Becky's Books –

I got this as one of the Daily Deal specials from Audible.com and the summary was intriguing and the narrator sounded okay on the sample.  So,  in spite of several reviewers who were disappointed,  especially by the narrator,   I went ahead.

Ah…  I guessed right and enjoyed the book quite a lot – perhaps because I was not expecting a whole lot and the book delivered somewhat more.

*******
Stillhouse Lake
by Rachel Caine
2017/ 300 pages
read by Emily Sutton-Smith –  10h 4m 
Rating:   A /  crime – suspense
#1 in Stillhouse Lake series – of 2)
*******

The narrator is fine – I’ve heard a whole lot worse but then,  maybe I prefer the narration when it doesn’t go over the top with added emotion or suspense.  The suspense here is fine on its own and the narrator adds only a bit – enough to make it real.

The plot is better, even more tension-filled,  than expected.   Gina Royal,  now Gwen Proctor,  and her children  now Atlanta and Connor,  have been on the run and in serious hiding  from self-proclaimed avengers of the deaths of a  number of women killed by Gina’s husband Mel,  who is now in jail.   Gwen was also arrested as an accomplice and locked up in jail,  but after several months was completely acquitted.   Nevertheless,  there are those who do not believe she didn’t know what was going on in that garage – and they’re after her in all ways imaginable  –  As her daughter says,  “You have a right to be paranoid,  Mom.”

So Gwen has trained in the use of guns (she’s good)  and computers (to an extent but she has a helper known as A) and even then she has to hide with new names and  in new towns – a kind of self-imposed witness protection program without the help of police.

Then a body shows up in the lake next to where she’s living and rather than running (again) Gwen makes the choice to stay.

There are a couple of other reasons for her staying –  first is the welfare of her children – she can’t keep moving them if it’s just her own paranoia.   Second is the attraction of a new man in town named Sam Cade  –  a good-lookig writer who is apparently a very nice guy.

I suppose the plot is fairly predictable and the writing mediocre but Caine certainly can develop the suspense.

Okay – I suspect there are realism issues here –  how did she manage to get away with hiding the stuff from her house is numero uno –  was no one watching her then?   And she is so stupid in some things.    Hmmmmm…..  Okay – but maybe these are details,  maybe even picky details,   but I can stretch my imagination letting the author have her way.

I picked up this older book at Audible a week or so ago because:  1.  it was on sale and 2.     I enjoyed one of Lehane’s books in the past (the other one wasn’t so hot).   The premise  of this story was intriguing and the narrator sounded good (I’ve heard him before), so I gave it a try.

I got really involved from the start when Doctor Sheehan returns to the east coast island (in Boston Harbor) where there is a rather gothic styled high security mental hospital for the criminally insane and where a patient went missing 20 years prior  (prior to 1993 when the letter was written – the book was published in 2003).

*******
Shutter Island
by Dennis Lehane
2003 / 400 pages
read by Tom Stechschulte / 9h 38m
rating:  B  / crime
*******

Teddy Daniels is a  Federal Marshall and has been assigned to Shutter Island together with his new partner Chuck Aule to investigate the disappearance of patient/inmate Rachel Solano who is there for killing her three children.

There is realistically no way she could have escaped.  Even the rats,  and there is an abundance of rats,  can’t escape.

Teddy has problems too –   memories of his wife after his return from Korea.  She was killed in a fire when their apartment house  was burned   The arsonist was convicted and sentenced to … you guessed it …  Shutter Island.

To add to the tension,  a hurricane tears through the place and although Teddy and Chuck plan to leave on the next ferry,  it’s suddenly not possible.  Meanwhile the two really have to leave,  – there are seriously dangerous things going on.

Taking place in a mental hospital,  the story gets realistically strange what with hallucinations and all.   Also,  there’s a lot of sexual content thanks to the revisiting old memories of better days.  But on the plus side it’s a page-turner –  there’s a huge amount of suspense driving this novel and the ending was a surprise.

Bottom line,  it was pretty good,  but off in some way with all the shenanigans.

Holy the Firm just struck me as something I wanted to read.  I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ages and ages ago and loved it.    This is a bit different,  it’s Dillard on Lummi Island seeking 1. God in the now and finding that God IS the day;  2. understanding God and pain along with life and forgetting;  and  3. Julie Norwich, a burned girl and how we are all victims.

*******
Holy the Firm
by Annie Dillard
1977 / 76 pages
rating:  10  /  nonfiction –  spiritual 
*******

After writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard left suburban Virginia to spend three days in a cabin on a remote island in Puget Sound – the edge of the world and the beginning of darkness,  to seek God.  She found him –  and a cat and a spider  and pain.

These are three essays which she wrote over the two years following that trip.

Dillard writes like an angel studying up on hell.  I’m not sure what I expected – this wasn’t it.  Nevertheless it’s an incredible meditation on what it means to search for God and a plane crashes –

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/where-have-you-gone-annie-dillard/426843/

Oh my –   I really had no idea what I was getting into when I cracked this one.  It was scheduled for discussion in one of my groups with the idea that it was a take-off of King Lear.  Okay fine – I can do that.   And I’d always wanted to try a St Aubyn and never had.

Okay – well,  it’s about family dysfunction and greed and there are 3 sisters,  2 of whom are greedy and nasty but the third one is truly loving.   So it’s a powerful tale and St Aubyn’s treatment,  although more about what happens later,  doesn’t diminish that – even with the use of contemporary situations and language.

