Becky's Books –

It’s that time again – my reading summary.   I read 187 books which is really more than I think is healthy and I need to get out more  (lol).  But it’s possible I feel this way because there were 27 books in December alone.   These are the “Best of Bek’s Books for 2015”  in no particular order:

** FICTION :
Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill – (US)

On Such a Full Sea
by Chang-rae Lee – (US)

Suspended Sentences
by Patrick Modiano – (France)

The Snopes Trilogy
by William Faulkner (US)

The Neapolitan Quartet
Elena Ferrante (Italy)

A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James (Jamaican)

City on Fire
by Garth Risk Hallberg (US)

A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara (US)

Did You Ever Have a Family
by Bill Clegg (US)

Karnak Cafe
by Naguib Mahfouz

**  CRIME –
The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine
by Alexander McCall Smith

The Cartel
by Don Winslow

Career of Evil
by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

The Girl in the Spider’s Web
by David Lagercrantz

The Purity of Vengeance
by Jussi Adler-Olsen

The Crossing
by Michael Connelly

Breathing Water
by Timothy Hallinan

Elizabeth is Missing
by Emma Healey

Justice Redeemed
by Scott Pratt

*********
** NONFICTION :
The Meaning of Human Existence
by Edward O. Wilson

The War of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
by Dan Jones

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England
by Dan Jones

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
by Daniel James Brown

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt

Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Senior Moments Are Murder
by Mike Befeler
2015 / 268 pages
read by Jerry Sciarro  7h 42m
rating – B / crime – cozy

This is the third novel in the Geezer-lit series by Mike Befeler.  They’re kind of fun, silly, and I’ve read the first two so …

Paul Jacobson is about 84 years old and beset with short-term memory loss.  He’s quite bright during the day but his memory resets at night.  As a result at the opening of Senior Moments Are Murder,  he has no idea who his fiancé Marion, is.   But this doesn’t seem to bother him too much – although it is somewhat disconcerting.

Then he goes for a walk and finds a dead body and can’t remember who where he is or how he got there for the detective.  Bad news.  >>>>MORE (no spoilers>>>>

World of Trouble
by Ben Winters
2014 / 320 pages
read by Peter Berkrot  8h 10m
rating:  A /  crime – dystopian future
(Book 3 in The Last Policeman trilogy)

It’s only a few weeks until Astroid Maia hits the earth dead on and our hero Hank Palace is still out solving crimes of misisng persons and murders.  This time he’s decided to hunt for his own sister who has taken off with a group determined to beat the astroid somehow.

Hank comes across a lot of strange and scary things in his search across New  Hampshire,  and as a former cop and detective in Concord he knows how to conduct an investigation and apparently he has some fair interviewing techniques.  But with only 9 months (in the first book of the series) and 77 days (in the second book) and now a couple or three weeks  in book three,  why does Palace bother? >>>>MORE (no spoilers >>>> 

Karnak Cafe
by Naguib Mahfouz
1974 / 101 pages
rating 9.25 – classic – 20th cent fiction

Back in 1954 Egypt was swept up by the July Revolution and granted independence from Britain.  King Faruk was unseated and the Republic of Egypt established under Abdel Nasser.   It took some time to adjust but then – Well,  then came the 6-Day War with Israel in 1967 which Egypt lost soundly and by 1971 the country was in trouble with Nasser’s death and Anwar Sadat in office as president, a new constitution and a general feeling of impotency. After an assassination attempt Sadat instituted a series of purges, the beginnings of a police state really.  There were protests but the voices were silenced.

Into this environment Mahfouz inserts the fictional but probably typical Cafe Karnak – a small, cozy meeting place for folks with very close and politically informed friendships.  There are old people from the days of the original uprisings in the 1950s and young people suspected of activity against Sadat.

And then one day the young people are gone.
>>>>MORE ( no spoilers)>>>>

Slade House
by David Mitchell
2015 /256 pages
read by  Thomas Judd, Tania Rodrigues  6h 54m
rating:  5 (out of 10) /  literary fantasy-horror

I’ve been reading David Mitchell since Cloud Atlas, 2004, and then went back and read his priors.  I run hot (Cloud Atlas) and lukeish (Black Swan Green) to cool (The Bone Clocks).   I was going to get this book as soon as it hit the stands (o cyberspace?) but then I heard less than glowing reports and thought about it.  Looked at it again today and it sounds fine if you know what to expect.

I was hugely disappointed in The Bone Clocks – way too much into the occult wars.  This supposed to be similar, but I read A Headful of Ghosts by Paul Trembly which is literary horror of a sort and I really enjoyed that, so I thought maybe now I’ll know how to enjoy Mitchell’s alternative universes. >>>>MORE (no spoilers)>>>> 

The Gate of Angels
by Penelope Fitzgerald
1990 / 219 pages
rating  9 /  historical fiction

Back in a very well presented 1912,  somewhere near Cambridge England, Fred Fairly, a physics lecturer at St. Angelicus,  was riding down the road on his bicycle when he was startled by an unlit farm cart and crashed into a pedestrian,  Daisy Saunders, a poor nursing student.  A neighbor rushed to help and took them to her home where she put them in the same bed because Daisy was wearing a wedding ring.

