Becky's Books –

The Hummingbird’s Daughter
by Luis Alberto Urea
2005 /  528 pages
read by Luis Alberto Urea (the author) 18h 25m
(read and listened)
rating:  9.5 – historical fiction (mystical realism)

I belong to a lot of reading groups where we nominate books and vote on which ones to read and discuss.  I have never nominated a book I’ve read prior but I can’t say that any more.   What happened?

I read Urea’s book 8 or 10 years ago on a friend’s recommendation and loved it.  This past nomination period in the great Bookgroup List I was stumped as to what to nominate – (It’s very difficult to nominate books you’ve never read – like recommending something you’ve never read – gads).  But I realized I really wanted to reread this lovely book and so I caved – nominated something I had read prior. >>>>>MORE>>>>> 

Isaac’s Storm:  A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
by Erik Larson
1999 / 323 pages
read by Richard Davidson 9h 38m
rating:  8.5 / non-fiction – history

Although Hurricane Katrina which hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 was larger and more costly, the hurricane which hit Galveston, Texas in September of 1900 is the deadliest the US has ever seen.

I’ve read three of Larson’s books,  The Devil in the White City (2003),   In the Garden of the Beasts (2011) and the brand new Dead Wake.  This earlier book concerns Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist in Galveston at the time,  his background, his experience, the experiences of various other Galveston residents,  a lot of information about weather forecasting and the nature of hurricanes as understood today.  Many of the phenomenon which they saw and were able to measure then had not been seen in the lifetime of anyone alive so there was a lot of pooh-pooh’ing – barometric pressure was one of these.  >>>>MORE>>>>

The Lives of Others
by Neel Mukherjee
2013/ 505 pages
rating:  8.75 / historical fiction

Another long one – omg – but it won a slot on the Man Booker    short list in 2014 so the Booker Prize reading group chose it for their June/July discussion – And I’m “categorizing” this as historical fiction because the author was born in 1970,  about 2 or 3 years prior to the main events which were almost 50 years ago and then there’s a lot of backstory which goes back to 1902 or so.  It’s basically a family saga in times of national trouble.

Be warned – this novel has some incredibly violent scenes – not for the queasy.

The frame story takes place in Calcutta and the forest regions of West Bengal some time in 1967 but there are  India  has been an independent nation for almost 20 years, but things are not as some folks want them. In fact it seems to some they are worse than ever for many. >>>>MORE>>>>

The Fall
by John Lescroart
2015/ 320 pages
read by David Colacci 11h 11m
rating:  A /  crime (legal)
Dismas Hardy series – #16

I’m a fan of Lescroart and have mostly followed the Dismas Hardy series from the first book, Dead Irish,  to this one. Confessions time  – I love Colacci’s reading and, except for one,  have skipped the ones read by other narrators.  I’ve also read a lot of Lescroart’s other series and stand-alones.

The setting is always San Francisco,  home to a very diverse population and generally liberal politics with plenty of murders to be solved.  Hardy is a defense attorney there but has worked in other capacities.  The series builds on the private life of Hardy.   >>>>MORE>>>> 

These are the books I read in May, 2015.  A total of 16 books with 8 of them over 400 pages!  Categorically,  I read 4 crime books , 1 sci-fi,  1 nonfiction,  3 classics and  5 women authors.  No translations.  Ratings are A-F for Crime and Sci-Fi,  10 (high) – 1 for everything else.  The highpoint was finishing the Scopes Trilogy by Faulkner.  – >>>>MORE>>>> (specifically):

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
2015 / 880 pages
read by Mary Robinette Kowal, Will Damron – 31h 55m
rating:  B / science fiction

“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.”    Yup – that’s the first sentence of Neal Stephenson’s new door-stopping, sleep-interrupting hefty tome.

A couple pages on comes:   “The good news is that one day the Earth is going to have beautiful rings,  like Saturn.  The bad news is that it’s going to be messy.”    LOL!

