even more so because of my experience with anesthesia.

The book isn’t a light read by any means, and the first few chapters are some of the most rigorous. In fact, I read and listened to the book at least two times because the new vocabulary gets confusing. I may still have another go at some point this month.

What Seth is doing is presenting the science of today about consciousness and the chapters are developed cumulatively so it’s better to treat the work as one work instead of skipping around picking chapters which seem interesting. He’s talking about self-awareness type of self-consciousness, not the “someone’s watching me” kind of self-consciousness.

The subject goes from the basic consciousness of organisms to the scientific definitions and findings about human consciousness and this includes types and what constitutes consciousness. Toward the end Seth goes into Artificial Intelligence and animal consciousness/

Seth keeps the style lightish with quotes and anecdotes throughout as appropriate. And if you’re listening to the book he narrates it better than almost any other author who reads his own work. Also, there’s a pdf file to provide various graphics, there really are quite a few. And as an added bonus, he can be pretty funny.

The Footnotes include source material as well as further information related to the subject and the text includes a number of links to outside sources or the author tells you how to find them.

I really feel like I learned a whole lot of very interesting material from this book but some of it is still quite speculative. I still won’t have surgery again though – if it happened once it’s almost more like to happen again, I’m definitely a senior, considered elderly by some, so there are several reasons it’s likely to reoccur. And what if I got stuck that way?

I’ve read all of Eskens’ novels and enjoyed them tremendously and then I discovered I had not read this one.  I have no idea why not but I think it may have been because I thought it was more of a war book.  It’s not about war.  It’s about 2 brothers who are both police detectives.  Alex, the younger one, is very competitive while Max, the older one, tries to be accommodating but the younger one gets in trouble at work and is trying to clear his name without this big brother’s help.  

The Guise of Another 
by Allen Eskens 2015
Read by Jonathan Yen 9h 21m
Rating –  B/ crime-procedural-thriller

It’s a solid police procedural/thriller with some twists.  It’s good but not outstanding in any way. I’m looking forward to the next Eskens book, Forsaken Country, which is due out later this month (Sept). As luck would have it (I didn’t plan this, honest) is about the elder brother from The Guise of Another and a chase to save a small boy from his dangerous father.  

Yes, Forgotten Peoples was even better the second time around.  I made better use of the organization and the general thrust of the book.  I understood the “lack of” source notes better. References to ancient documents such as the Bible are given within the text and otherwise see “Further Reading” which is admirably done.  

Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World 
by Philip Matyszak 
2020 / 398 pages
Read by Michael Page 8h 3m
Rating: 10 / ancient history of the west
(Both read and listened)

Again, it’s a marvelously well organized, very nicely written, and beautifully presented book.  Matyszak looks at 40 different Middle Eastern and European civilizations ranging from the Akkadians of Mesopotamia to the Hyksos of Egypt, the Jutes of Britain, and the Hephthalites of northern India. And he covered them more or less chronologically between the years 2300 BC and the 6th Century AD. He discusses who these people were, what they did and what they bequeathed to the West.

 It’s fascinating and I actually read parts of this book several times with a bit more sinking in each time. 

I’ve read this twice now (see https://mybecky.blog/2022/08/07/the-employees-by-olga-ravn/) and actually this last time should count as a third time because I kind of studied the book, taking copious notes. There is so much that is striking about this novel. .

The Employees:  
A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century 
 by Olga Ravn 
2022 – 
Read by Hannah Curtis 2h 31m
Rating – 9.5 / literary sci-fi novella 

Taking place on a space ship with a large crew (employees) of both humans and humanoids Ravn explores what it means to be human vs humanoid.  The humans were brought there from Earth at some point while the humanoids were “born” (hatched?) there.  The humans miss the Earth and their prior lives while the humanoids are barely discovering what it means to be alive.  And there are the “objects” which they picked up on their travels. These are supposedly not even alive but they do seem to have strange effects on the employees. 

The book is comprised of short usually 1 or 2-page numbered “chapters”  or “statements,” in which the employees are being interviewed by someone from staff. One number is repeated – 054, but she has what she calls an “add-on.” Also, from the interviews themselves, it seems like she has other interviews with other numbers.  The interviews are with both humans and humanoids and slowly the reader is able to piece together the difference between them and then discern what is going on in the spaceship with its humans, humanoids and objects. Read carefully, I noticed and understood so much more on my second reading.