Fred is pretty badly hurt and lands in a hospital where, guess what, the unmarried Daisy watches over him as she is a student nurse.  Fred falls in love which is against the rules of his job and the tale unfolds from there. Who was driving the cart that got away?    >>>>MORE>>>> (no spoilers)

Reykjavik Nights
by Arnaldur Indridason
2014 /  304 pages
read by George Guidall / 7h 10m
rating –  A+  / crime – police procedural
(Erlendur  Sveinsson series #16 but it’s a prequel)

This is a little different in the course of the series -it mostly concerns Erlendur as a young traffic officer who investigates closed and missing persons cases on his own time.  This young Erlendur may continue with a series of his own.

In 1974, Erlendur is new on the job,  a usually drunk and homeless man named Hannibal is found drowned in a local shallow pond by a couple of teenage boys.    A year later Erlendur and a couple of trainees are called to the same neighborhood and Erlendur is reminded of the case >>>>MORE (no spoilers) >>>> 

Numero Zero
by Umberto Eco
2015 (US) / 208 pages
read by David Colacci  5h 14m
rating 8.75  / literary crime (satire)

Big fan of Eco here – since The Name of the Rose and including some nonfiction.  (May I recommend Six Walks in a Fictional Woods?).

Numero Zero is shorter and lighter than his prior fictions which usually involve a fair amount of semiotics and complex historical plots with themes of conspiracy theories which bumbling  folks get sucked into – or authorize for devious reasons.

Although it’s not nearly as detailed,  the theme of Numero Zero is most similar to that of Foucault’s Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery.   The year is 1992 (for an Italian political reason) the place is Milan.   This time a writer named Colonna  wants to be famous but can’t seem to get there.  Instead he’s stuck with minor reviews and translations.
>>>>MORE (no spoilers)>>>>

Between the World and Me
by  Ta-Nehisi Coates
2015 / 178 pages
read by  Ta-Nehisi Coate  – 3h 35m
rating:  9.5  / race relations – memoir 

I was winding up the reading for 2015 but there are a couple short books I really wanted to get read.  Between the World and Me has been on the “best of” lists all over the internet as well as winning the National Book Award for nonfiction.  And then there’s Umberto Eco’s new one,  Numero Zero as well as the older The Gate of Angels (Penelope Fitzgerald) started for a reading group discussion next month.  All this and still 5 days to go before 2016.  Easy-peasy – anything else I can  finish quickly? –  lol –

This book is mainly  a very serious statement on race relations in the US but it’s also partly a memoir – continuing from Coates’ 2008 book, The Struggle.  >>>>MORE>>>> no spoilers 

The Shepherd’s Life:  Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
by James Rebanks
2015 / 304 pages
read by Bryan Dicks
rating:  9 / memoir

Why do we read memoirs?  Is it because the author is a famous personality  or had an interesting life like Oliver Sacks or Malala?   Maybe it’s because the author lived through extraordinary times like Rahimeh Andalibian and then there’s John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor – the life of a literary man – his thoughts on literature mixed with the way that life is lived.   –

The Shepherd’s Life is like none of those.  It’s the memoirs of a man who was raised on a sheep farm in the rainy Lake District in northwest England.  He left for awhile,  but went back pretty quickly and lives there now on his father’s farm which was his grandfather’s farm before that.  It’s a dying way of life.  I suppose this is an “extraordinary times”  type of memoir,  but it feels more like a report from a very ordinary person about what is to him a fairly ordinary life  in very ordinary  but changing times.    >>>>MORE (no spoilers)>>>> 

The Secret Chord
by Geraldine Brooks
2015 / 320 pages
read by Paul Boemer  13h 8m
rating  7.5  / literary historical fiction
(both read and listened)

I tried to listen to this book twice and got so confused I just finally put it down – gave up and actually returned it for the credit.   But I really wanted to read it!  So when a group selected it I got the Kindle version and I’m both reading and listening (much more reading) – this is better.

The problem is that the basic material story is complex enough for us folks who are not Bible scholars,   Brooks definitely did some intense research.  But there are too many strangely named characters and  their relationships and various motives adds another dimension.  I suppose this was to increase a sense of unfamiliarity in folks who know the story from the Bible – this would enable Brooks to add both fictional and less familiar elements perhaps from Jewish sources, more readily.  >>>>MORE (no spoilers) >>>>

The Octopus
by Frank Norris
1901 / 421 pages
rating 8.5

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time because the historical situation unfolded about 50 miles from where I live and it still gets some play in the news once in a great while.