Section 1 is basically concerns what happens when the people of the earth realize they are going to die because the moon has exploded and in the very near future the human population will be bombarded by its pieces – what they come to call “hard rain.”   The international plan is to  save a few thousand humans, historical artifacts and create a new civilization on a “Cloud Ark,” designed and developed by the “ark-itects” and sending the specially selected people to live there.  Other folks go underground or do whatever they can think of,  but the surface of the earth will be uninhabitable when the pieces of the moon explode into a white cloud of rocks and then millions of  pieces, shrapnel really, start bouncing off each other for an unknown number of millennia.   The deadline to have this Cloud Ark up and running is two  years.  >>>>MORE>>>>

The Martian
by Andy Weir
2011 / (385 pages)
read by R.C. Bray 10h 53m
Rating:  A / sci-fi (space travel)

** read in April – forgot to put the post up **

Imagine yourself an astronaut who is stranded by his group – they think you’ve died and have had to make an emergency escape.   Problem – you are not dead. You are a very bright and resourceful engineer who can get into a capsule,  repair and jerry-rig much of what you need and hope to live until someone comes back for you – likely with the regular 4 year schedule because they think you’re dead.  >>>>MORE>>>> 

The Whites
by Richard Price / Harry Brandt
2015 / 352 -pages
read by  Ari Flakes 10h 30m
rating:  B+ / literary crime

I really enjoyed Lush Life back in 2008 so I was considering reading this one anyway and then the Modern Fiction  group chose it for discussion – great!   (I have no idea why Price wants to go by Brandt although perhaps he knew it didn’t quite live up to Lush Life.

Same setting,  realistic New York cop shop,  Manhattan,  Billy Graves has been a night shift police detective for several years – he doesn’t like it but he works with a group of men he respects – not for sissies.  Billy has his own problems with an RN wife with her own past and who is scared witless for him and an aging ex-cop father with dementia who lives in their home.  He also has two small sons.  >>>MORE>>>

The End of Vandalism
by Tom Drury
1994 / (352 pages)
read by Lloyd James 10h 36m
rating:  9 / contemp fiction

I found it!   A book in which many of the characters are a part of the setting  – think  “characters as setting”  lol

Taking place in and near the fictional and very small agricultural town of  Grafton in Grouse County, Iowa, the main story concerns the sheriff, Dan Norman and a bit of his job and his love for and marriage to Louise who works as a photographer.   Louise’s  ex-husband,  Tiny,  also figures fairly large in the narrative.  >>>>MORE>>>> 

The Information
by Martin Amis
1996 / 372 pages
rating:   5 0ut of 10 / contemp lit

This is the third book in what is generally known as TheLondon Trilogy, with the books  Money and London Fields preceding it. They’re not connected by story-line, only by the fact they all take place in contemporary London and the themes,  tone and character “types” are essentially the same.   I’ve not read either of the other two.

In the book – a middle-aged writer named Richard Tull  is very, very jealous of his fabulously successful long-term friend Gwyn Barry.  Gwen Barry of the best-selling novels and drop-dead gorgeous wife.  Richard is so jealous he becomes obsessed with the idea of messing up Gwyn’s life in some way.   And he seeks “information” to either write up himself in one of his articles or reviews,  or to leak to the bottom-feeding press.  >>>>MORE>>>> 

Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
by Elizabeth A. Fenn
2014 /  480 pages
rating – 8 / US history (Indian)
(self-select)

Interesting to me because of the North Dakota connection and I’ve also read a fair amount about the Indians of North America since college days (many moons ago).  .

This history begins with the author’s personal travels in central North Dakota in the early 21st century.  Then she gets into the geography and natural progression of their migration to the North Dakota area, their myths, housing, hunting, agriculture and wars.   Then come the effects of the European incursion starting with  a guy named La Vérendrye and his sons and a few other lone traders to trade with other native groups for horses and guns.   >>>>MORE>>>>

Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
by Maria Semple
2013 / 352 pages
read by Kathleen Wiltholte 9h 39m
rating:  8 / contemp fiction – humorous

This is a very funny, hilarious (?),  and generally good-natured satire of contemporary society with emphasis on mental issues and support groups,  the nouveau riche, the tech industry and tech in general,  more – .  Semple’s  brush is broad.

