Excellent but gory. I started another great one before I wrote the blurb for this – oh dear. This one is about a serial killer in Denmark. It’s like the old Scandi-noir books by Jo Nesbo and others. This one is super if you can stand the violence against women and children (and men). This is the author’s first book translated into English and I do look forward to the next because it really is a wonderfully original and complex plot with well-drawn characters and so on.
Wolf Pack
By C. J. Box
2019 /
read by David Chandler 8h 51m
rating – B+ / crime series (book #19)
Not my favorite series but one that always satisfies. This book is mostly about as good as any of the 18 which precede it (not that I’ve read them all!) There is more violence here though – lots of guns and bodies.
The main characters are nicely developed but the ones which are specific to this book only are rather flat. The plot is somewhat original , complex and. engaging. A drone has been harassing the critters and when Pickett gives him a warning, the FBI gets involved. Huh?
The setting is Wyoming which means plain, and the characters match that. – The book is quite violent – more than usual .
I’ve read a few of Krueger’s books, Iron Lake (the first of his Cork O’Connor series), another of that series and Amazing Grace, a stand-alone. This Tender Land is another stand alone.
This one is a bit weird. I’d call it Young Adult, ages 16-=22 or so and interested in miracles and spirituality.
This book has quite a lot of tension on its own, but with Scott Brick as narrator it sometimes feels a bit over-the-top. I got used to him though, and by half way he was perfect. The plot involves two teenage boys and a younger brother who run away from their Indian School taking a little orphan girl with them. The setting is south central Minnesota in 1932 the Great Depression and the time of the Bonus Marches. They travel on their own to St. Louis..
Parts of this are really fun reading, other parts are pretty gruesome and some ore schmaltzy.
This was my second read and I often get so much more out of Rushdie’s books the second time around. I really should read Grimus but It just isn’t calling to me. Quichotte is sooooo funny though. And it’s sweet and a bit scary and insightful in places. But as is usual for a Rushdie novel it’s complex.
The characters:
Ismael Smile (aka Quichotte)
His love, Salma R –
Dr. Smile – Q’s cousin – a pharmacist
Happy Smily – his wife
Sancho – Q’s imaginary son
Brother (author)
Sister = powerful Indian lawyer/politico
Evel Cent – billionaire techie
Cricket – Pinocchio-like character
The Quest path:
Valley of the quest itself
Valley of Love
Valley of Knowledge
Valley of Detachment
Valley of Wonderment
Valley of Apology and Healing (the dale of restored harmony)
Valley of Poverty and Annihilation
In some ways it’s like the encyclopedic novels of the 1980s with lots of real people, places, and events. I Googled a lot of other stuff just for fun, like Lilburn (a suburb in Atlanta). But the point/theme is that of playing games with realityl and what’s fantasy/fiction/make-believe. .
There are some good reviews out there –
“Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte Drives You Nuts That’s Fine It’s Meant”
https://www.krwg.org/post/if-salman-rushdies-quichotte-drives-you-nuts-thats-fine-its-meant
And
This turned out to be very much worth the second read. There are five main characters and I was better able to follow them in their lives. I was better able to understand the Indian problems and the other issues that pioneers had like crops and getting things started.
Warning – it’s not about pioneers and their experiences all over the country and it’s not an expose of American’s inhumanity to Natives. Rather it’s a beautifully rendered history of the pioneers of Marietta, Ohio taken from their own journals, letters and other personal resources.
Marietta was on the cutting edge of American ideals from education to slavery. The men and women who first settled in the wilderness of Ohio were spreading their ideals, their hopes and dreams. This is surly an endeavor to be admired.
Only the Good
by Rosemary Reeve
read by Noah DeBlase 10h 3m rating: B / legal thriller
Jack Hart/Harmony Series #3
In this third book of the Jack Hart trilogy, Harmony is getting over her trauma in Japan and Jack is settling down again in Seattle. There he’s notified that his father has died in a fire in Bellingham. What? His father has been gone as long as Jack has been alive. Absent fathers, whether they are dead or just missing. is like a theme of the whole series.
It’s a great plot mixing up wonderful characters from the prior books, but I’m not sure the plot hangs together properly in this final narrative If it does, it’s pretty far-fetched and the reader might really have to suspend some disbelief for the sake of the story (and for the characters). Moreover it seems like there are inconsistencies between the books in the series. I lowered the rating due to that.