*******
Dunbar
by Edward St. Aubyn
2017 / 258 pages
read by Henry Goodman – 7h 16m
rating –  8.5  /  very literary “thriller”
*******

Henry Dunbar, an 80-year old Canadian billionaire and media mogul, is locked up in a “care home” in remote northern England where his only friend is Peter,  an alcoholic comic.   Having given controlling shares of the company he built to two of his daughters,  Abigail and Megan,  he’s on the verge of being completely ousted because those same two daughters are arrogantly, deviously and ruthlessly pursuing  greater glory (total control of the company) while a  third daughter,  Florence,  declined the stock in favor of following her heart to a ranch in Wyoming.

Dunbar and Peter plot and execute an escape,  but then things get mixed up and Dunbar takes off on his own.  When the daughters find out they take off to find him.   Abby and Megan themselves are murderously insane with greed.  They gather a couple accomplices.   The women had wanted to place Dunbar in a really secure Belgian hospital,  but that plan was foiled by the escape – it might be on again – or something more devious could be in the works.

Meanwhile,  Florence also sets out to look for her father,  but her motives are those of love and concern.    She isn’t quite sure what she should do if she finds him,  but she goes and gets the assistance of an old friend and attorney,   Wilson.

Dunbar heads south through the hills toward London to reassert his power over the company.  As he travels the back snow-covered roads and paths,  he remembers his life – the many betrayals he’s guilty of.   He’s not insane – he’s profoundly remorseful .  He gets lost in a storm and the chase is on – it gets viscous.  Dunbar manages to keep going despite all and becoming angry and determined not to be captured.  He meets Simon,  a lost minister,  who becomes a  friend.

The family dynamics are straight out of Shakespeare,  but the chase is more from John Sanford.

I found the opening rather silly and didn’t know if I should bother.   The lengthy internals from Abby and Megan got somewhat boring.  Everything about Dunbar and Florence was good and Dunbar on his own in the storm was magnificent.

This is part of the Hogarth series of updated Shakespeare –  they’re powerful stories from life via Shakespeare and in tune with our own times.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/dunbar-edward-st-aubyn-king-lear-review/542235/

King Lear at Schmoop:  https://www.playshakespeare.com/king-lear/synopsis

Having read Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser just three months ago, I wasn’t all that keen about finding Libertarians on the Prairie on sale at Amazon.   That said,  I did wonder what the differences in the two books would be and I couldn’t imagine this one being better but …  this is a good book.  It’s a bit less general than Frasier’s and with a somewhat more scholarly approach toward the political element in Rose’s contributions to her mother’s oeuvre.

Prairie Fires covers the life of Rose Wilder Lane (Laura’s daughter) and her involvement in the work of her mother,  Laura Ingalls Wilder.  It also covers Rose’s  politics  – Rose is called one of the “founders of libertarianism.”   The book is really a dual biography as is this one.   The basic material itself is essentially the same,  but where Rose comes across in the Fraser biography as a somewhat spoiled child with limited contributions to the Little House books, she’s almost the heroine of Woodside’s book – there’s much more about her than there is about Laura.  Laura is a more of a bumpkin.

*******
Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder,  Rose Wilder Lane and the Making of the Little House Books
by Christine Woodside
2016 / 292 pages
rating – 7 –  biography
(read and listened) 
*******

I suppose the truth is somewhere in between but we’ll never really know.

This is a good book.  I accept that Laura Ingalls Wilder would have been nothing without Rose’s guidance,  but I also understand that there would never have been a series of Little House books without Laura –  no matter how great a writer Rose was.

Libertarians on the Prairie is only 292 pages including Notes and appendices.   The Frasier book is 640 pages and the difference is apparent – there’s simply a lot less information  –  and where the Frasier book is geared toward the interested layperson,   Woodward’s version is more scholarly – almost assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of Laura’s life and works.

Also,  the Woodward book is very much oriented toward Rose and her life rather than Laura’s and shows Rose’s progression into Libertarianism.   This book does not mention the  lawsuits regarding her “interpretations” in her unauthorized biographies of Jack London (for which she was sued),  Herbert Hoover,  Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and  others.  This book shows Laura as being much more of a story-teller than a writer- not much taking her strong will into consideration.

Prairie Fires has quite a lot about Rose’s leaning toward Libertarianism,  but in Woodside’s book the details are made more clear – of course, here the focus is that exact thing as named in the subtitle.

Rose’s book,  The Discovery of History has a typical conservative outlook and  Woodside uses the hugely laudatory comments of David Beito’s (Uni of Alabama) about it.   Beito is a current day libertarian/ conservative who is too young to have known Laura.  The comments of the New York reviews at the time,  which were not at all complimentary,  are ignored other than saying they existed.  She had to plead for positive comments from Hoover and eventually wrote her own (which he simply passed on).

The whole thing boils down to the idea of who wrote The House books.  It would seem that Laura wrote the basic stories,  but needed Rose’s assistance to put them into publishable format.  How much Rose actually did for the books is the question.   The two women never told and  the thing is I’m not sure even they knew –  no one really knew except possibly Rose and she never told anyone – not even Laura.  I personally don’t think she did a lot more than a really good knowledgeable personal editor would do.   (Look at Benjamin Lay and his editor/publisher Benjamin Franklin.)  She did more as the series and her own political views progressed and Woodward shows it.

Woodward provides specific examples of how Rose did influence Laura’s books and where she apparently didn’t.   Laura was quite a strong-willed woman herself.  Frasier’s book doesn’t get that detailed about this aspect,  but just goes through the books as they were published – it feels like reading The Little House books again.    It seems that when  Laura wrote,  she avoided specifics about hard times or things which weren’t true to her memory or sometimes because they were too intense for children.   Rose wanted to put some of those parts in – Rose became more and more political.