It’s a beautiful, haunting, evocative, sensory book of yearnings.  

I’m not that fond of domestic thrillers. I prefer police procedurals, who-done-its, amateur sleuthing and legal thrillers. This one sounded different and quite interesting. I’ve read a couple of Linwood Barclay books and he writes okay. 

*****
Take Your Breath Away
by Linwood Barclay 
2022 / 
Read by a cast 10h 1m
Rating: B+ / crime-suspense 
*****

The plot is original and twisty. A woman who disappeared 6 years prior, and actually was thought to have been murdered, shows up back in town. Andrew, her husband, was heavily suspected of the murder, but now has another woman living with him. He’s very confused but determined. The murder victim’s relatives are now involved with their mother dying.  And the woman who lives with Andrew has a troubled brother who is orphaned and also lives with them.

Meanwhile, there is a police officer, Marissa Hardy, who seems to be a bit too aggressive in her pursuit of Andrew and whatever else she smells going on. I really disliked her – Barclay is quite good with characters.

This was recommended by a fellow 4-Mystery-Addicts group member whose tastes often jive with mine.  Also, I read the 1st of this series, Conviction, and this, #2, is the latest book.  The novels feature “Anna and Fin” as kind of amateur detectives (in loose senses of the term). Anna listens to true crime podcasts and gets involved.  The first one started her off, when a crime pod-cast she listened to dealt with her own prior life. The second in involves other people a lot of other people and places.

Confidence 
by Denise Mina
Read by Rona Morrison and Jonathan Keeble 
7h 29m
Rating:  A / crime-thriller 

Actually, it involves lots of other people and places and things like a guy from South Africa and a Hungarian girl, a defrocked Catholic priest, and a box or casket which supposedly contains items from the cruxifixction itself.  That casket, along with the disappearances of the podcaster, are the focal points of the mystery. 

Anna and Fin travel a lot. Physically, they travel around Scotland, where they live, to Paris and Rome. Then digitally they visit all sorts of places like Hungary, Beirut and Boston.

Starting slow things get crazy-mixed up for awhile around 20%, but that clears and at about 1/3 it gets somewhat exciting.  At 1/2 it’s really interesting and at 3/4 it’s downright page-turning.  

Warning – it does deal with very unpleasant violence to self and others.  

Oh I do enjoy these novels.  There are little things which annoy me but overall they fix me when I’m mentally weary of nonfiction or literary fiction or maybe I’m just mentally weary of stress. I have no doubt I’ll finish the series but maybe not this year because I’m going at the rate of 1 or 2 books a month and I’ve got about 10 to go.  

11th Hour
by James Patterson and Maxine Praeto 
Read by January LaVoy – 6h 47m
Rating – A+ / crime thriller
(11th in Women’s Murder Club series)

Seven skulls are found in the garden of a man who was arrested, but found not guilty of killing his wife; they never found his wife’s body.  Meanwhile a vigilante of sorts is on the loose gunning for drug dealers – this might be a fellow police officer.  

And so it goes with two cases going at the same time for 6 hours 47 minutes while January LaVoy gives a masterful reading.  Plus there’s the overarching connecting plots of Lindsay Boxer and her friends as they go through life. (This is what makes it a series.) 

This is escapist, genre fiction – it’s formatted. It’s nothing special, but it gets the A from me because it’s very good at “developing” these characters and building tension. San Francisco sometimes plays higher than other times. The tension is high and higher with occasional breaks for a bit of romance (which I do NOT like).

“ It’s a racial allegory grounded in history, shrouded in mystery, and dripping with blood. An incendiary device you don’t want to put down.”- NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039434714/percival-everett-the-trees-review

The Trees
by Percival Everett
2021/ 305 pages
read by Bill Andrew Quinn 7h 43m
rating – 9 / literary-crime-satire
(both read and listened)

Another book from the Booker Prize Long List 2022 and this one is very strange. In Money, Mississippi, where most of the story takes place, a  white man is found dead next to a black man. The black man is holding the testicles of the white man in his hand. The state police are called but by the time they get there the black corpse is gone. That’s right; it disappeared.  

Then pretty quickly another white man is found dead with a black man next to him and holding the white man’s privates.  Then this black corpse also disappears. The thing is by looking at the crime photos, this black corpse seems to be the same black corpse as was found at the first murder.  