Frank Norris,  using a naturalist and muckraking technique, fictionalized the following story:

Back in  1880 the Southern Pacific and other companies used their land grants from the US government to build railroads  from Oregon to Los Angeles.  The railroads got an enormous amount of land in a checkerboard layout (this happened throughout the US)  with farmers buying the alternating sections.  The deal was that when the tracks were in the railroads were to sell the extra acreage to the farmers at a very reasonable rate.

That’s not exactly what happened in this case though. >>>>MORE (no spoilers)>>>> 

Countdown City
by Ben H. Winters
2013 / 320 pages
read by Peter Berkrot 8h 18m
rating:  B / crime – futurist
(#2 in The Last Policeman series)

“Boomsday” is about 4 1/2 months closer than it was in The Last Policeman #1 – it’s now only 77 days away and counting to the day a stray astroid will hit the earth dead on.

Civilization has kind of fallen apart, at least it’s not fully functional at this point,  stores are empty, crime is rampant.   The  economy has dumped,  and electricity in southern New Hampshire is out because  no one is working at their jobs and leaving town or just committing suicide.  >>>>MORE – no spoilers >>>> 

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
2014 / 528 pages
read by  Jonathan Haidt – 11h
rating 9  / nonfiction – psychology / ethics

Good book – it’s going to have to go on my list of best 2015.  Fascinating stuff.  I’m not sure I agree with all of it – I’m not sure I fit the norm in all of his little tests.  That’s okay – the book explains a whole lot.  And it’s comprehensible – a true layman’s presentation – and Haidt has a nice sense of humor.

Haidt is not a partisan anything – he has no political axe to grind. He’s a generally liberal moral psychologist who has been studying people’s beliefs and behaviors for a long time.  He finds that conservatives in the US have a broader gamut of moral underpinnings (foundations – values) to rely on than liberals.  These are things like caring and authority and loyalty and freedom and fairness and so on.  But beware fundamentalists – they have very few different types of underlying values.   >>>>MORE>>>>

The Last Policeman
by Ben Winters
2012 /336 pages
read by Peter Berkrot 8h 20m
rating:  B+  / futurist crime

Interesting book – it takes place in the current times,  but the world has just been informed it has about 9 month to exist.  This is because an astroid is zooming through space right on target to hit.

Detective Hank Palace has chosen to keep working as a policeman in a New Hampshire city in spite of the fact many people are either committing suicide or quitting jobs to do something on their “bucket list.”  Being a police detective is what he wants to do so that’s what he does. And there are others on the police force who stick around.

The case Palace is interested in involves what appears to be a suicide by hanging in a McDonald’s bathroom,  but Palace thinks it was murder.   He follows up on leads but is lied to repeatedly.  There are several factors,  drugs,  computer projects of the astroid, insurance fraud, more murders.  It’s pretty good mostly because of the setting – the sense of impending doom.  >>>>MORE  (no spoilers) >>>>

Notorious RBG:  The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
2015 / 240 pages
read by Andi Arndt / 5h 9m
rating:  9

This is a splendid biography of a heroine – but it’s hard to give a rating to a book which is pretty close to  hagiography (look at that crown) and you also love her.  Dearly.

I would recommend getting a paper copy of the book as there is a lot of information and photos not included in the audio version although there is a downloadable pdf file –  I’d rather read the book and see the photos.  I’ll likely be getting it later and rereading for the All-nonfiction group in March.

The title comes from a Tumblr blog started by Shana Knizhnik, a law student and then fans starting posting.  The “Notorious” part comes from The Notorious B.I.G, a famous rapper.  Knizhnik then joined up with  Irin Carmon of MSNBC and with some assistance from RBG wrote the book. >>>>MORE (no spoilers) >>>>

Men Explain Things To Me
by Rebecca Solnit
2014/ 130 pages
read by Luci Christian Bell  2h 48m
rating – 8 / nonfiction – feminist essays

I haven’t read anything by Solit for many years and then I wasn’t too thrilled by  Wanderlust,  her book about walking,  but really about other things – the wanderings of a woman’s mind.   Men Explain Things To Me came up on one of my reading lists and I got tempted and got it from Audible.

This one is pretty good even if I’m not all that interested in feminist theory these days.  It seems this book has become a standard in 3rd wave feminism – or 4th? – http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/four-waves-feminism

In seven essays, some previously published elsewhere,   Solnit expounds on the fact that although things are getting better,  and not all men are bad guys,   women are still not taken seriously in the world which is dominated by the male point of view (“mansplaining”).  We are still too physically vulnerable,  are “disappeared” from the patrilineal genealogies and life,  are  benefited by marriage equality,  should try embracing the unknown (about themselves) and all we can do is go forward – it’s too late to go back in the old traditional boxes.   >>>>MORE>>>>