As to the idea that Laura was as “libertarian” as Rose it’s an odd one because although Laura had a problem with taxes,   that was probably the extent of her political thinking.  Rose took it from there to fighting government in almost all areas and her estate supported the Koch family as well as Rand Paul –  no foreign involvement,  end Social Security –  it seems almost anarchistic.

Many years ago I enjoyed Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto,  but later I thought her book State of Wonder was kind of lame, so I avoided Commonwealth in its year of hype and I’ve not read anything else by her.     However,  in honor of an upcoming reading group discussion –  I read it and it’s really quite a good book after you get into it.

*******
Commonwealth
by Ann Patchett
2016/ 316 pages
read by Hope Davis – 10h 33m
rating –  8.5 /  contemp fiction
*******

There are a lot of characters to keep track of so thank goodness Hope Davis does a nice job of reading the book – smoothish voice and not too emotive nor flat and with good distinguishing between the many voices as appropriate.

The book opens with a longish chapter in which a huge party is going on.  It’s  in honor of a christening (Franny’s) where  Bert Cousins, who is married with children,  kisses Bev Keating (the mother of the baptismal child) and starts the whole tale rolling.   This is in California of the late 1960s and the fruity drinks flow like water.   This chapter with many characters is confusing,  but the main plot line is set up.

From there the narrative skips to Virginia in the 1970s  where Bert and Bev are now living and married to each other.   Over the years,  the children are shuttled back and forth between Virginia and California.  Bev’s children live with the couple for most of the year but  Bert’s four children live most of the time with Teresa,  their single mother in California,

During those summer months in Virginia the children are left pretty much to their own devices because Bev can’t cope very well and Bert is overloaded with work.  Even their absent parents have their own serious problems and are non-attentive.  The children basically only have each other.

And that’s what the story is about –  how these six children navigate the next 50 or so years,  staying in touch,  continuing some semblance of family but without any kind of focal point.

Franny and Caroline Keating along with   Cal,  Albie,  Jeanette and Franny Cousins are very different,  they don’t even look like each other – are bored without anyone to guide some kind of activities.

The big kids Cal, Caroline and Holly generally ignore the little ones,  Jeanette, Franny and Albie and they play dangerous games with adult toys.  The parents nap a lot.   The kids are angry and do forbidden things and it’s like this every summer for years.

In the next section we find  Franny, an English major and law school dropout with lots of debt,  working at a bar, a job she hates but it pays the rent.    One night a famous author comes in and she waits on him,  they flirt.  She was born a year prior to her christening in Chapter 1 in the late 1960s so this is probably the mid-1990s.

And so goes the book – in and out of time and place and characters as the children grow up from this mess into their own messes.

There’s a lot of drinking in the book –  Chapter 1, late 1960s,  is a drunken party where the kiss starts things.    In Chapter 2,  probably the late 1970s,  the kids take whiskey and a gun to the beach and even the baby gets his share of the booze –  quite good – convinced me to continue.  In Chapter 3,  Franny serves a famous author a lot of drinks and she accompanies him to his room and then to Iowa.   This is truly boring except for a backstory about her life as a child (1980s?)  in competition with Caroline.   This is about 1/3 of the book

I suppose the theme may be drinking from baptism until death –  (dysfunctional families)

Jeanette, in Brooklyn,  becomes the wife of a Guinean man and mother of his child.  Then after many years her younger brother Albie shows up out of the blue and we get further flashbacks to his younger life.  This is riveting – Albie has had problems in his past and is now a drunk who uses drugs.  Jeanette has her own issues.  This is probably in the same time frame as Franny’s section.

And it’s Albie who first reads the book  – the book which the author-friend of Franny writes on the basis of the tales she tells him when her stay goes on for months and then years.   And the book becomes a best-seller as well as a contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

So we switch over to Franny and her life at the beach where she is staying with her author.  She’s 29 years old,  so it  must be ’98 or ’99,  and she’s expected to play hostess to a bunch of 60+  year old drunks  –  her author-lover is divorced,  remarried and now separated. – would likely marry Franny if he could but …    Big problemo – Franny doesn’t drink.   –  yup.   This is possibly because of a serious deed she did in her childhood. Franny is in touch with her mother in California.

Although I listened only and the book switches between time frames and people,  I never got mixed up.

*******
The children:
Caroline and Franny Keating –  Bev and Ed (Link) Keating
Cal, Holly, Jeanette, and Albie Cousins – Teresa and Bert Cousins

Bert marries Bev and the kids all visit in the summers –  (that’s the troubles)
Bev keeps her own kids –   Teresa has hers for most of the year but sends Albie at age 15.

I was attracted to this one because it has a nifty title and it’s a nominee for the  Barry Awards First Novel Award – 2018,  so it showed up on the 4-Mystery Addicts list.  It looked appealing from the title and the brief summary,  and the sample sounded very promising so I just got it and started the same day I saw the mention – what the heck?

*******
She Rides Shotgun
by Jordan Harper
2017 /  272 pages
read by David Marantz –  6h 14m
rating:   A++/  thriller
*******

The extraordinarily bright and imaginative 11-year old Polly McClusky  lives with her mother and step-father somewhere in the LA area.  Although she goes to school,  she has no friends.  She doesn’t do her homework so she can even avoid recess.    She carries a teddy-bear and is quite talented at using it as a puppet.    Her father,  Nate McClusky,  has been in jail for quite awhile.