The Mississippi State Police take up investigating, but don’t get very far with the local rednecks and the sheriff isn’t at all happy to have these black State Police in town. It turns out the white shooting victims  are actually serious racists from the families who lychee young Emmitt Till back in 1955.  The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is called. 

This is when the detectives meet Mama Z, the 105-year old local collector of US lynching stories, histories, news articles. It turns out there are strange, similar murders occurring all over the country. 

The book falls into the horror, who-done-it,” fantasy genre(s) but brimming with satire and even slap-stick comedy. I can’t say that I loved it in the conventional sense of loving a book, but it’s edgy, very funny and truly original as well as being wonderfully well written. It set my thinking back a notch as it’s even somewhat shocking in this day and age. 

Molly is a maid at a luxury hotel. Because of who she is in many ways, she loves everything about her job and being in that environment. She and her guardian grandmother were quite poor until she got this job. But although she loves cleaning she says she really has no friends. She lived with her beloved grandmother but Grandma died 9-months prior to the story’s opening.  Molly appears to have Asperger’s – or is on the spectrum anyway.  Her grandmother had explained things to her and Molly is full of things Granny said. 

The Maid 
by Nita Prose
2022 (280 pages)
Read by Lauren Ambrose 9h 37m
Rating – 8.5 / Literary Crime

On the day the story opens Molly has found a dead man in his bed in his room. According to Molly, this was “a seismic event.” 

The very rich and handsome Charles Black and his much younger, trophy wife of two years Giselle, stay in the room about 1 week a month while Charles inspects his large real estate holdings in the city. The narrative backtracks a bit from when Molly finds the body and then it goes forward with less and less backstory as the plot moves forward

The book is a bit long for the story it carries and although I thoroughly enjoyed parts of it, and there were some wonderful twists along the way, there were other places where I actually almost nodded off.  Also there were times I felt the character of Molly slipped and showed better perception than I’m accustomed to – could be though – this is all a spectrum now.  

It’s been a long time since I read a novel which included a character with Asperger’s so I’m glad to have seen it some time ago and put a hold on it at the library. That’s where it showed up while I’d forgotten about it at Audible.  Yay!  

 The books with Asperger’s characters have often been quite fun in their own way.   The Gauguin Connection (a series) by Genevieve Ryan, The Rosie Project and sequel by Graeme Simsion, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, and Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata) are a few of my favorites.  This is a nice addition.

NPR review:
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/05/1070131496/in-the-maid-a-devoted-hotel-cleaning-lady-is-a-prime-murder-suspect

At only about 130 pages this novella made the Booker Long List for 2021 which Damon Galgut won with The Promise. The Employees is the second book by Olga Ravn, a Danish author. The premise is that in the 22nd Century a spaceship holds a workforce of both humans and humanoids who care for the objects which are in their care. It’s dystopian for sure, but with a tender sadness.

The Employees
by Olga Ravn
2021
read by Hannah Curtis 2h 31m
rating: 8.2-A / literary sci-fi –

There’s not much difference between the humans and the humanoids except that the humans can reproduce. New employees arrive at the ship regularly. They start becoming emotionally attached to the objects in different ways At some point a decision is made to record the thoughts and ideas of the employees and that’s the narrative of the book.

WIth a couple exceptions, the employees have no names and their reports are designated as being from their employee number. In some way the employees can tell the difference between the humanoids and the humans and a certain status accrues to the humans although they will die while the humanoids get “rebooted” or “upgraded.”

There is quite a lot of reference to smell and tactile elements but not so much to the visual, auditory taste sensations. Reading Group discusses this in August so I’ll likely read it again.

https://www.ndbooks.com/author/olga-ravn/

This is some great historical fiction with a crime at the center. I’d never heard of the ex-slave colonies (or maybe if I did it was a line or two back in college.)

The Kingdoms of Savannah 
by George Dawes Green 2022
Read by a cast 11h 17m
Rating: 9 – A / literary crime 

One dark and drunken night in a barroom on a moss-covered, tree lined street of Savannah, a rather dim, but good-hearted, bum-type of guy, is murdered.  He’s not quite a friend of anyone in particular, but he’s tolerated and well liked by all, even though he’s drunk more often than not.

So Morgana Musgrove, the aging but still smart and gorgeous social queen ofSavannah takes it upon herself to investigate. She’s also the proprietor of a detective agency and a domineering mother and grandmother.  With the sometimes grudging help of the family, she digs up more wormy dirt than there is in the lush, old, well-worked cotton fields. But investigating a murder can be a dangerous business, so Morgana and  her crew find trouble, an archeologist is seriously missing and the old ghosts come out to haunt. They’re very old ghosts. 