This is pretty good for a series starter focusing on the protagonist with plenty of background to get you involved for the long run.
Bruno is a very peaceful and likable guy for a police chief but he lives and works in a charming village in south central France where the main con-cerns are agriculture ad tourism. He’s also single and good looking which invites the interests of women. And he has a rather mysterious past which is revealed to the reader without losing it’s flavor.
In this story an older local man is found killed but the bad part is that a Nazi symbol is carved on his chest. Another interesting thing about this man is that he’s an Arab veteran, one of the few in the area. The Arabs, especially Algerian, have a long history here.
I’ve fallen in love with the writing of Mark Arax. First I read The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California (2019) which absolutely amazed me and was about how California got to be California. I’ve mostly lived here since I as 16 – a long time as I’ve been retired for several years now. I knew the places and many of the people Arax wrote about.
By Mark Arax
2010 / 351 pages
rating: 8.75 / nonfiction California history
Then I put West of the West on my Wish List and just got to it now. This is in spite of the fact there is no Audio book to go with it. (I both read and listened to The Dreamt Land.)
And now I’ve got The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire on my Wish List and I will get to it before too long – both Kindle and Audible (fwiw).
Highly recommended if you’re interested in the subject of California history with emphasis on the San Joaquin Valley (not much about San Francisco or LA or politics or Indians etc – there are other books for those things.)
Too long, contrived and predictable, but it was on sale. On the plus side, I did finish.
Ellie Mack was 15 years old when she disappeared. The prologue shows her as a high school student and the main plot jumps to 10 years later with a short flashback section about an incident at 5 years when her bones were found. But there is no evidence of who, when, where, why, – nothing.
The main character is Ellie’s mother Lauren Mack who has been tormented by this loss and has lost her husband and 2 older children as a result of her emotional collapse .
Now Lauren is recovering and dating a man with a young girl and Lauren’s remaining family is suspicious of him, as is the reader. But more is slowly revealed with moderately interesting but broadly predictable twists..
Well, this is one to read again – (maybe) – Gibson’s plots can get notoriously complex and he liberally strews very current words and technology throughout. This is on top of the astonishing world building – I think I like this book but it’s very complicated and difficult.
I fell in love with Gibson from Snowcrash and went on to the Blue Ant trilogy which was also just delicious – loved it. Then it got weird and I’ve tried but ….. at this point we have “time travel” using alternative universes with clones and drones plus cloned bits.
The time periods go between 2017 and some time in the far future. The locations are California and London. And a part of the alternative strand of reality is that – ta-da! – Hillary Clinton is president.
*******
Before She Met Him
by Peter Swanson
2019 / 325 pp
read by Sophie Amos, Graham Halstead 10h 15m
rating: B+ crime suspense
*******
Quite good after a couple hours of set up which feels like a standard thriller story. Then that fades and new twists appear. Hen ____ takes it upon herself to chase down the new neighbor she believes is guilty of a murder from several years prior. The book gets very exciting although the characters were a bit flat It got lots of good reviews .
The title is from William Blake’s, “Proverbs of Hell” but the story here is straight from Tokarczuk. But there’s lot of Blake in it as well as astrology, Swedenberg and even, yes, a couple of murders.
This was first published in 2009 but won the Man Booker International Award just this year because it was finally translated into English. Tokarczuk is a well known writer having won the Nobel Prize for Literature only last year..
Drive Your Plow is different. But all her books are different. She’s amazingly creative and imaginative
In a small town in Poland, just across the border from the Czech Republic an older woman lives in a very small house alongside two other small houses on a hill above a small town. Her name is Mrs Duszejko and nothing is ever said about a possible husband somewhere – she doesn’t like her given name, Janina. And she gives her friends and neighbors their own names, Oddball, Big Foot, Dizzy, the Grey Lady and so on to suit their personas.
But seemingly random people start dying and we learn more about Mrs Duszejko and her friends.
The book was good – the Audible version was lousy. The narrator read way too slowly (275 pages took 11 1/2 hours?) It was so slow in places I could barely keep tuned in to what has happening.
Interesting research on animal behavior – Edward Payson Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), p. 18.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barthélemy_de_Chasseneuz#cite_ref-1
In some ways this book was much better than I expected. I’d heard rather disparaging comments about how the title seemed to imply the story of westward expansion in general, and readers were disappointed that their own ancestors places were not included. But the narrative was limited to the Northwest Territory, mostly what is now Ohio.