One day her father comes to pick her up from school –  he’s been paroled.   But the twist is he killed a man the day before his actual release and now payback is a bitch because the man he killed has top-notch connections and a bad-ass brother.  He wants Nate’s family killed in retaliation.   So by the time Nate picks up Polly,  her mother and stepfather are already dead – and not by Nate’s hand. At this point Nate has to try to save  Polly from being killed next,  so the book is a lot of page-turning action.

Nate has to get the two of them away,  train Polly in gangster fighting and robbery,  and line up friends to help.   Pretty soon everyone is after the duo – even the cops,  good, bad and ugly.  So off Nate and Polly go to the desert east of LA where the drugs and gangs rule in Slab City – home of Aryan Steel gang,   a white-supremecist prison based group of outlaws.   They have one friend,  a woman who runs a small store.

Polly takes to this life – she’s her father’s daughter through and through.   Besides,  she’s    still angry and mourning her mother and loves her father dearly.   She uses the bear to great effect in many ways.   Everything works –  but it gets gritty.

There are parts of this book which are almost literary – the dialogue is probably spot on -but the sentences are like short pointed things,  sharpened like knives.  And there are the original and appropriate metaphors and tropes,  beautiful and re-readable.  Also,  the structure of alternating points of view is well done and definitely used to best effect with very little,  if any,  foreshadowing or other sometimes “cheap tricks,”  although there are a couple of cliff-hanger chapter endings.

In addition,  the themes of loyalty and several different kinds of love and the growth of a young girl’s self-respect – a kind of coming-of-age story if you will –  all point toward literary.

Okay,  even if the overarching and deep-rooted base of this novel is the suspense and thriller aspect and  everything works toward enhancing that – it’s a literary thriller – and maybe it will win the Berry Award.

The attraction here was that this was a historical novel of India as well as a crime novel.  I’m not big on the women detectives of Victorian London but …  maybe India?

It was standard fare with a hint of the mystery up to Chapter 5 which is right out of a romance novel –  omg – what have I got myself into?   Fear not –  it leads to a separate non-romance thread.   It’s not directly involved with the main plot mystery,  but it sets up the series nicely and adds to the historical element –  India 1916-1921 Bombay,  Calcutta and the lives of strict Parsi people,  especially in regards to women.   I kept going.

*******
The Widows of Malabar Hill 
by Sujatta Massey
2018/ 400 pages
read by Soneeta Nankani 14h 34m
(#1 A Mystery of 1920s Bombay) 
Rating:   A  / crime – cozy  
*******

In 1921 the 23-year old  Purveen Mistry is an attorney  and the daughter and granddaughter of the attorneys of Mistry House,  although she’s unable to appear before a judge because the bar won’t accept women,  educated and tested or  not.  So she works for her father and her current job is to figure out if three widows of a wealthy man actually want their inheritance given to charities including one to build a boy’s religious school.

Perveen has a good friend named Alice Hopson-Jones,  an English woman who is in Bombay with her upper class family.   The two young women met at college,  but have been separated for some time.    Alice and her family live in a wonderful, but very old house on Malabar Hill,  Bombay (Mumbai),  India.  The widows live in the same neighborhood.  Alice becomes a great help to Perveen.

The crime,  which Perveen  finally gets around to investigating in Chapter 7 due to the backstory,   (about 20%)  –     Back In 1916,  when  Perveen was only  18 years old and was trying to get through law school,   she fell in love with a man from Calcutta.  This thread is interwoven through the book and gets very intense.

Then someone dies.

An old Malabar Hill home

 http://reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=11034

Oh my –  what a magical mystical story –  typical of Smith in so many ways,  original in others.   The second in her Seasonal Quartet (the first was Autumn which I read a few months ago),  and she just flat outdoes herself at times.   The best winter story I’ve ever read,  like hands down,  is Mark Halprin’s Winter’s Tale ( ) which completely transported me to a child’s turn-of-the-century Christmas in New York with gangsters and snow and flights to upstate.

Smith’s tale deals with time and memory and the question of “what is real?”  (in these times of the 45th president and “fake news” and the internet.)   There are elements of magical realism (a little talking head) and literary correlations (Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for just one).  It’s also very much Ali’s story – ghosts and all.

*******
Winter
by Ali Smith
2018/ 336 pages
read by Melody Grove – 7h 28m
rating: 9.5  /   contemp literary general fiction
*******

The miserly Sophia Cleaves plays the part of Scrooge, in her big, old empty house  where a “head’ appears one night  –  the ghost of something.

Cold and death pervade much of  the book but it’s so warm and loving . A few of the characters are very cold,  they don’t die – not the real ones anyway (whatever that means),   the ones alive in that era. The other characters are for the most part very, very sympathetic – loving and lovable.

There is only a limited amount of  linear storytelling here.  The main thread is woven into and around backstories and mythology and other stories with past, present and a bit of future each represented.   Only the original story of Christmas Eve,  Day and Boxing Day is chronological from the time Sophia wakes up in her big house on Christmas Eve morning in the second little section of Part 1 until Art is home again at the end.  Within the contemporary times,  the Christmas Present part,  it goes into politics a lot more than Smith usually does –  (can’t remember specifically but I’ve read all but 3 of her 9 novels).

There’s a lot of art and history and even singing involved along with religion (it is Christmas) and love.  Then Sophie gets three  visitors for the Christmas holiday  – her sister and her son with his girlfriend – but there “is no room at the inn” so she sends Art and his girlfriend out to the barn.  There are no beds in the house.   Besides – girlfriend is really the wrong name for Luz – Charlotte.