The tale starts a wee bit slow gathering the main characters and painting the setting,  but it’s interesting, so I kept reading. I’ve been to Savannah and read about it in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt as well as other places so I got hooked into this book! 

Morgana is a fierce character who loves her four children of course, but is also full of passion and flirty southern lady-ness. Still, even with all that, there’s only a whisper of a type-cast “southern” anything (imo).

Part of the story includes background on enslaved Black soldiers who, during the American Revolution, fought on the side of the British and/or escaped during that time.   

Sharper and Lewis were captured and escaped to Spanish Florida.  I had to check on this .  (Btw,  with historical fiction I’m not picky about everything being “true” – If it is, kudos to the author for his research and the inclusion.  If it’s not kudos to the author for his imagination.  Just please, incorporate it well- believably and in context (they usually do).

“The King of England’s Soldiers”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/running-from-bondage/confronting-the-power-structures/FA2F0173B2F5DE17D724521F3CD0164E

Lewis and Sharper http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/49564/7/WRAP_Lockley_The%20King%20of%20England¹s%20Soldiers.pdf

https://www.history.com/news/the-ex-slaves-who-fought-with-the-british

https://msmagazine.com/2021/07/02/slave-black-women-freedom-independence-day/

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

A couple of my reading groups post what they’ve been reading each month.  As many of the others do, I get a lot of my ideas as to what to read next from those lists. My reading of Need To Know was based on the last month’s reports at 4-Mystery Addicts.   

Need To Know 
by Karen Cleveland 
2018 / (353 pages)
Read by Mia Barron / 8h 39m
Rating: B+ / thriller-suspense

Because the characters all work at the CIA I figured this was a spy novel.  It’s not really that – not as I know spy novels anyway.  It’s a thriller/suspense of the domestic variety with some CIA activity involved. 

Matt and Vivian Miller are both employed at the agency and fall in love.  After 10 years of marriage and 4 children Vivian accidentally finds out Matt is a Russian agent.  Legally, she is supposed to report this type of thing to her superiors, but she can’t bring herself to do that because it will mean the end of life as they know it. And therein begins the suspense-thriller. 

It’s almost more of a romance suspense novel than anything as they try to preserve their family and keep everyone alive and out of jail while doing the right thing. he suspicion Vivian can’t quite get rid of festers. Their children are a prime concern.

So … it’s okay – not great – the domestic aspect is usually overridden by suspense. I’ll not be seeking out more books by this author. The narration is very good.  

I’m slowly reading my way through the Booker Prize Long List but this was on my Wish List anyway. I loved his Pulitzer winning In the Distance (see my review on this site):

Trust
by Hernan Diaz
2022 / (415 pages)
read by Eduardo Ballerini and 5 more
rating 9.5 / historical fiction
(I will be rereading this)

“Trust” is a small word but very large as a theme. There’s the noun which has to do with financial instruments and there’s the verb which is about a relationship between one person and another, an object like a car,  or a financial institution or a memoir.  Diaz does not belabor the word but it’s used in several contexts throughout the novel. It’s one of several themes including “who you trust” to add a good measure of tension. 

Yes, it’s a family saga, of sorts, but with twists, and in some ways is not too far removed from what Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead  presented the reader. 

The history includes the financial/economic history of the US between the two World Wars and using time jumps to change eras. There are only 3 main characters with just a few minor ones. In some ways it could be seen as a feminist novel.

I don’t want to say anymore out of respect for the possibility of a spoiler but I will say that there is a novel within a novel here and virtually no one is reliable, but there does seem one narrator we can “trust.”

This was on sale at Audible and it sounded better than what else I was thinking of for now at the moment. I need space between good literature and good nonfiction because they can be exhausting. The New York Times said Grave Reservations was “delightful.”  (It’s available via Kindle Unlimited, too.)

Grave Reservations  
By Cherie Priest 
2021 / (300 pages)
Read by Ulka Simone Mohanty 8h 49m
Rating B- / crime 

A police detective narrowly misses his flight out of Florida and watches it explode on the runway. A travel agent who may have psychic talents had dissuaded him from boarding.  He realizes he can use her in his current older case and they go from there.  As it happens the travel agent’s fiancé was killed a few years prior and his killer was never apprehended and that turns out to be their main case. 