Years ago I read The Trees by Conrad Richter, but never goto around to the rest of the trilogy, The Fields and The Town. I was definitely reminded of The Trees as I read the first several chapters of The Pioneers and then McCullough mentioned the Richter books in his Acknowledgments. I felt vindicated (or something).
But it seems the Northwest Territory was plagued by a number of trials including settlement, Indian warfare, starvation, abolition, education and epidemics to say nothing of the antics of Aaron Burr and various other characters and personalities (the Blennerhasasett family for instance. Several were related to an original party, Manasseh Cutler.
The book has more interest than one would think and McCullough writes well enough to inform and entertain. There’s a bit of everything, politics, exploration, Indian fighting, medicine, technology and expansion, as well as family life and death – even weather and earthquakes along with education and canals. It’s not a great book but it was certainly worth my time and in its own way does McCullough’s reputation no harm. (I have enjoyed McCullough’s books since The Johnstown Flood (1968).
This is a book of limited geography but broad time frame. The story covers the area around Marietta, Ohio between the years 1787 and 1863. The title implies that it’s the story of American pioneers in general – and in general, it is that. What pioneer men and women experienced in those years was the pioneer experience as it played out in Maine, Minnesota, Kentucky, Texas, Nebraska, Oregon, Montana and even California at their own times and each with their own variations.
I enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale, the book to which this is a sequel, but I wasn’t wow’ed even if Atwood is one my most admired writers. I’d be hard pressed to say which of her books is my favorite – The Blind Assassin probably. It’s possible that reading The Handmaid’s Tale is not a prerequisite for The Testaments but I can assure you that the reader will get a lot more out of it if it has been read.
Anyway, this is a hard book to follow – there are two 1st person narrators and their chapter alternate within Parts which have distinguishable front pages with a graphic suitable to a character. And each of these characters uses different names. The chapters of two characters are related via “transcript” while another character’s chapters are via Holograph. It gets tricky in some places – I think it deserves a couple readings anyway. Very imaginative.
I was going to say that I don’t think two books should have shared the Booker Prize this year, but maybe I’ve changed my mind, I’ll have to reread Girl, Woman, Other to decide. .
I’ve read this twice now. The first time was very confusing and because I had a reading group discussion coming up I read it again. I had a feeling I’d really like it once I got the characters straightened out.
So I did read this book again, but it still wasn’t entirely clear. It is historical fiction, but the time frames aren’t chronological. There is some magical realism in it. I guess the reader is supposed to figure out who these people are and their relationship to each other along with the sequence of events. That’s a rather tall order imo.. .
Another theme is women’s “liberation” as it applies the social scene of marriage. The women in Oman went from being slaves to careers and driving cars in a few decades.
This one is gritty but it got a lot of hype and it piqued my interest. It’s essentially a procedural crime novel set in the Kensington area of Philadelphia. Kensington is treated with a certain amount of love, hard as that might be to believe as it’s one of the worst drug slums in the nation.
Our first person narrator, Mickey Fitzpatrick, is a street cop on those bad streets, the same streets her sister Casey, a drug addict and part time hooker, frequents. There have been missing women here, some dead, some murdered even, some never reported.
On the job, Mickey is between partners, a long term guy now on medical leave, and the new one who’’s not working out, inappropriate. At home Mickey has a small boy from a prior domestic partner.
The plot unfolds very slowly as Mickey reveals her background and that of her missing sister. There are demons which drive her and her sister as well as the grandmother who raised them after their mother died long ago from her own addiction.
The whole thing Is very involved with the parentless girls growing up in poverty and the broken family relationships. There’s lots and lots of padding to the point it becomes more a tale of addiction, crime and street life than a mystery.
I have problems sleeping as much as I should so I saw this book in the recommendations of Bill Gates and went for it.
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew Walker
2017 / 369 pages
Read by Steve West 13h 52m
It’s not as much about how to get enough sleep although there is a fair amount of that. Most of it is devoted to the benefits of getting 8 hours of sleep regularly. Way, way more than I imagined.. I kind of thought sleep was a waste of time – now I certainly know better. And knowing better makes me more conscious of doing the things which will help me get it. (She said at 3 AM due to waking up too early.)
Becky's Books - 