And Smith plays her usual delightful word games – wonderful little puns, charming misunderstandings and so on which keep the book from being dark at all – and it certainly could be.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/ali-smith-turns-brexit-into-myth-in-winter/550430/

Incomplete – NOTES –   >>>>>>>

Krueger is not my usual cuppa,  but the publisher hype and reader reviews hooked me because I am interested in border problems,  both drugs and immigrants.  So,  the outcome was mixed –  I enjoyed the setting,  plot and “themes” but I wasn’t too keen on the protagonist or the writing style.   I’ve only read one of Krueger’s books prior and that was Ordinary Grace which is far more literary and therefore not typical.  I suppose it doesn’t count.  Krueger usually writes books about a detective in northern Minnesota,  Cork O’Connell and that’s what this is –  #16 in the Cork O’Connor series,  except it takes place in southern Arizona.

*******
Sulfur Springs
by William Kent Krueger
2017/ 320 pages
read by David Chandler – 11h 5m
rating –   B+ /  crime:  suspense-thriller
(book 16 in the Cork O’Connor series) 
*******  
Although the opening chapters were great,  it still took me awhile to get interested because the style is so … um … dry?  I don’t know.   Maybe it was the narrator.  Maybe I’m just not used to reading Krueger books or I’m not up to speed for this particular book,  or the narrator didn’t strike me right – don’t know.

Anyway,  Cork and his brand new Native American wife,  Rainy Bisonette, have to go to a place south of Tucson on short notice because Peter,  Rainy’s son from a prior relationship,  phoned and left a message about having murdered someone and being in trouble.   Eeks!   Peter mentioned the name Rodriguez.  Peter Bisonette is a recovering addict who was treated and supposedly working for a very expensive rehab south of Tucson.

When they get to the rehab they find that Peter was fired six months prior and hasn’t been heard from since.  He gets his mail in the small town of Sulfur Springs, but when they investigate there no one seems to know anything about him.

Asking a few questions,  they come across a lot of knowledge about the local issues,  immigration and drug cartels particularly but also a group of bikers,   from several rather shady characters and a few sympathetic ones.

But there are so many forces and sides.  There is a drug cartel working with the killer anarchistic bikers and there are the really struggling immigrants as well as the humanitarians who help them.  There are also government forces of several types plus  a gold prospector or two and a property speculator in town.  The book is slow moving because it’s back and forth over the desert searching for Peter,  back to town,  searching for immigrants,  back to town and over to the desert again searching for the bikers.  And there’s more than that.

On the plus side, Krueger does a great job on the setting and general ambiance of the place.  I’ve been there and I’ve been to northern Minnesota.  I like Minnesota better – southern Arizona is okay to visit.

From shortly after I finished reading Sarah Bakewell’s  How To Live,  a biography of  the 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne,  I started seeing Montaigne in Barn Boots on Audible and it intrigued me.   Michael Perry is a Wisconsin farmer  and volunteer fireman (among other things) who also writes and thinks and thinks about thinking and speaks – about writing and thinking.   It’s about his own life in relation to the essays of Michel Montaigne.

The book is interesting,  insightful and humorous – Perry writes easily,  nicely.  His comparisons of his life on a Wisconsin dairy farm to the life and philosophy of Montaigne who lived on his a private estate in southern France,  is kind of endearing.  He mentions the most famous translators,  M.A. Screech and Donald Frame,  as well as taking note of  Bakewell’s book.

Yes,  I’m also reading The Essays of Montaigne in the Screech translation.  This is being done on my iPad/Kindle at night – it’s going to take a long time.

*******
Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy
by Michael Perry
2017 / 245 pages
read by Michael Perry – 5h 12m
rating:  9 /  memoir/bio/philosophy
*******

Perry has obviously read Montaigne’s essays more than once,  probably as well as whatever else he could get his hands on.  It’s apparent he appreciated the writings.

Montaigne in Barn Boots is short –  just 5 hours plus a few minutes on the Audible version. But it packs a really nice punch in those pages.  And he’s incredibly honest.

The information on Montaigne is fascinating, although brief,  and it’s  consistently relevant and includes some great quotes.   Perry does not spare the lofty thoughts and vocabulary as appropriate, but at other times he hits the barnyard ways and country speech of his community.  And he talks about everything from memory to  toilets and sex to love and death and anxiety and pain as well as spiritual leanings  – just like Montaigne.   There are times when he simply waxes poetic and then in the next paragraph has the reader rolling with laughter.

You can kind of get the sense of it by reading through the table of contents:

Reading Like a Chicken
Roughneck Intersectionality
Confound the Fool
Shame
Marriage
Amateur Aesthetics
Kidney Stone Wisdom
Meditating on Faith
What To Do

I think my favorite chapter is probably “Kidney Stone Wisdom,” but the funniest one is “Marriage.”

“In overcoming shame I do not wish to become shame-less.”  

Perry narrates the book himself and it’s not too bad at all,  a little fast maybe.

Perry’s page:  https://sneezingcow.com

Review: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/electric-fences-intersectionality-michael-perrys-montaigne-barn-boots/

Interview:  https://brevity.wordpress.com/2017/11/01/with-montaigne-in-barn-boots/

Montaigne:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i

“Meditation is not to get away from the crowd outside us,  but to get away from the crowd inside us.”  

Very slow moving book – read because it was the 4-Mystery Addicts selection for the second half of January.  I was not impressed for the first half of the book but then it kind of started making more sense to me and about  3/4 of the way through I was thoroughly engrossed and thinking I should go back and get straightened out about the first part.  Oh well –  I wanted to get to the ending.