The writing is mediocre with too many irrelevant metaphors. The author tries to be funny but it’s mostly the humor of 20-somethings.  Just not my cuppa. 

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story 
edited by Nicole Hannah-Jones
2021 / 539 pages
read by the authors: 16h 57m
Rating – 9 / US history 
(I read and listened and I would love to do it again but I only reread parts.
*******

I was not “happy” with this book. I got angry a few times – about different things.  I thought it was going to be a history book, but it isn’t quite that. Hannah-Jones is not an historian and neither are most of the writers who contributed to this volume. There are some entries by actual historians though. (See Sugar by Khalil Gibran Muhammad or Citizenship by Martha S. Jones and there are works by Carol Anderson and Kevin M. Kruse and Ibram X. Kendi – all real historians.)

This is not to say the contributors aren’t all fully qualified to be included in their own capacity because as far as I can tell, they certainly are. And it’s a marvelous display of talent. 

Hannah-Jones, herself, the “creator” of the tome, is an investigative reporter and she did an excellent job of organizing and editing and generally putting this volume together and getting it out there (thanks in large part to the New York Times).

There’s a lot of information in the book, and a lot of emotion, but the quality of each essay, fiction or poem depends on the author of it. Some works are a wonder, others are okay. I recognized a number of names (Nikky Finny, Ibram X. Kendi) but not many.  I know that most of the contributors are black, but certainly not all.   

What I didn’t like was the idea of a “new” history.  This is not a “new” history it’s a broadened history, more inclusive and honoring people and elements we neglected and mistreated in many ways before.  But if this is the “new history” of the United States or America (whichever you prefer) and it started in 1619, are the Natives no longer to be included as part of US history?  Both the first permanent women and the first evidence of democratic institutions occurred in Virginia that same years and I learned that before high school. (Disclaimer – my dad was a history teacher). Yes, I’m amazed at what’s in this book, but I don’t think we need to push anyone out to make room for those who are also here. 

Fwiw, I was a history major (1975) and continue to be a history buff almost 50 years later. This doesn’t make me an expert – just a very interested reader. Thank you.

One thing about procedurals is that they have to be accurate to the times.  A contemporary crime story should not have a couple of criminals being escorted from a building but taking a side trip to use the bathroom.  I know almost nothing about police procedurals but that seems like evidence that to the author,  the plot comes first.  

7th Heaven 
by James Patterson and Maxine Praeto 
2008 (396 pages)
Read by Carolyn McCormick 7h 45m
Rating:  A++ / crime procedural thriller
(# 7 in the Women’s Murder Club series)

There may be other small irregularities here, but nothing which seriously disrupts the fun of the book. It’s considered to be one of the best in the “Women’s Murder Club” series.  

The nice sweet handicapped son of a former governor has gone missing and is presumed dead, while a serial arsonist is running amok in San Francisco.  Homicide detective Lindsay Boxer is working on both cases, as usual, but it seems that the prostitute the missing boy was supposed to have seen confesses to the crime plus she says she hid his dismembered body in a trash sack.

Meanwhile, we get insight into the minds of the teens who are setting fire to lush homes in Pacific Heights – and then they hit Lindsay’s.  

There are excellent courtroom scenes in most of the “Women’s Murder Club” books and the regular characters are fun to follow in the over-arching story line. This particular book has a bit too much sex in it for my tastes, but… (It wasn’t that bad, you can see I put up with those brief scenes.) 

Lindsay has her new partner, Bill Conklin. a couple of other co-workers, and the equally fun friends from the Women’s Mystery Club. There’s Cindy Thomas a newspaper reporter and there’s Claire Washburn who is black, married with children, and working in the medical department. And there’s the newest member, Yuki Castellano an attorney with the District Attorney’s office.  

I’m mostly reading these in order skipping the books where Maxine Paetro is not included as an author. She’s the author who’s been working with Patterson creating The Women’s Murder Club series which is now up to #22. The series improved dramatically when she was added. I read #1 but then skipped #s2 and 3 for #4 and went on from there also reading from the new releases so # 19 was my actual first of the series, then came 20, 21, & 22.  I also went ahead  hitting #s 8 & 9 but came back for #7.  This means my next book will be #10 if a new one isn’t released first.  Likely not for a few weeks though.