Bernadette Fox is the brilliant but very strange wife of Elgin Branch, a Microsoft executive, and the mother to Bee , their precocious 14-year old student at a private school.  The very upper-middle class family now lives in Seattle,  but don’t  really “fit” with the attitudes of old Seattle people she meets through Bee’s school. Besides,  Bernadette doesn’t really get along with other people except her husband.  She is also a highly regarded architect who is in hiding from everyone except her husband and daughter.  >>>>MORE>>>>

Invasion of Privacy
by Ian Sutherland
2014/ 472 pages
read by Matthew Lloyd Davies 16h 59m
rating: A + / cyber-crime

A cellist is the victim of a very violent, premeditated murder. Individual webcams are highjacked to provide  entertainment and information.  Hackers are needed to solve all this madness.

Detective Jenny Price and her partners work on the murder in pretty much traditional ways while Brody Taylor,  a computer whiz, takes on a challenge from an online hacker group and tries to find his way through the security surrounding a new site –  Flex-base? He finds a web-cam site called “Somebody’s Watching You”   (SWY) and a show called  “The Au Pair Affair.”    The challenge has been set up by a hacker called Crooner 42 in order to ruin Brody who is known as Fingle via another hacker named Mad the Hatter.   >>>>MORE>>>> 

No Show
by Simon Wood
2013 / 298 pages
read by Luke Daniels 8h 20m
rating B  /   crime

First,  the narrator is difficult to get used to – his interpretation  of Terry Sheffield, the protagonist, is fine,  but when other characters enter the picture they sound like they came from central casting at Warner Brothers  – cartoons.  I got used to it and the whole thing turned out quite nicely but …

Terry Sheffield has given everything in England up for the love of his life,  Sarah Moore.   After they marry months go by before he is finally able to move to California to be with her – only to find she’s missing.  She’s not at the airport,  not at their new house,  not at her job.  As a newcomer to the whole country he has some issues but he does have a job – that’s a start.  >>>>MORE>>>>

Blessed Are the Dead
by Malla Nunn (South Africa/Australia)
2012 / 336 pages
read by Humphrey Bower  9h 7m  (A+)
rating:   A /  crime

This is the third book in the Detective Emmanuel Cooper series by Malla Nunn of South Africa and Australia.   Cooper, who is half Afrikaner and half English, has a co-investigator named Detective Constable Samuel Shabala, a Zulu tribesman and also of the local police.  The time frame is the 1950s,  the days of apartheid (instigated in 1949/1950).   Imo,  it’s very credible historical fiction- likely set in the days prior to the author’s birth. >>>>MORE>>>>

The Snopes Trilogy
by William Faulkner
1940 – 1957  / 3 volumes
Rating 10 / classic American fiction

Whew!  I did it.  A long time goal to read the    whole Snopes Trilogy – ever since just after high school.  And I’ve now read 12 of his 19 novels in addition to a bunch of short stories.

Each volume,  The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion,  got a rating of 9.  But when they are all put together it’s apparent this is a true masterpiece.

Faulkner started writing about the Snopes, especially Flem Snopes,  back in the 1920s and included various members of the Snopes family in short stories and books.  In the late 1930s he put together the outline of two volumes of Snopes books and that changed titles and expanded to the three volume Snopes Trilogy.   He then had to go back and make some corrections in all three novels so the material is consistent.
NOTES, photos, links, etc.  

The Mansion
by William Faulkner
1959 / 498 pages
rating 9+ / classic American

The Mansion starts up at the scene where Mink Snopes shoots Isaac Houston over a cow.  This is back-story from maybe half-way through The Town but where The Town leaves Mink with a life sentence,  The Mansion picks up and continues that story as well as the tales of Linda Snopes (who, in the The Town,  left for Greenwich Village)  and her older suitor Gavin Stevens, a local boy who became a Harvard educated lawyer.  Other stories continued are those of Montgomery Ward who owned the (porn) photography shop,  Gavin Stevens in love with Eula V. Snopes, deceased mother of Linda,  and of course, Flem Snopes.

Flem Snopes,  about whom the trilogy is basically concerned,  is now a rich and powerful banker seeking respectability.  His has been the poor white trash route to the top and at this point Flem has to prove he’s not a Snopes except in name. >>>>MORE>>>>