*******
The Birdwatcher
by William Shaw
2016 / 337 pages
read by Roger Davis – 9h 53m
rating:   B+  / British crime (procedural) 
*******

Police officer  William South has a murder in his own past which he has really tried to forget about for the past few decades.  His partner,  Detective Alexandra Cupidi, the single mother of a teenage daughter,  has recently relocated  to Dungeness (Kent) from London.   They find a box with the badly beaten body of Bob Rayner,  a neighbor, inside it.

The murderer looks  like it might probably be one Donnie Frasier –  a drifter who is found dead.    Unfortunately for South,  Donnie is from Northern Ireland,  the same area South is from and there might be connections to the crime South committed.  Actually,  Frasier was convicted of murdering Fraser’s father.  So the question becomes,  how was Rob Rayner connected and why was Judy Farouk missing?   South has to  keep all this from Cupidi because of his own involvement.

And part of the book is revisiting the Northern Ireland of William’s (Billy’s)  youth when  William’s father was killed.

It gets complex what with overlapping murders and memory and the relationships of fathers and sons.

Another aspect to the story is that South is attracted to Cupidi and her 15-year old daughter is a budding bird watcher so the workaholic Cupidi makes use of South to take Zoe on outings.  They enjoy them and each other and it leads to further information,

The ending is excellent.

For some reason I’d never read this book although it seems I’ve heard of it forever.   So it was on sale at Audible and I snapped it up.   Then I waited for my next break in scheduled reading and got to it.   I’m generally not big on books from the 1960s and ’70s except as remembered good reads,  but this one is really quite good –  in large part because it’s about way more than science fiction –  it’s about identity and the human condition and that’s probably a big part of what makes it a classic .

As first person protagonist we have Charlie Gordon,  age 32,  a “mentally retarded”  but very sweet man with many friends who has been working at a friend’s bakery for 17 years.  He really enjoys his job,  but he wants to be smarter and so is taking special reading classes after work.

As a result of the classes,  he’s chosen to participate in a psychology test case involving increasing human intelligence through experimental surgery.  In a maze test he’s pitted against a mouse named Algernon who has had the surgery and at first,  Algernon always beats Charlie.     (Fwiw,  Algernon was named for an English poet.)

*******
Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
1959 / 311 pages
read by Jeff Woodman – 8h 58m
rating:  8.5 –  classic literary sci-fi 
*******

After the surgery he continues to work at the bakery as he undergoes memory training and continues reading classes.  He’s also given  the tools for subliminal messaging through tapes in his sleep and he writes reports on his progress for the experimenters.  His reading and memory in general improve as well as his emotional development but not at the same pace.

In very short order Charlie learns to remember a few things and is promoted from assistant  to baker at work.  Also,  his dreams become more vivid and through them he remembers events from his childhood including some violent dysfunction.

But life isn’t all happy for Charlie who wanted to read and get smart so badly.   He’s not entirely appreciated by his co-workers who come to view him as competition.  He’s now laughed at by a few of them.  As Charlie understands more,  he gets a bit suspicious of people.  His intelligence and memory continue to increase as he reads more and more difficult material.  Ethical concerns manifest themselves and he learns to deal with some conflict and stress.

He tries dating but it’s not the same to him as it is to her.  He finds new emotions and new understanding about them,  but then he’s confused.   His intelligence continues to increase –  post-grad level.  He stops working at the bakery and he comes to realize the narrow range of knowledge in the specialists   Charlie’s emotional problems continue – he’s very immature and he had a long and very difficult childhood.  He has to confront his ideas about himself and everything gets quite complex.

Unlike a lot of  older science fiction,  this book holds up in many ways,  but that’s because for the most part,  the focus is on Charlie’s personal issues rather than the 1950s science.

It’s literary because the structure of progress reports and letters provides a unique texture.  The language changes smoothly and is appropriate to the situation and Charlie’s development.  The themes of isolation and identity are interwoven with the ideas of what it means to be smart and human as well as how the mentally disabled are treated in our culture.

The background on story is quite interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon#Background

Awards:
1960: Hugo Award for the short story “Flowers for Algernon”
1966: Nebula Award for the novel Flowers for Algernon
1986: Kurd Lasswitz Award for The Minds of Billy Milligan
1993: Seiun Award (Non-Fiction of the Year) for The Minds of Billy Milligan
2000: Author Emeritus Award from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

It’s also been challenged and removed many times  from the shelves of  both public and school libraries. .

Sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s,  Sean Phillips, our 1st person protagonist.  is a man of early middle age (?) who is severely disfigured, handicapped,  having been shot in the face many years prior.  The reconstruction is not perfect – his face is a mess.   People stare at him, trying not to.   So he mostly stays in his darkened apartment where he tends to the maintenance of a pre-digital (early 1970s)  text-based, snail-mail,  adventure game called “Trace Italian.”  The game involves a highly dangerous,  imaginary,  post-apocalyptic world where players travel to complete quests in a terrain with lots of dungeons.  This was right before most everyone was getting online.   It’s when certain boys were taking to an old game called “Dungeons and Dragons”  by mail.  

*******
Wolf in White Van
by John Darnielle
2014 / 224 pages
read by John Darnielle
rating:  8 /  contemp fiction (techie?)
*******

Sean still makes a bit of money doing this,  mailing  a few loyal customers/players the instructions and various help information.   The trouble is that it has caused some problems when two kids from Florida die trying to take the game into the real world.   (See Pokemon Go – but different.)

The parents of one of the kids took Sean to court,  but Sean was found not to be  responsible.

At that point Sean goes back through his life to the point where this all started.  How did this tragedy come to pass?  Darndielle takes us back through the years, a bit at a time,  to when things might have started and how it got from point A to point C.    Who Sean really is becomes the basic question and how did his face get so messed up?    And, by way of a theme,  what’s with all these lonely and isolated teenage boys and the violent roleplaying video/computer games?  It resonates.

Sean is a very imaginative storyteller – ever since childhood he’s enjoyed stories – especially,  when he was young,  those like the gory Conan the Barbarian.   As he grows older he makes up his own world and stories.  As a homebound disfigured adult he needs a life.  This is the one he makes for himself in large part to ward off  the feelings associated with the fact he is now nothing and nobody in the world.  He’s lost in his own world where he is in control,  has power,  etc.

He actually makes up stories about his medications and other things.  When he has a story it helps to give things purpose – he needs purpose,  meaning,  in his life.  His stories for “Trace Italian” are especially good.   But how did he get this way?  –

The intersting thing about this book from a literary standpoint is that Darnielle has chosen to use a backward chronology.  We know he’s in court for the death of a young woman.  A young man also died but the parents have dropped that suit.   How the deaths happened,  how Sean got injured happened first but are told last – almost,  there are some differences,  some overlaps.   And it applies to all of us as we approach life with its goals and choices,  dangers and wonderment.

One thing this backwards storytelling does is to tell us that Sean dies – “If you don’t go forward,  you die.”   There are other little motifs like religion and being god or living forever –

Sean is not exactly what anyone would call a reliable narrator – the reader is always wondering what in the world he really means.  There’s so much going on inside him what with his game reality,  game world, and his face and the lawsuit.  The boy is nuts – no,  I think what happened is he got stuck with the maturity of a 17-year old,  going to the liquor store for a LOT of candy,  etc.

AV Clube Magazine – review:
https://aux.avclub.com/john-darnielle-s-first-novel-plays-a-dark-game-1798181319

This is a reread from when I first read it years ago –  1990s?   I remember it as being a really good book with thematic as well as character subtleties.  This is the first of Ishiguro’s works I read and I went on to read almost all of his novels plus a few short stories.    Ishiguro recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I believe it was largely on the basis of this book although all the books I’ve read are quite good.

The story is told in first person by Stevens,  the impeccable butler, the  “butler’s butler,”   who in 1956 works for the American Mr Farraday at Darlington Hall somewhere in the south of England, near Salisbury.

Farraday has recently cut the staff of Darlington Hall quite a lot and (1) Stevens is overworked.   Farraday wants to go to America and invites Stevens to take a short vacation while he’s gone.   Stevens figures he’ll take a trip which includes a visit to Miss Kenton who was a prior Darlington Hall housekeeper to see if she would like to return.

*******
The Remains of the Day 
by Kazuo Ishiguro
1989 / 246 pages
read by Simon Prebble  8h 13m
rating:  10  /  20th cent US
(read and listened) 
*******

Stevens is a very stiff and proper man of middle age who takes great pride on his “dignity”  and in doing things the right way.   He has problems with his employer’s less formal ways as well as the general differences between the most proper of Englishmen and a relaxed American.

Times are different from what they were in his father’s day when his peers served the “great gentlemen” of the day.  That was part of being a “great” butler,  but it wasn’t everything.

So Stevens leaves on his little road trip but his mind goes back to 1922 when both Stevens’ and his aging father as well as Miss Kenton were newly placed at Darlington Hall.   This was also when Lord Darlington owned the Hall.  Stevens has a rather elevated view of his own father and Miss Kenton brings her own issues.  In a very poignant scene,  Father is found to be aging beyond his duties –   (I was reminded of when I retired.)

Private international “conferences” are held at Darlington Hall starting with the treatment of the Germans in the Treaty of Versailles and continuing almost throughout the war.   Darlington is not happy with the punishment of the Germans.  France wants it hard. Darlington becomes more and more sympathetic to the Germans.

The “action”  mostly consists of Stevens going about his duties of various sorts,  interspersed with his relationship with Miss Kenton.  The completely dedicated Stevens is committed to handling everything like a professional,  He is seriously repressed  – to the point of being a somewhat unreliable narrator.

The tale goes on alternating between Stevens’ road trip and his memories of life at Darlington Hall under the direction  of Lord Darlington who has some powerful but disreputable associations.  Other employees come and go,  Miss Kenton tries to get close to Stevens and then her aunt, her only living relative, dies. And in 1956 he goes from one town to the next,  on his way to meet Miss Kenton who is now married and has written him a letter in response to his.

I can’t even begin to address the themes of the book except that dignity and  loyalty and love are huge –  but it’s the fact they challenge “duty”  and “dignity”   which is important – and what,  exactly,  is “dignity?”

Timeline:
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/ishiguro/rodchron.html

Loads of resources online –

Oh I was so in the mood for something light and fun – a wee tad heartwarming maybe, but not super mushy or romantic.  I found it – and it was the next book up (Jan, 2018) on the discussion schedule at the BookGroup List .

Arthur Pepper of somewhere north of London has been widowed for about a year and is finally going through his late wife’s things when he finds a beautiful gold charm bracelet he’d never seen before.

*******
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper
by Phaedra Patrick
 2017 / 336 pages
read by James Langton – 8h 58m
rating:   7  (for fun) / contemp light fiction
*******

This find stirs some kind of serious curiosity in him and he examines it carefully noticing some tiny engraving on the elephant charm.  As it turns out the engraving is a single word followed by what appears to be a phone number.  He calls it and is connected to a jeweler in India and yes, they had known Miriam many years prior.   What a shock! Miriam had never said anything about any time spent in India.

This leads Arthur to some travel in order to checking out the sources of the other charms which include a tiger,  a thimble, a painter’s palette, a ring and a heart.  In doing so he has some adventures and meets a number of curious but mostly lovely people.  He also remembers Miriam and grieves.

Meanwhile,  one of the women in his own neighborhood bothers him, as well as a number of other people, with cooking and looking after.   She has her own son who is a bit lost.  The two of them help Arthur in ways – they all become friends.

But even Arthur’s own children are kind of lost to him  – his son is in Australia with his own young family and his daughter,  single again and childless,  is recovering from a messy divorce.

Arthur started out only wanting to know more about his late wife’s past but ends up with a huge treasure of his own.  It’s a feel-good book.

Oh my –  I really disliked this book and just about every character in it until about 2/3rds of the way through when something actually happens – kind of.   Until then it’s just too meaningless and basically silly,  imo.   It’s about a few days in the life of a huge extended family on a big old plantation of the Mississippi Delta.  There’s going to be a wedding and the women (three generations) are all getting ready for it while at least partially living in the past and basically excluding anyone who is not part of their exclusive circle.  Had this been in the form of a physical book I’d have thrown it against the wall too early.

*******
Delta Wedding
by Eudora Welty
1946  / 327 pages
read by Sally Darling
rating: 8 / classic American 20th cent.  
(read and listened) 
*******

Delta Wedding was published in 1946 with the action taking place just after WWI,  1923.   It’s a little peak into the actual place and times because Welty was born and lived in that area her whole life.  But having been educated in the north,  she had a larger vision and knew America as a whole.   It’s sad and looking backward in mourning or forward in fear and hopelessness.  It’s the story of  suffocation and claustrophobia vs change and freedom.  (And I won’t say which one wins.)

I really enjoyed Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter which is also about memories and the south and so on,  but nothing like Delta Wedding. 

Laura McRaven,  a 9-year old girl whose mother died only 8 or 9 months prior,   travels alone about 100 miles by train to the home of her cousins (her mother’s people)  who live in the Mississippi Delta (map)  The big sprawling Fairchild family lives in a big sprawling house on an old plantation called Shellmound complete with a number of Negro (the term used in the book) servants.

One of the girls, the 17-year old  Dabney,  is getting married which causes a lot of commotion.  She’s marrying the 34-year old Tory who is the plantation overseer.   I suppose the arrangements are done in the complete style of Southern hospitality  – from magnolias to memory and madness with a bit of history thrown in,  and a bit of cooking.  and a bit of violence as an occasional but unmistakable underlying tone.

It is because people are mostly layers of violence and tenderness—wrapped like bulbs, she thought soberly; I don’t know what makes them onions or hyacinths.  (page 53) 

And there is the quiet stealth of danger and death everywhere –  from wars to trains on tracks and from the river to serious illness..  The real danger is that something will break the family – there will be loss – and the family has lost so much already.   Fear of change.  And they are all very protective of Maureen,  the handicapped child – damaged – like their “way of life” –  And George can’t save it all – besides he married an outsider which is dangerous enough.  He,  who should have been able to save the family, left them.

As I see it,  the train represents progress and George is going to stand in its path.  The river flows through,  but the kids will go swimming and lose things.  WWI  brought death and disease so they cling even more tightly to each other and the land and their ways.   With a few exceptions,  the oldest generation is stuck in the past,  the middle generation is fighting change as best they can,  and the young ones (Dabney’s generation)  seem to want change  now.

So  family, isolation and the search for identity are huge themes as the family just hunkers down around itself and won’t let anyone in.   Period.   They are terrified of change.  So Troy (Dabney’s fiancé) and Robbie (George’s wife) are definitely outsiders.  The aunts and children are all insiders except  possibly the one who moved away.     Laura is a problem – she’s inside but outside. Her mother is still an insider even if she’s deceased – her body is there in the family cemetery but her father is an outsider who actually stays away.

Laura is not allowed to be in the wedding because she’s in mourning for her mother.  But she’s allowed to travel alone on the train?  This is preposterous. But tradition is tradition and that’s the real danger – they might lose something or someone valuable –  to the river or to the rushing train or to marriage or to death or to just plain losing it. (Mental illness is not considered loss.)

There is no plot – it’s just a family getting ready for a wedding with huge emphasis on the tragedies which have struck in the past and the ever-present threat of more change.   Women have the upper hand because they hold the reins and men are like the horses and could bolt. –

When Welty writes a novel of manners it might be real or it might be satire –  I have no idea.   Are the adults supposed to sound like the kids in all their stupidity?    I might get some input from online sources.

If all those people get confusing,  here’s a family tree:
http://www.alisamuelleck.com/deltawedding/

A Review:
https://koonce2000.wordpress.com

And here’s a character list:   http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/04/delta-wedding-by-eudora-welty-review.html

The Coconut Cake was kind of interesting:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/coconut-cake-recipe-1947027

And here are some critiques, analyses and reviews (I haven’t read them yet):

http://www.uncleguidosfacts.com/2016/02/delta-weddingwhat-did-eudora-welty.html

https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=etd

http://www.amerlit.com/novels/ANALYSIS%20Welty,%20Eudora%20Delta%20Wedding%20(1946)%20analysis%20by%204%20critics.pdf